Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
Follow @bmf on Twitter. If you have comments, email bmf@le.mu.rs.
For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
Out of nowhere, Apple announces OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, and I must say, right off the bat, that I am disappointed.
No, the feature list is fine. It’s the name that disappoints me. I get that there’s a new pattern with iPhone 3G giving way to iPhone 3GS, and Leopard giving way to Snow Leopard. But Mountain Lion?
Right off the bat, there’s a problem with that name, as “Mountain Lion” (10.8), “Panther” (10.3), and “Puma” (10.1) all refer to the same cat: the common cougar, Puma concolor. It’s bad enough that 3 of the now 9 “big cats” are the same cat, but cougars are not even big cats!
Oh, they’re large, certainly, but the distinction is not actually made based on size, but on laryngeal physiology. The big cats, all members of genus Panthera, roar*. Small cats meow. Mountain Lions are actually the largest of the small cats—a group that notably also includes the oddball Cheetah (10.0).
Of course, if you actually research this, you will find that definition is far from universal. Many people just go by size. It turns out cat taxonomy is a surprisingly messy field. In fact, that whole Linnean classification system you learned in school has been turned on its ear by molecular genetics. But I digress.
I might as well just admit that, back in 10.5 days, I called “Ocelot” as the name for 10.8. That’s a long time to let a bowl of Claim Chowder sit before having to sup on one’s predictions.
*Snow Leopards being the exception. They are large cats and have the physiology to roar, but are apparently too polite to actually do so.
In case you haven’t heard, Burning Man completely mucked up their ticket sales this year. They have more demand than any server can handle, and there are so many people who want to come, that if you distribute the tickets randomly, there’s no way for the project camps to secure enough tickets to actually build the city everyone else is trying to come see.
Let’s solve this, shall we?
There are three problems that need to be solved:
Ensuring project camps have enough tickets to actually build the city
Ensuring equal and fair access to tickets to the extent possible
Avoiding a first-come-first-served queue and resulting traffic jam
To pull this off, you have to split the tickets into two allotments, the corpus allotment for project camps, and the spirit allotment for general attendees.
Project camps will send in applications as usual, but in addition to their plans, they will include the number of tickets they will purchase at the group rate.
Once the city is planned, contact those camps and sell them their requested number of tickets.
The spirit allotment is then distributed using the standard lottery system.
Important: do not mess us this split. Overestimate the corpus allotment or delay the spirit allotment to after city planning if necessary.
For the current situation, the only thing that really matters is solving problem 1, because without that, Burning Man as we know it is over.
What has to be done, then, is to try to move things back inline with this general plan.
Get the project camps to let you know how many tickets they absolutely require and plan the city.
Use the tickets allotted for the secondary open sale (sorry holdouts!), and any tickets you can manage to buy back (if necessary), and sell them to the project camps.
There is no step 3.
I hope they get it sorted, or ol’ “Pirate” Mike won’t be flipping breakfast your way at Pancake Playhouse this year, and that would suck for everyone.
Like this idea? Want some advice of your own? Hire me!
When I was younger, I bought into the idea that I deserved to be where I was, and that by extension, everyone else probably did too. I was one of those abused kids who practiced Kendo without armor. Mercy is for the weak.
Then one day I got into it with my parents and got kicked out—again—only this time, there was nowhere to go. Door after door was closed in my face. I ended up sleeping on my ex’s front porch in what is definitely one my top 5 lowest moments.
Laying there, shivering on the concrete, I reflected on how suddenly my world fell apart. The thing that eventually saved me was a friend who, when faced with my predicament, had the strength to overcome his own disdain for altruism, to give more than he had gotten.
True story: years later, I hired his company to do game design on what would become the #1 game on the App Store, giving him the ultimate bragging rights. With a history like that between us, I knew I could trust him with my baby.
Now I am self-made among the self-made, and the greatest friction between me and my peers is my commitment to beneficence in system design. Many people take my altruism as a sign of weakness or naïveté, and send me condescending email insisting I read books that I have long ago collected first editions of.
