Global Nerdy

For those who missed npm COO Laurie Voss’ excellent talk at Tampa Bay Startup Week, Stuff Everybody Knows (except you), I took notes. Regular readers of this blog will know that when I take notes, I really take notes.

Laurie’s presentation ran for 1 hour and 48 minutes, not counting the Q&A session, so my notes will come in installments. Here’s the first one…

The images are a mix of Laurie’s slides, with some selections of my own.

Intro

• This is the 28th time I’ve given this talk
• If you’re a web developer, this talk is for you!
• I’m the COO of npm (which involves lots of yelling at lawyers and accountants), but what I really am is a web developer
• I started web development at 16, and I’ve been doing it for 22 years
• The purpose of this talk is to fill a gap that exists when talking about web development, especially with new developers
• We always talk about the new, exciting stuff
• However, there’s stuff from 20 years ago that we agreed was a good idea, and that we still agree is a good idea, and if you’ve been developing since then, you internalized that stuff. If you’ve been around that long, you just know it.
• How do you know that stuff if you just started three years ago?
• This talk is about all that stuff that we agreed was good, true and evergreen 20 years ago, and you should still know.
• The reason that this talk is called Stuff that Everyone Knows (Except You), because no one probably told you this stuff.
• Two hours is a long time, but not long enough to be a complete tutorial. It’s an index of things you should look up.

• A disclaimer: This is a ton of opinions, glued together and presented as facts. I have reasons and experience that leads me to think these things.
• It’s been refined over 27 versions – stuff that didn’t land got excised.
• Keep in mind that I could still be wrong. That brings us to…

You know nothing

• There’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
• Dunning and Kruger studied how good people were at stuff vs. how good they thought they were at stuff vs. how good they thought other people were at stuff.
• They gave people basic tasks that were easily to quantify by performance and discovered interesting things about the people in the top and bottom quartiles:
• The top quartile were great at what they did, but they think they’re about average.
• The top quartile are susceptible to Impostor syndrome, and it makes them vulnerable to arrogant jerks, especially people whose arrogance comes from prejudice.

• Impostor syndrome lets white guys run roughshod over the rest of us.
• The bottom quartile is “the really dangerous shit”. They’re terrible at stuff, but don’t know it. They also think they’re above average.
• They’re also terrible at estimating how good other people are. They don’t overestimate or underestimate; they’re just random number generators.
• They’re like that because they have no idea what good and bad look like:
  • If they knew what bad looked like, they’d know they were bad.
  • If they knew what good looked like, they’d know how to get better.
  • They’re the kind who set the cake on fire, look at it, and go “I guess that’s baking.”
• The real problem is that they don’t improve until a neutral outsider says “That’s bad. Let me help.”
• Things like boot camps and conferences help you emerge from bottom quartile.
• You know you’ve emerged from the bottom quartile and realize “I’m so dumb! There’s so much stuff I don’t know!”

• The problem is that if you think you’re pretty good, you’re either pretty good — or the worst, unless you can find a good outside impartial observer.
• It’s very hard to find a good impartial observer.
• In general, when estimating your skill, be humble, but don’t take any shit.

Automate everything

• Tasks that take a small amount of time but do often will eat up surprisingly gigantic chunks your life.
• This was brought to my attention by this xkcd comic…

• …but Randall Munroe, who writes xkcd, doesn’t have a real job, so he doesn’t know how real jobs work.
• This is my version, which is based on an actual working day over the course of a year:

• Think of a task that you do every day, and suppose it take you an hour a day. If you’re a programmer or information worker today, that task is probably typing — you probably spend 8 hours a day doing that.
• If you type at 30 words per minute (the speed of a beginning typist) and speed it up to 40 words per minute, you’ll save an hour a day. Over the course of a year that savings becomes 1.5 months.
• If you had a startup that got a bunch of money that made up 12 months of runway and you were a slow typist, you could spend the first month doing nothing but taking typing classes, and you’d still be better off, because the resulting time savings from being able to type faster would give you two weeks more runway.

