Product – ex·trap·o·late me

Book: Creativity, Inc.

Problem-solving at its best. The problem at hand is how to build a sustainable creative culture:

What had drawn me to science, all those years ago, was the search for understanding. Human interaction is far more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions.

The book follows the path of Pixar, Inc. Along the way Ed Catmull (one of its founders) both reveals the core of what’s needed for few hundred people to work together to build a great product and shares a lot of tactics that either did or not work for Pixar itself.

If you work or play with groups of people of two or more, I would recommend you have a look at Creativity, Inc.

P.S. You might also want to check out Dave Martin’s 36 Things You Might Take Away From “Creativity, Inc.”

Ten Years Since My First Open-Source Contribution

Ten years ago Ryan Boren committed to the WordPress open-source project a two-line change I had suggested. I wasn’t ecstatic, but there was this warm feeling of being useful.

Screenshot of the commit message

In the next few years I regularly contributed to WordPress. Not too much, but often. What kept me around wasn’t programming itself or the hard technical challenges, but three other reasons: being useful, the safe path to learning responsibility, and that everybody was so nice.

I contributed translations and code for the internationalization infrastructure (affectionately known as “i18n”). Translators rarely know much about code and since a lot of the developers were from English-speaking countries they didn’t know much about encoding, unicode, or how to make texts easy to translate. I was in the lucky intersection of both and that exact place made me useful.

Our jobs often make us work hard to achieve great things together and it’s worth it. But they often fail to make us feel useful in the simplest ways. Not as a part of a big machine stomping ahead, or a part of a great team changing the world, but just as person helping another person with their problem. I helped translators with their formatting problems or developers, who had been struggling with encoding bugs for days. I wasn’t assigned to fix those problems, the fact that it was a human on the other side just felt good.

Then people started to notice. In about a year I became the maintainer of the internationalization corner of WordPress. Now I had responsibilities. But those were responsibilities with training wheels – vague and weak expectations, even vaguer schedule, all the freedom in the world, an easy way out (“I am busy at my day job” works wonders). My task was simple, but I started to understand what it’s like when people depend on you. At the time I was a junior developer at my job and there was always somebody looking over my shoulder and making sure I was making progress. It wasn’t like that with WordPress. If I wanted internationalization to be covered before a release, I had to take the initiative or it wouldn’t happen and many people would be left unhelped.

Motivation and responsibility aren’t usually part of the “contributing to open-source” conversation. And yet, that’s what I learned from my first years of working with WordPress. Most of my programming I learned elsewhere, but contributing to WordPress boosted my soft skills – I learned to write better, I learned to deal with (and ultimately help) random people on the internet, I learned to manage a project, without giving assignments, I learned to be motivated for the right reasons.

Less than three years after my first contribution, I joined Automattic. It is one of the biggest contributors to WordPress and the company behind WordPress.com. I have been working there ever since (more than seven years now), because the culture was built around the same open-source values. We strive to help people for all the right reasons.

I don’t know if you’ll be as lucky as me, but contributing to open-source projects seems worth the try.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Never has a book become more deeply ingrained in my daily life for such a short time. Every day, since the moment I started reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, I have either referenced it in a conversation or have noticed a situation, explained in the book.

Thinking, Fast and Slow contains all the psychological wisdom the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has gathered through the years. He’s almost 80 years old, this makes for a lot of wisdom.

The goal of the book is to give us names to the most common errors of judgement we make. In addition to the names there are a ton of amusing stories and insights into how our mind works. While most of the content isn’t unique, the value of the book is in its completeness. It covers all aspects of the way humans make decisions, both right and wrong.

If you answer with “yes” to at least two and a half of the questions below, move Thinking, Fast and Slow to the top of your reading list:

Have you wondered why very smart people have a hard time navigating in the outside world?
Have you ever submitted a sub-par essay, because the professor knew you were smart?
Have you ever negotiated over something?
Have you ever given money to a charity?
Have you ever evaluated (in your mind) whether a person is attractive or not?
Have you wondered why we trust some politicians even if we don’t know their work well enough?
Have you wondered why people love conspiracy theories?
Have you ever had to make an important work decision?
Have you ever had to make an important life decision?
Have you ever had to make a decision about anything?

Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most complete and in-depth popular work on how and why we make decisions, that I’ve read. It was worth every minute I spent with it.