The advantage of dehumanizing philosophies is that they’re easy. The disadvantage is that they don’t actually work. The reason I am so nice to people all the time is that I’ve seen where “every man for himself” fails. In fact, it was abandoning that idea around the epoch of the lemurs that lead to our humanity.
On the other hand, my philosophy of “be kind, work hard” has been tested again and again, and has worked every time. In fact, it was just tested again, and I want to show you what a different world I live in now than when I was a selfish, narrow-minded child.
I ran out of money over the weekend. I was thousands of miles from home, attending the 360|MacDev conference in Denver. The out-of-pocket expense of international travel combined with giving the vast majority of my time to the community this past year finally sapped my reserves until I had overdrawn accounts on two continents and the Benjamin in my wallet was the last $100 to my name.
While quietly panicking over things like rent and bills, I spent 22 hours of each day working on my presentation and meeting the community. Finally I found the one I was looking for, the reason I go to these shows. I found my diamond in the rough, what we in the industry call a “Mike Matas.” Some undiscovered talent trapped in a life ripe for changing.
What does someone like that look like? They’re the one who had to take time off from their minimum-wage job to blow their savings on the chance to meet the people who they want to be. Someone who doesn’t flinch at attending a dinner that will take them a week to pay for, because that’s what it takes to hang.
That kind of thing impresses me, because it shows that they don’t just talk good game, but actually have the passion to do something about it. That’s what I and every hiring manager worth their salt is looking for. When you find someone like that you either hire them or you give them to a friend to hire, who will one day do the same for you.
But I went one further than simply giving him free advice and recommending him for a life-changing job. I also gave him my last $100. Before you start screaming at me, understand my reasoning.
I only had that money because other people had picked up a couple of tabs
It takes me an hour to make that much, compared to two day’s labor for him
I genuinely believed it would work out better for me than selfishness
When it came time to check out and go home two days later, I realized that I had two problems. First, I had to get to the airport, which in Denver is an expensive cab ride. That $100 definitely would have come in handy there. Second, the organizers only covered two nights in the hotel, which meant I had an unexpected $400 bill to settle.
For those keeping score at home, I gave away my last $100 and was now $500 from home. The scientific word for this starts with an F and is not polite to say in mixed company.
I had one more thing, which I keep in my back pocket for things like this, and that’s karma. People often misinterpret karma as some cosmic bookkeeping system incompatible with atheism, but that’s typical misinterpretation. Really, it’s just phenomenology. If you take care of people when you can, they will inevitably take care of you when you need it, and vice versa.
I didn’t end up homeless this time. Instead, the conference organizers were more than happy to pick up the tab for the extra nights for a speaker who does so much for their attendees, and a kind soul on Twitter took the trouble to pick me up and deliver me to the airport.
We like to believe that there is something natural about the way things are, and that things will never change. The reality is, we’re all just playing the hands we’re dealt. Sometimes you get Aces and Eights. Other times you’re staring down the barrel of an inside strait. The only thing you can rely on is that things will change, and the next hand will be different.
Experience has taught me, and taught me well: be generous when you’re up, because one day, inevitably, you will rely on generosity. To believe otherwise is to believe a lie.
All that being said, today might be a good day to hire me.
It took a trip to Denmark for me to understand Occupy Wall Street. I was at the GOTO conference in Århus, talking to another attendee from the States about the protests, which were still quite new. I expressed the common concern that the protestors hadn’t defined a win condition. What was their deliverable? What did they hope to gain?
His answer resonated with something I believe Dr. King said about the purpose of passive resistance. It is a kind of meditation, a non-action that could only irritate someone who hates you, intended to bring that hatred to the light of day, to show the world as their hatred washes over you in waves.
The government, he assured me, will demonstrate the contempt it has for its citizens. How eerie that promise seems in hindsight, yet how empowering. It is with memories of batons and pepper spray fresh in our minds that we proffer the next empty protest, a vessel to be filled with hatred.