• Master the Unix command line — you have to live there; it’s where we deploy web sites. You have to be great at the command line; it can’t be someplace you go because you have to.
• You have to know how bash and grep work, and if you can, learn how find, sed, and awk and all those other weird utilities work. Those are where you save time, where you put together little five-line scripts that take you from a 15-second task to a 1-second one.
• There’s this myth of the 10x programmer — there’s no such thing. Everyone programs at the same speed; what a 10x programmer is someone who does only programming by automating away everything else in their job. They appear more productive.

Pick a text editor and master it

• It doesn’t really matter which text editor you use: pick one and become really, really good at it.
• IDEs are fine; don’t listen to people who tell you that vim is the only way.
• Don’t switch editors all the time, and don’t remap your keyboard to Dvorak. The act of switching is what will destroy your productivity.
• The people who are astonishingly productive at vim are like that because they’ve been programming in it for 30 years, even though vim is one of the worst pieces of software we’ve ever put together.

Version control: git or GTFO

• There are lots of version control systems out there, but git’s the only one that matters.
• git is how software is made these days. It’s how we collaborate, test, debug, and deploy.
• You need effortless comfort with git as you do with typing. You need to be able to branch, merge, squash, and do all the weird things that people do with it.

Also in this series

• Part 2

I’m going to start with a controversial statement: in theory, Tampa Bay Startup Week 2018 should amount to nothing.

Good — I’ve got your attention now.

It’s an easy argument to make. Tampa Bay’s cities — Tampa, St. Pete, and Clearwater — don’t have the sort of entrepreneurial or tech cachet that other places, from the usual suspects Silicon Valley, Austin, and Seattle to upstarts like Raleigh, Boulder as well as Toronto and Montreal. Tampa, St. Pete, and Clearwater are also  overshadowed by other, better-known Floridian cities: Miami and Orlando. Tampa Bay’s geography and horrible traffic fracture the area, and between bridges and drive times that are twice what they should be, locals are reluctant to travel within their own areas, never mind the nearby sister cities.

With these challenges, what could the well-intentioned team behind Tampa Bay Startup Week 2018 possibly hope to accomplish?

If we play our cards right — and by “we”, I mean the organizers and us, the intended audience , Startup Week’s accomplishments could be bigger than anyone dreamed. I say this because we’ve seen this sort of thing before, over and over throughout human history. Of all the examples I could pick, I’m going to take one that’s close to my musician’s heart: a seemingly unremarkable event in a failing city in England that would later be known as “The Gig That Changed the World”.

Manchester, 1976: The Gig That Changed the World

The Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England.

You could draw a number of parallels between Manchester, England and Detroit, Michigan, especially in the 1970s. Both were cities that grew to become industrial powerhouses in the first part of the 20th century, and both saw their fortunes decline drastically and become bleak urban wastelands after World War II. Both would also end up changing the course of music history in unexpected ways.

The Sex Pistols.

In June of 1976, a relatively unknown band called the Sex Pistols played a concert at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. There were a mere 42 people, which is respectable for a band that plays at your local bar on a Tuesday night, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of gig that would “change everything”. What separated this gig from all the other Tuesday night gigs with fewer than 50 people is who were involved and showed up:

