Last week I posted my three-minute presentation about making a bit of a science out of karaoke song choice.
I had the privilege to present this to my group at Microsoft as part of a lightning-round presentation invitational for our team.
Check out the video below.
This coming week, the employees in our group at Microsoft have an extra deliverable: a seven-slide (or less) PowerPoint deck on any topic they want, provided it fits modified PechaKucha presentation guidelines, in this case, auto-advancing every 30 seconds. I thought it was about time I applied a little measurement and PM-geekiness to karaoke, a hobby I’ve had for close to a decade now. The results – well, see for yourself:
When I look back at the difference between my professional projects and my personal projects, the gap is always in the planning.
Whether it’s because work is planning-heavy and I want spontaneity in my personal projects, or because I hold some deep-seated paranoia about not destroying the creative process of making games by imposing deadlines and constraints, I’m not sure.
All I know is that for the last decade, I’ve been working instinctively, following rules I never really codified. Last night, I started to change that, by planning out how to take my Windows Phone game prototype for Node.Hack all the way to a finished product.
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The one admittedly dubious plus about having a medical order stamped “BRAIN INFECTION”: it gets you service.
A little over a week ago, I woke up with double vision, worse in the morning and at night. I gave it three days, figuring something about my heathen lifestyle was simply catching up to me. On Friday, I casually took the continuing problem to the doctor.
What they saw, I still don’t fully understand. I hardly had time to react when the doctor signed an inpatient order, told me to call my wife, and before I understood what had happened, had me on my back in a Stryker cart, my only view a jungle of white ceiling tile and automatic double doors, with orders to get floated in a sea of IV antibiotics to control a potentially lethal infection that had spread to my brain.
“Hours count,” I remember the doctor saying, as I lay on a tilting table meant to draw my cerebrospinal fluid down by gravity into a waiting syringe stuck into the L3-4 space in my spinal column. After that, an MRI to find less-visible culprits, and an iodine-fueled angiogram CT to look for aneurysms, before spending a night in the hospital hooked up to a bag of bacteria-killing antibiotics.
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Feeling squished? Like you’re unable to get your message across, pinned between organizations or competing interests? Blame our modern world.
I’ve told you how much email I receive. And I’m only a ground-level Program Manager. You should expect real decision makers to get three to five times that amount. With that much information load, reading isn’t really a first-strike option for dealing with an inbox – it’s a last resort. How can you ensure that your carefully-crafted communication is going to get noticed?
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Sit right back, and I’ll tell you a tale of a grand world where people, smart people just like you, put software in boxes and shipped it – without patches, without updates – and called it done.
What? You don’t care? That’s good; you shouldn’t. It wasn’t the right way to do business, and it’s over besides. These days, it’s not about finishing one thing one time. It’s about finishing everything, faster, all the time. The big challenge for any worker has been with how to get to done in a world where done simply doesn’t exist.
I know you remember from my earlier post that I’ve still got a lot to learn about finishing projects; it seems doubly important as we all adjust to a world where every project, from games to simple social communication is a service with decades-long updates and patch plans. So, how can you throw off a project that’s “done enough” and escape a world of endless patching for everything you make? I’ve been fighting this battle for years; I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned.
With a week’s worth of retrospection, I feel like I can look back on Seattle Startup Weekend and try to distill some lessons down from it.
I suppose it’s worth saying that these lessons come hard-earned; my company of eight people produced a viable prototype, but failed to land any prizes in the final competition against the twenty-one other startups at the Weekend; I have some ideas as to why.
For those that haven’t been, the Weekend is a little surreal. It’s entirely based around tech startups – and a surprisingly homogenous class of web-app-like technology at that. I suspect that the negligible cost of remixing today’s information economy has allowed something of a gold rush mentality, complete with the shabby chic and messenger-bag cultural tide that carries tomorrow’s gurus.
My own part was as makeshift team leader – I had a dream of starting up a game company and racing to a first prototype in 48 hours, using a mixture of the Unity engine and backend metrics through an analytics engine like MixPanel.
I found out quickly that games weren’t really represented during this weekend. Information mashups, yes, automated forms, sure, but not games. Maybe they weren’t known, maybe nobody cared. Whatever the case, our initial team of three were the only game developers willing to represent there, when all was said and done.
Undaunted, I pitched the game company idea during the Friday “speed-dating” portion of the weekend, and it stuck well enough – out of the 60 ideas that were looking for teams, mine made the final cut of 20. By Friday night, my initial team of three had become a team of eight. By Saturday at noon, I promised, we’d have our game idea chosen and coding started.
It took us until Sunday afternoon to have everything done; we’d fought through idea changes, tech failures, sickness and absences, and a metric ton of conflicting priorities to come up with something viable – and a business plan around it – to show off to investors Sunday evening.
Thinking back on it, we really made a lot of mistakes.