Improvisation, imagination, resilience: that’s how you build software
This year, the year of years, 2020, really by pure coincidence, saw a growing complexity of projects at Eight Bit Studios. We’ve been very fortunate to work with some great clients over the span of many years. Some of their products have well thought-out multi-year development and roll-out plans. I love a well thought-out, multi-year plan. It shows future thinking, investment in a long term idea, and these are often riddled with complex issues to solve. It’s my professional jam.
I’ve been building software for over 30 years as of this writing. I’ve started 8 companies and advised countless others. I have officially mentored at 1871, Matter Chicago, The Founder Institute. Every year, I take on a few startups to personally mentor. In a nutshell, I have mentored and advised hundreds of founders at every stage of the product journey.
I was recently getting my hair-cut, Chicago pandemic style. This meant there were only two customers in the place so conversations were more inclusive then they would normally be.
If you’ve met me you will know that I have a fairly distinctive look. When people first meet me, they usually try and fit me into their universe quickly. I’ve been pegged as a professor, musician, writer, poet, stand-up comedian, designer. Rarely do people see me for who I really am: a software developer.
As I sat alone in the waiting area, the other customer, who had finished her cut, asked me if I play chess. Yes, I do. I’m not very good, but I enjoy the game and I have fun playing people with whom I am evenly matched. My late friend Jeff Fredriksen and I would play for hours in various coffee shops all nights of the week.
This woman was just learning to play, thanks to the success of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. I hadn’t seen it yet but I do love a good story where an intellectual nerd is front and center. She was asking me, with so many well know and published opening moves, so much study of strategy, so many books at all levels of gameplay, why isn’t every game of Chess a stalemate. It was a fascinating question. I told her, and this is just one of those weird facts that I happen to know, that there are more possible board states in Chess than there are particles in the known universe. I told her that people make mistakes, misjudgments, and that everyone has blindspots. The fact that no chess player is a perfect yields player rankings. Simple game, finite number of pieces, finite two-dimensional world, seemingly infinite possibilities: One of the most challenging games you can play.
Switching gears but staying on the same road, I recently read an article in the October 2020 issue of MIT’s Technology Review about how NASA is figuring out ways to divert destructive earth bound asteroids. Scientists will be slamming a small spacecraft named the DART — the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, into a “near-Earth” asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour hoping to make enough of an impact to dissuade it from hitting the Earth. The challenge is further complicated by the fact that their target asteroid is actually being orbited by another asteroid and that’s the only one they can see from Earth.
DART will launch from Earth, make a go around the sun, travel to astroid that is 30 times farther away from us than the moon is, find the actual astroid to hit some 30 days from impact, and slam into it. There will be cameras on board shooting high-res images and sending them back to earth. We will be using a 3,200-megapixel camera all to document and gather data and measure success. There are so many variables and unknowns, it is impossible to tell what will happen.
“Will the spacecraft hit a hillside or flat ground? Will there be boulders? Hard or soft rock? Gravel? Dirt? And as a result, how much ejecta will DART create? Which direction will that ejecta go, and how fast?”
They have to do this exercise many times to gather data and increase confidence so that when something truly threatening heads our way, they can predict with degrees of certainty, our probability of success. The goal of this first run is to get a baseline against which to measure future attempts to knock an asteroid of a possible collision course with the earth.
The chess conversation and this article put me in mind of how software is developed. Even the simplest of web and mobile apps sits on heaps and heaps existing software, thousands of lines of code that other teams have written. No matter how much accurate and up-to-date documentation has been provided, there is always unexpected behavior. When we write code, we rely on operating systems, OEM APIs, third party APIs and algorithms, servers, internet connections, cellular infrastructure, hardware integration… the list goes on and on.
While your average software product is not launching satellites or executing real-time astronomical physics calculations, we are building surprisingly sophisticated products. Throw a startup in the mix and by definition, we’re building something unique — something that has not been done before, something that stands on the shoulders of countless engineers before us. Building software is not about getting it right the first time, or knowing precisely how everything will work in concert. Building software is about improvisation, imagination, resilience.
Thanks to Finley MacDonald-Bora for the amazing collaboration and super creative artwork. bonepencil.com & https://www.linkedin.com/in/finleymacb
