We have developed weddew in our spare time and I really dont remember when did we launch it. We didn’t adapt this approach in consious way it just happened, it looked obvious.
We also believe that iterating is grueling task and most important one. This period plays crucial role in shaping up the product and it takes time. It is energy soaking process.
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Dilbert Principle
Very much true, liked it
]]>Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Video Link at ted.com http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92
]]>It was entertaining interview. Development environment of initial days of Netscape.
Seibel: Yet that’s also a classic opportunity to fall into the secondsystem syndrome.
Zawinski: It is, it is.
Seibel: How did you guys avoid that?
Zawinski: We were so focused on deadline it was like religion. We were shipping a finished product in six months or we were going to die trying.
Seibel: How did you come up with that deadline?
Zawinski: Well, we looked around at the rest of the world and decided, if we’re not done in six months, someone’s going to beat us to it so we’re going to be done in six months.
Seibel: Given that you picked the date first, you had to rein in scope or quality. How did that work?
Zawinski: We spent a long time talking about features. Well, not a long time, but it seemed like a long time because we were living a week every day. We stripped features, definitely. We had a whiteboard; we scribbled ideas; we crossed them out. This was a group of like six or seven people. I don’t remember exactly the number. A bunch of smart, egotistical people sitting in a room yelling at each other for a week or so.
Those days in Netscape seems to be chaotic. I dont know the exact reason why they came up with deadline of Six month. Fear of someone will come and beat them, seems to be the driving factor for them. Interesting way of deciding deadline. Zawinski further says
Seibel: Are the long hours and the intensity required to produce software quickly?
Zawinski: It’s certainly not healthy. I know we did it that way and it worked. So the way to answer that question is, is there another example of someone delivering a big piece of software that fast that’s of reasonable quality where they actually had dinner at home and slept during the night? Has that ever happened? I don’t actually know. Maybe it has.
But it’s not always about getting it done as quickly as possible. It also would be nice to not burn out after two years and be able to continue doing your job for ten. Which is not going to happen if you’re working 80-plus hours a week.
Seibel: What is the thing that you worked on that you were most proud of.
Zawinski: Really just the fact that we shipped it. The whole thing. I was very focused on my part, which was the user interface of the Unix front end. But really just that we shipped the thing at all and that people liked it. People converted immediately from NCSA Mosaic and were like, “Wow, this is the greatest thing ever.” We had the button for the What’s Cool page up in the toolbar and got to show the world these crazy web sites people had put up already. I mean, there were probably almost 200 of them! It’s not so much that I was proud of the code; just that it was done. In a lot of ways the code wasn’t very good because it was done very fast. But it got the job done. We shipped—that was the bottom line.
That first night when we put up the .96 beta, we were all sitting around the room watching the downloads with sound triggers hooked up to it—that was amazing. A month later two million people were running software I’d written. It was unbelievable. That definitely made it all worthwhile—that we’d had an impact on people’s lives; that their day was more fun or more pleasant or easier because of the work we’d done.
Interview was interesting and entertaiing read. Pepter has done great job and answer to those question give us the clear picture of chaos in those early days of Netscape.
80-plus hours a week seems to be bit harsh. I dont know how can anybody be productive with such freaking schedule. 5-6 productive hours in a regular days are seems to be perfect with occational(mostly during shiping) long stretch out. I am excluding the hours when you are constantly thinking about the problem in back of your mind, Paul Grahm put this in his essay Holding A Program In One’s Head (http://paulgraham.com/head.html)
I have observed and experimented with this and settled with the finding that whenever I do other stuff like reading, watching movie, discussion with friends etc I ended up being more productive in my work.
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