Of grasshoppers and O_S
Gus's "How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days" is now up there with Panic's "The True Story of Audion" in my stable of links to pass on to any and everyone interested in software on any platform -- not just budding indie developers. It's basically a post-mortem of his start as an indie Mac developer, and the lessons he's learned along the way...
Lots of bits worth snatching and filing in the back of your head, and I especially dug him posting bits of the data and timelines which led him to those conclusions, and would seriously dig others doing something along the same lines. This part in particular stuck out at me, as I remember the conversation, although the specifics revolved around there being such a similar feel between the choices in the two developer's apps when faced with user interface decisions:
You've got to make it look and feel nice as well. Make it a Macintosh™ application. Someone commented to me the other day that both Brent Simmons (maker of NetNewsWire) and myself seem to have a sense for making usable user interfaces. I then pointed out that we both just try and figure out what Panic would do.
Keep your eye on Gus. My saying that type of thing wigs him out (even moreso than inviting myself to crash on his couch and demanding to sample his homemade pizza while asking how to explain Menu Accelerator to a Normal), but it's one of the things I like about him, and why I've taken to pestering him about so many things lately.
Gus is Old School in every positive sense of the word, and part of being O_S is not quite getting what the big deal is about just trying to create the best software they can. O_S isn't about releasing a 1.0 and then making it usable by version 3 or 4, it's about making the 1.0 as good as you can possibly make it, and then as you learn more (about software, design, coding, or even your customers) making it even better.
I've been asked before what makes someone snag on my radar when other's aren't necessarily paying attention to them as "names" yet -- It's a crazy large list, and on the Mac includes people like Rory Prior and Mike Piatek-Jimenez or Nicholas Jitkoff or the guy grinding on Endicia for the Mac or Slava of APE... and on and on and on. Rentzsch used to be one them, but he's now a name way beyond his product, and has agreed to allow me to tout him as a success story in my upcoming infomercial. JKM of Django made the list not not long ago, just because of an interchange that crossed my desk where he was going out of his way to find out what Django could learn from WebObjects.
While it's not the only factor, a sort of semi-permanent grasshopper mode in a coder is something that always catches my eye, and is something I've noticed in all of the above either directly via conversation, or inferred by poking around their software. Note we're just talking about coders here, as it would apply to just about any field.
By grasshopper mode, I mean there's a sort of internal humbleness (not always outward) at how they approach their product and its problems, an awareness of what they don't know, and a drive to suck in the lessons from any and everything they encounter and then apply them towards their projects. It's not about adopting something that works, it's about figuring out why it works where it's being used and then adopting it if it makes sense.
It's just been my experience that Grasshoppers have a high likelihood of releasing stuff that consistently raises the bar over time, and are able to apply the lessons they pick up to everything they do after.
For a concrete example, not everyone kept their glory in the great OS9 to OS X ELE, but people like Panic not only ported, they adapted while applying everything they knew about making great software up until then and everything they could learn from what was already out. While you may not have a need for an FTP client or Usenet reader, when they do release something for a need you have you can bet it'll be Quality™.
Grasshoppers like Gus will probably never quite get what the big deal is, and as users we're all the luckier for it, but do keep your eye out for them.
Posted by drunkenbatmanDecember 26, 2005, at 09:42 AM
Comments (5)
Posted by: sfenerule at December 26, 2005 12:06 PM
Great & sure-to-be-twice-told tale. Alt stable link for the grasshopper spirit came to mind: http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
thx, DB
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good etc etc etc
Posted by: drunkenbatman at December 26, 2005 04:55 PM
If you could relay that explanation of Menu Accelerator, it'd be much appreciated. Looks kind of cool, if I could tell what's going on there. :-P
It's sort of like Quicksilver, but for menu items. Of course, explaining Quicksilver to a Normal is a whole other ball of wax...
Posted by: Peter da Silva at December 28, 2005 01:45 PM
Unison may be the best Usenet file sucker out there, but I'd really like to talk to someone who actually uses Usenet for discussion, and who's been using it as their main news reader. My reaction to their site was that they were completely missing the boat on what Usenet was really for, and the only person I know who actually tried using it described it as a mediocre news reader at best.
My newsreader of choice is still TRN, which is so old school that people who use Emacs to read news think of it as old school.
Posted by: John Laudun at January 1, 2006 02:03 PM
I had only read Gus' piece on his blog a week or so before when I needed to get some help with some problems I was having with using Markdown in MarsEdit -- btw, shouldn't Gruber be on your list? Who should answer my questions than Gus -- who I guess is now doing some work with Brent? And I have to tell you, everything that he seems like in his blog is just the way he is in a technical support forum: very kind, very patient, very human.
I gotta say that it's experiences like that that keep me coming back: I've had similar ones with the developers at Mellel and with Omni. "Oh, you don't like that? What would work better for you? Hmm. That's interesting. We'll throw that into the mix for consideration in the next version." I'm not so ego-centric that I think even a small percentage of my ideas are very good, but I am always impressed with those developers and companies that manage to maintain some form of human dialogue that allow you some space to try to articulate what it is you think you want to do and how you think you should do it.
If you could relay that explanation of Menu Accelerator, it'd be much appreciated. Looks kind of cool, if I could tell what's going on there. :-P
Happy holidays DB!