February 2009
0 posts
1 tag
John Carmack on making games
Lots of solid advice from John Carmack (of id fame) in an old Slashdot thread:
“There is not a hell of a lot of difference between what the best designer in the world produces, and what a quite a few reasonably clued in players would produce at this point. This is the “abstract creativity” aspect. This part just isn’t all that valuable. Not worthless, but it isn’t...
January 2009
8 posts
1 tag
Any definition of success is bound up with time.
From an interview with Demetri Martin: We live in time. So any definition of success is bound up with time. With other things you can say, “Can I yo-yo? Can I juggle?” Usually you have a pretty small window in which to get your answer. The question is - “Will I enjoy this?”
Because by enjoying it enough, now I have a nice big window. You can suspend judgment and make that hole very big. If I make...
2 tags
“We’re living in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new...”
– via Thomas Freidman.
This quote is probably the main reason I got into product management in the first place. If you are a person who’s capable of helping people make things (either dreaming things up or making existing things faster, better, etc…) then your skills will always be in...
3 tags
“That’s why most designers make awful team members. It’s why, when the biz dev...”
– via Derek Powazek’s “Things I Learned the Hard Way”
2 tags
Work on Stuff that Matters (aka: how we can turn...
Tim O’Reilly’s got a great New Year’s themed post out, titled “Work on Stuff that Matters”. Here a few of my favorite quotes from it:
“You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a...
2 tags
“Every great business is founded on a thesis, a statement of what should be true....”
– via John Battelle.
I think this could also apply to careers or individual roles. What argument(s) would you put on your resume?
2 tags
How do you solve problems?
Came across an interesting post by Matt Gemmel on the decline of real problem solving among software developers (and probably our Google-ified society overall)
The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the...
2 tags
“Learn to make non-fatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible.”
– via Tim Ferriss