• Two art school student friends, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley organized the event. They ended up forming their own punk band, Buzzcocks, whose single, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) has wound up in some of the most unlikely places: covered by Fine Young Cannibals in the ’80s and Thursday for the 2004 video game Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, and featured in the soundtracks for the 1986 film Something Wild and the 2004 film Shrek 2.
  • Devoto would later form the post-punk band Magazine, who would influence ’80s acts Ministry and Peter Murphy as well as late ’90s acts Radiohead and Jarvis Cocker (lead vocalist from Pulp).
  • Shelley went solo, during which time he recorded the synth-pop single Homosapien with producer Martin Rushent. The experience doing all the drum machine and synth programming for that single would serve Rushent well, as his next project was The Human League’s ground-breaking album Dare! (the one with their big single, Don’t You Want Me).
• Tony Wilson, who hosted a TV show featuring the still-new punk rock movement, and Martin Hannett were there. They would go on to become a key figure in the Manchester and alt-rock scene by:
  • Starting Factory Records, which featured a number of notable bands: Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, Northside, and (briefly) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and James.
  • Wilson would open the legendary nightclub, The Hacienda, featured in the movie 24 Hour Party People and a key player in the rise of the acid house and rave scenes.
  • Hannett who would go on to become a legendary record producer.
• Steven Patrick Morrissey was also in attendance. He’d ditch his first two names and go on to become the King of Mope and lead vocalist of The Smiths, who would go on to inspire just about every emo rock band that followed.
• Also there:
  • Mark E. Smith of The Fall, whose influence can be heard in later acts such as Pavement, Sonic Youth, Guided By Voices, Faith No More, and even the electronic act LCD Soundsystem.
  • Paul Morley, who would go on to become a music journalist for the Brit music magazine NME, promote the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and co-found Art of Noise
  • Mick Hucknall, who would go on to become the lead vocalist of Simply Red
• And finally, three young men named Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. Inspired by the performance, Hook would buy his first guitar, and the three would form a band named the Stiff Kittens, which would later go by the name Warsaw, after which they’d finally settle on the name Joy Division. They would go on to become one of the best-known and influential New Wave bands. After Curtis’ suicide, the remaining members who would go on to become New Order, who’ve influenced anyone who’s ever plugged in a MIDI cable into a synthesizer. To this day, New Order’s Blue Monday is the best-selling 12″ single of all time.

The headlining act (the Sex Pistols) and the organizers (who’d go on to form the Buzzcocks) of this poorly attended, seemingly insignificant gig were so influential that they’d end up in Jack Black’s lesson in School of Rock…

You can see the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks listed under “Punk”. Click here to see the full blackboard.

…and the concertgoers from that gig would go on to build the foundations of alternative rock and influence a lot of people who took up the electric guitar, synthesizer, or turntables.

In theory, this concert should’ve amounted to nothing, but in the end it changed everything in the music world.

The Gig That Changed the World brought together people with similar interests who were passionate about what they did. Its attendees saw that popular music was changing, and after being inspired by a group of troublemakers, decided that they could be part of that change. They went on to create music their way, and they made their mark on the world.

Tampa / St. Petersburg 2018: The week that could change the world

The people behind Tampa Bay Startup Week (the 2015 team is pictured above) may not look punk rock, but they’ve most certainly got its DIY, “we have an idea and we’re going for it” spirit. Like the Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto organizing the Sex Pistols gig, they’re a band of troublemakers putting on an event on a shoestring budget (yes, Chase is sponsoring, but without them, the budget would likely go from shoestring to none), and at the moment, it isn’t being noticed by most of the world outside “the other bay area”.

Like the music scene in Manchester the mid-late 1970s, the work-life dynamic in Tampa Bay in the mid-late 2010s is undergoing some big changes:

• People are moving here in droves,
• Forbes has put this area in the number two spot on their top 10 list of cities for young entrepreneurs,
• we’ve got both University of South Florida and University of Tampa teaching entrepreneurship,
• The Iron Yard taught motivated go-getters to code,
• We’ve got some interesting companies here in town — Malwarebytes, Jabil, Adjoy, AgileThought, Haneke Design, and Sourcetoad, to name a few,
• One Million Cups has consistently been gathering hustlers every Wednesday,
• we have more than our fair share of makerspaces, what with The Hive, Tampa Hackerspace, and Eureka! Factory,
• we put on a great BarCamp, CodeCamp, and Ignite,
• and we have a healthy tech meetup scene.

The team at Tampa Bay Startup Week have done their part by organizing their event for Tampa and St. Pete, just as Shelley and Devoto did back in 1976 by bringing the punk rock to Manchester. How the rest of the story ends is up to us.

I’ll repeat what I said at the start of this article: In theory, Tampa Bay Startup Week should amount to nothing. In practice, and as shown by music history, if we take inspiration from the event, make friends and connections, and take action, it could be that gathering that changed the world.