And fill it they have, as Wikipedia and other sites go dark today to protest the Anti-Internet bills before Congress. Everyone’s favorite new Twitter feature, Dick Costolo, jumped in early to further demonstrate his inability to communicate by calling the idea “foolish.”
Senator-cum-MPAA CEO Chris Dodd stepped up with some nice inflammatory rhetoric, accusing protestors of trying to “punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns” with a protest that “is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.”
How my heart bleeds for the hardworking men and women of power! When the people who actually do things for a living refuse to do those things because they don’t like the way you treat them, that’s communism isn’t it? If the world’s current and former communist countries are any example, I think we can say that’s the opposite of communism, which is what America is meant to be all about.
I finally got around to watching Ben Kingsley’s epic Ghandhi biopic on a flight back to the Netherlands from Australia, and I reflected on the common misconception that I’ve abandoned the United States, or am some kind of “anti-American socialist.” The truth is, it’s hard to see something when you’re standing on it.
Maybe it’s the winter chill, or the end of the fiscal year, but it seems like I’m being asked this question a lot: “I’m working on a great app, but it’s going to be a while before it ships, and my savings are running perilously low. What should I do?” As opposed to deeper existential questions like whether to trade in startup life for spending weekends with your kids, this one is easy: do contract work.
You will be in good company. Many is the famous artist who has to work outside their preferred medium to make it through tight times. Many is the painter who has to paint houses to buy art supplies. Many is the actor who has to wear a chicken suit between acting gigs. Many is the novelist who has to write books to buy alcohol.
Don’t try to work on your app part time. Finish your contract, then get back to your baby. With careful budgeting and a simplified life, you can work for someone else for a few weeks to enable working for yourself for a few months. Make no mistake: this is about compromise. You’re not necessarily doing something you love. You have to have patience that the time you are buying will make up for it.
Don’t limit yourself to the popular platforms. You probably want to spend all your time on iOS or Android, but so does everyone else, and competition for contracts is as fierce as on any app store. On the other hand, new platforms like Microsoft Windows Phone are wide open. Don’t discount “old” platforms, either. You might find them boring, but the money spends the same.
The perception of BlackBerry in particular is a potential goldmine. Their market share numbers are in decline, but in real numbers they still have 70 million subscribers, with some 36 million users in EMEA. They’re active in some lucrative markets, like government and enterprise, and surprising to me, are seen in some markets (like the Netherlands!) as the young person’s alternative to the stodgy executive’s iPhone.
Their users have money, their bosses have money, and RIM itself still has a little bit of money, which it’s willing to spend on you. Providers of sparkly platforms have little incentive to treat their developers as well as providers of platforms like BlackBerry.
Look at the upcoming BlackBerry DevCon Europe. Yes, it’s not the most beautiful site in the world, but look past that at the actual numbers. Not only is it a cheap conference at €350 (€250 early bird, although that ends tomorrow), but look at the other stuff on that page.
You get free hardware, which might not be too exciting for a hardcore gearhead like yourself, but don’t think of it that way. Think of it this way: if I’m going to a BlackBerry conference it’s because I want to make money making BlackBerry apps. The hardware ensures I can, which looks suspiciously like someone actually stopped to think of my expectations.
I’m impressed that they have tools inline to help potential attendees plan budgets and convince their bosses of the value of their attendance. That really says something about understanding the experience of someone trying to get to this show. I am even more impressed that they offer a €90 guest pass so you can bring a date to the receptions and parties.
This is RIM ahead of the curve. I am convinced that enabling people to bring their partners to tech conferences is key to increasing diversity in our field. It not only reduces the testosterone and nerdiness levels in the atmosphere, it reduces the potential for the kind of sexist misbehavior that marred last year’s conference season.
A good friend of mine once said something like, RIM is in trouble, but RIM is not stupid. When they come to Appsterdam and tell me they’re betting on App Makers, I realize that he’s right.
“Ask and ye shall receive” bonus: RIM is offering Appsterdammers 50% off admission to BlackBerry DevCon Europe with the promo code DSTET0.