There seems to be an obsession with speed in Silicon Valley. I get the impression that many people think if you can go faster and create more code quicker, better software and innovation will somehow magically happen. The lean software movement and the popularity of hackathons encourages this type of thinking by hinting that you can create a MVP in a weekend, field test it, and discard it by Monday (or raise funds if you are lucky). I guess there are some engineers out there that can bang out fully formed software products as fast as they can type in a stream-of-consciousness type of way, but I find that it just does not work that way for me. I am sure I am not the only person, since a friend at Google confided in me that they are concerned that he is not creating enough code, even though his solutions are typically 1/3 in size and more elegant than his peers. I also suspect many proponents of dynamic typing feel like the programming language is getting in the way because you have to type and think more, hence slowing you down while banging out your opus.

I choose to think before I code. I can sometimes think about how I would like to implement something for several days, sometimes a week. I often find myself in a situation where I am ready to start implementing, but then a nagging little voice tells me not to start. Most of the time the little voice is right. A few hours additional thinking often led to some breakthrough insight that made whatever solution was thinking about before look like a toy. Unfortunately there is no lines-of-thought equivalent to lines-of-code, hence every meddling middle manager at a corporation wonders what the hell I am doing every day staring at little pieces of paper and doodling in my notebooks all the time. 

Maybe someone will invent a way to measure lines-of-thought, but I somehow suspect it will never catch on, even if possible. There are too few people that understand what innovation really means, and how you go about it.

Every company has a story behind it. You hear that so-and-so had some sort of a problem and the scratched their itch. Sometimes the story gets bigger over time. For example, I heard from some glassy-eyed EBay folks that the first version of Ebay was written in a weekend by Pierre Omidyar - it does not say so on his wiki page, so I guess it is like a fishing story where the fish just got bigger.

The story behind Flashback, my latest venture is actually quite simple.  We've been talking for many months about remodeling our home, and finally pulled the trigger by selecting a general contractor and ordering some kitchen cabinets to start. At the same time I was spending a month in South Africa to unwind from my previous job and catch up with my family. So there was a three-way conversation happening between my wife, the designer, and myself via email, Skype, and landline.  

Our experience was that it is really really hard to talk even about the simplest design ideas if you are not in the same room. This is of course not new to me having spent the last six years or so in the architecture, engineering and construction space, but was sort of novel to experience it first hand.  It got me started thinking that there must be a simple way to do this, and I started speaking to other people that are in the design business.

The remodel is not done yet, but the number of details just keep on piling up. My wife and I are both very detail oriented, so we end up having a lot of questions how things will be built, look and so on. Flashback is not yet in a state where we can use it to answer our questions, but it is getting there.

Welcome to my new place on the web! Unfortunately my previous web page has stagnated over the years while I focused on making a living and building software products. I am not a big self-promoter, but I am hoping that this time around I will be "more communicative" to a larger audience. I think it will most likely take the form of shorter posts and notes.

Regarding the title of the blog post, I've again launched myself into developing a new product in the collaboration space. I am interested in creating an immersive collaboration experience for creative people and their clients.  The baby steps can be seen at the Flashback web site.