Further reading

Visit Tampa Bay Startup Week’s site to find out what’s up this week!

For those of you who’d like to know more about The Gig That Changed Everything, here’s the BBC’s special on the event, titled I Swear That I Was There:

This article is the 2018 revision of an article I posted in 2015.

It’s that time of the year again: Tampa Bay Startup Week, when Tampa Bay celebrates with five days of workshops, presentations, gatherings, and parties, all with the goal of bringing together the tech and entrepreneurial communities in one of the fastest-growing urban centers in the U.S.. This is your chance to learn from Tampa Bay Startup Week’s special guests, network with your fellow techies and entrepreneurs, and see some of Tampa’s and St. Petersburg’s most interesting urban spaces.

There’s a lot going on this week, and I’ll point you to the speakers who’ve piqued my interest.

“Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will be written in JavaScript.” That’s what Jeff “Coding Horror / Stack Overflow” Atwood wrote in 2007, and he was right. Part of what made Atwood’s prediction come true was npm — Node Package Manager — the package manager for JavaScript and Node.js. As for npm, part of what makes it go is Laurie Voss, npm’s co-founder, former CTO, and now its COO.

The full title of Laurie’s talk is Stuff Everybody Knows, Parts 1 and 2: Web Development Best Practices, and it runs for two hours. However, it runs for a very fascinating two hours in which he covers a number of things that developers held as true as far back as 15 years ago. Why? Because everybody knows this stuff except for you, the junior developer who’s just emerged wet behind the ears from code school.

This talk is Laurie’s solution to your problem. It’s an attempt to take a nearly quarter-century of web development practices, boil them down into a two-hour talk (with an intermission, because Laurie is kind and merciful), and give you a “fast-forward button for your professional development”.

Of all the talks at Tampa Bay Startup week, this is the one that I’m most looking forward to. If you’re a coder and can make it to only one Tampa Bay Startup Week event, make it this one!

Can you build a startup on a bus? The Startup Bus people and participants believe it’s possible, and they’re here to talk about the experiences, lessons, skills, and friendships that you can build during an event that’s both highly rewarding and a terrible ordeal.

I’ll level with you: in my opinion, “Gary Vee” pivoted from giving useful business, marketing, and sales advice a while back, and these’s days he’s more of a motivational speaker, and by “motivational speaker”, I mean someone who’s really in love with their own voice, and has figured out a way to monetize that. Gary’s like another motivational speaker, Bear Grylls — except that unlike Bear, Gary wants you to drink his pee.

It’s not that I don’t think he’s got good ideas — it’s just that his present-day work is mostly self-promotional, FOMO-driven, aspirational fluff designed to funnel attention and money from “wantrepreneurs” with fantasies of becoming successful businesspeople but lack the will, wherewithal, and work ethic to do so. He’s selling the idea that if you watch enough Gary Vee videos, and believe hard enough, you too can enjoy the Gary Vee Lifestyle.

So why am I going? It’s because there are lessons in Gary’s self-promotional tricks  worth borrowing, especially in the current attention-driven socio-politico-complexo-migraino environment, where selling yourself is not merely a valued skill, but a virtue. This skill has helped me in times both rich and lean, and it’s a saw I keep sharp by watching and learning from manipulative masters like Gary Vee, Grant Cardone (Scientologist and snake oil salesman), Jon Sonmez (advice columnist for brogrammers-in-waiting), and others of their ilk.

Gary’s also a big draw, which means that the real value of the event will be in the opportunity to meet more local techies and entrepreneurs.

Just as the shoemaker’s children often go barefoot, many techies fail to take advantage of technology to help them with tasks that machines are simply better at. This session, run by Brandon Marcum, will show you how to make all the processor power we have do the “donkey work”.

Here’s an interesting one: while we celebrate grit, there are many times when the right thing to do is not to persevere on the same course, but to quit and choose a new one (I’ve experienced this both personally and professionally). Peerfit’s president, Scott Peeples, shows you how looking at grit differently can change things for you.