Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
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I had the honor of being invited back to the stage for another Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture, and took the opportunity to introduce a bit of lexicon, submitted here for your approval.
Blue tulips are bugs or missing features that are immediately obvious to anyone using a product, but which remain unresolved due to hidden complexity.
Although perfectly applicable to software, the original blue tulips are quite literal. If you find yourself shopping for tulip bulbs, you will notice that they have every color and pattern imaginable—except for blue.
Were you to ever-so-casually mention that a tulip producer might consider making a blue one, you would hear through gritted teeth that it’s not that they never thought of making a blue tulip.
It’s just that generations of the world’s top geneticists have consistently failed to produce one. Orange carrots? So successful people forgot they were ever not orange. Blue tulips? Forget about it.
A blue tulip is a lot like a white whale, except in Moby Dick, Ahab wasn’t further burdened by everyone he met asking if hadn’t considered maybe going back for revenge?
It’s not a limit of effort or of interest, but of nature itself, which is bad enough to exist, but to come up again and again, so cavalierly every time, is a kind of repeated insult, emblematic of how hard making things really is.
The city is gearing back up after the new year shutdown, and the New Lemurs are no exception. Our first troop of lemur chemists have given us some great feedback to work on in earnest this week. I’m big into trying new things this year: new ways of development, new ways to do business, and new adventures in the city.
This weekend Kitty and I went to not one but two museums—Allard Pierson, the university archeology museum, and Kattenkabinet, an adorable museum dedicated to art featuring cats. We also had a mini adventure when we discovered that the wall on which Rembrant’s famous “Night Watch” had originally hung was preserved inside the NH Doelen hotel, just around the corner from our little canal house.
Amsterdam is a treasure trove of history and adventure, which is why the Amsterdam Museum is so mind-bogglingly massive—not that you’d notice from its many hidden doorways, so indicative of this facet of the city. It’s no coincidence Anne Frank‘s family managed to remain hidden for so long. The buildings, like the people, hide rich interiors behind inscrutable facades.
Or so I hear. I’ve never actually been inside the Amsterdam Museum—a wrong I’m finally going to right this Sunday with 19 of my closest friends on the official Appsterdam tour. There are still a few slots left, and everyone is welcome, so whether you were born on a bike or are new to the city, I hope you’ll join us on what promises to be a fun day with friends.
If you’re looking for something a bit more adventuresome and dare I say booze-soaked, you’ll be pleased to know that for the third year running, Cocoaheads Bremen are inviting Appsterdammers to cross the border in more ways than one for the annual Kohlfahrt. Don’t miss out on your chance to experience this unique northern German custom.
Speaking of not missing out, Amsterdam’s own Rockstart accelerator program is accepting applications for their second class. If you’ve ever been to Startup Weekend and wanted to take that experience to the next level, this is your second chance. This is just one of thousands of opportunities for technologists in this city planned or tracked by Appsterdam.
I know it’s dark and cold outside, making it easy to get depressed, which is exactly why you should get out and meet some people. We celebrate the summer as a time for getting together with our friend, but the dreary winter is when we need institutions like Appsterdam the most. I’m shaking things up this year. Aren’t you?
I had a wonderful New Year’s Eve, and an exciting adventure on New Year’s Day, both of which I will tell you about later. Meanwhile, I’ve been dying to share some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head—the closest thing I have to resolutions this year.
Monads and Objective-C
Last year saw me transition back to technical production, so it’s no surprise my thoughts in 2013 center around reconciling those years of theory with practical engineering. One topic that got a lot of laughs last year was monads—specifically their inscrutability. I had the chance to sit down with computer scientistErik Meijer last month and get a lesson in monadic patterns. I felt like I understood, but was dying for some examples in my native language, Objective-C. When a Bing search proved fruitless, I knew I had my speaker topic for 2013.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
I spent years making people laugh on stage until I got really good at it. Then I made the choice I so often make—to leave that comfortable expertise and become a novice again. First I went back and gave my “death deathy death death” talk another go, with improved—if still mixed—results. Going back to speaking on technical topics will challenge me further. Talking about something I started by knowing nothing about is a dose of my own advice. This will challenge the theories I’ve espoused to a generation of Appsterdam-trained App Makers beginning their careers with an emphasis on public speaking.
Do you have a better idea?
I’ve spent the past six years trying to get better at taking feedback. This year I’m going to try getting better feedback, with this simple question. It’s too easy to give something a minute’s thought. Too easy, in fact, to be useful. It’s too easy to fall into a situation where one person becomes the well of ideas and sink for complaints, who everyone expects to solve every problem, and accept every blame. It’s an unhealthy dynamic for families, teams, and individuals. Worse, it’s not productive. Complaints need to come with suggestions.
Luck is not a formula.
The world is full of people who had one success and are content to spend the rest of their lives talking about their formula. You can’t trust people like that, because one success doesn’t imply any formula other than luck, and luck is not a formula. Few are the people who have consistently performed again and again. Few who can show clear patterns of learning from failure to produce success. Repetitive success and learning from failure are the only ways to build a formula. Everything else is horseshoes and rubber chickens.
Success is exceptional.
One of the most challenging ideas to me was the Agile assertion that I should build a failure-based business strategy. I hadn’t even considered my strategies success-based, but I have seen how destructive failure is as an exception. I’ve been thinking a lot about how my reverence for excellence could mesh with a failure-based strategy where products are produced on the cheap and expected to fail, where success is the exception. For example, a lab where we could remix games to explore ideas with our fans, sending the best for expensive native development.
This is a business.
I have always been bad at business. I don’t care about money, I trust people implicitly, and I entertain the most ludicrous notions about honor. I’ll fire people for laziness or incompetence, but I’ll hire my friends just because they need to pay the rent. I’ve come to be convinced that signing contracts with friends prevents making enemies, but I’ve been so turned off by the recent cult of contracts I haven’t been good at it. While I’m not willing to compromise my principles when it comes to my customers, when it comes to my company, I always have to remember this first rule of business.
Engineering is hard.
Then there’s the first rule of engineering. For the past few years my trade has been in words, but returning to war has reminded me that my advantage has always been in suffering. What perhaps makes my story interesting is that I’ve come so far, and been through so much, but learned so much from it. While I often sum up my secret as “be kind, work hard,” the implementation detail has been a tolerance for pain. The biggest shock to people trying to bring their ideas to fruition is just how much work is involved, how much blood must be shed, how much sacrifice is required.
Honesty is adversity.
It’s easy to make promises. It’s easy to make excuses. What’s hard is honesty, and it’s honesty that makes engineering hard. We all hold honesty up as a golden ideal, but we all hate honesty when it’s applied to us. It is the honesty of a life laid bare that makes death such a terrifying experience, embodied in the idea of judgment. We hate those who judge us most when they make us judge ourselves. If you want to practice honesty, and you don’t want to be an asshole, you have to learn to be selective with your heart. Honesty is not free, so you should probably be paid for it.
Art through adversity
For 2013 I have embraced process and I have embraced pain. There are many who think process negates the need for pain. When you can convince me Thomas Kinkade was the greatest painter who ever lived, I’ll believe process can produce art, but as long as I believe that Vincent van Gogh was the greatest painter who ever lived, I will believe that art requires adversity. Process can never free us from that, but it can, like a high-level framework, relieve of us the suffering we don’t need to do, to free us to suffer for the things that matter, for the state of our art, for the experience of our user.
Well, it’s official—Lemurs Chemistry: Water is a hit! We’ve got five-star ratings on App Stores worldwide. Everyone agrees it’s beautiful, nobody hates it, and people who understand the game find it quite addictive. The current Game Center Champion is Joris Kluivers, whose game of Dry mode is currently over 14 million points! When I passed 2 million, I said my high score would reign for a long time to come. Boy was I wrong!
The game has revealed an interesting phenomenon where kids find it quite easy, but adults are frustrated because they think they need to know chemistry. You are meant to discover chemistry. If you could make atoms billions of times bigger, hydrogen molecules would not be the ones labeled H. They would be the smallest, and therefore the lightest and fastest. Oxygen and nitrogen molecules look similar, but only oxygen reacts with hydrogen. Kids get that.
I’ll look back on the decision to launch in December the way military historians look back on generals who invaded Russia in the winter. There’s been a lot of bad stuff in the news lately, and it’s made me shy from my usual flair for hype. Instead, I think of why I’m doing this, not to make a quick fortune with a game, but to make gaming into something that makes future generations smarter, and I realize that it’s going to be a lot of work. Hard times ahead, that we can agree on.
We’ll supplement the game with some tutorial material, like the trailer, and this lemurcule cheat sheet. App Review is going to be closed for awhile, so we don’t get to do an update until early next year. We’ve got some cool tweaks we’re preparing for that, to make the game even better. I have a lot of smart friends with kids who have a lot great ideas about making games educational. There’s going to be a lot of work.
The product was expensive, especially in human terms, and I’d like to make these products smaller and faster, without necessarily making them suck. People really like our business ethos, about not siphoning money through their kids, about a no nonsense respect for their privacy. There’s a lot to learn, which is a good sign.
On Monday, I’m presenting a post-mortem of the launch of Lemurs Chemistry: Water at the fourth annual This Happened conference in Amsterdam. It’s going to be a fresh topic, since the app is launching this very weekend. (I’ll be sure to start with my failure to foresee a 38-day app review.)
Another thing I’ll be pondering is my propensity to jump into a market without paying much attention to what others are doing in that space. To wit, I’ve never looked at the paid educational iPad games section of the App Store until I started looking for our app there.
My market research consisted of talking to parents and looking at what they felt were the best educational apps on the market. That gave me a much better sense of how customers were being served over how the market’s being divided.
The upshot is, I don’t care what other companies’ strategies are. I care about why their customers are unhappy. When I did take a look, I was unsettled by what I saw.
Seriously, if I look at that picture too long I start to feel very nervous. All those primary colors and simple topics make our little lemur feel very claustrophobic. I can hear the creaking of a swing and disembodied voices on the breeze, singing, “one of these things is not like the other…”
I’m going to have to reconcile the fact that the market being served by this category is very likely not the market looking for my game. When I tried to figure out what category our game belongs in, I realized the problem was not that we are misclassified, but that most of the page is misclassified.
Some of these don’t seem educational. Some of them don’t seem like games. Most of them are for a primary school audience. I wouldn’t call most of these educational games. I would call these kids games. I would call these apps for children. There should be a category for that. Oh wait, there is.
The time difference between those two screenshots is the amount of time it took me to figure out that there actually was a kids category that, unsurprisingly, is mostly the same stuff cross-listed into educational games.
If the App Store is to evolve games like Carmen Sandiego from its current selection of animated globes, Apple may need to curate this distinction. Maybe busy boxes, toys, and primary tutors should go into the category of Kids Games, while the game equivalent of algebra and higher should be classified as Educational Games.
