Stop typing. Go square dancing. Then we’ll code. Or why thinking platform is so important.
From July 2025
Some mornings at the coffee shop are better than others. Was a whole cluster of retired folks there talking about the cruise one them planned to take and how it was very “exclusive.” Was tempted to try to explain to them that “this is just not our vibe here,” but I don’t think they would have taken that well.
In contrast, I was quite supportive of the two colleges kids spending Sunday morning strategizing for investment banking interviews. Go, kids, go! If they had been thinking about consulting interviews, I might have offered to give them some tips. We old folks have a responsibility!
I had a great discussion with one of our engineers yesterday about how hard it is to think platform and act platform. Everybody wants to go and put fingers on keyboards immediately, forgetting that typing is not coding.
I shared an experience from when I used to write (admittedly unsophisticated) code for money thirty-odd years ago. I was the chief technologist for a small company outside of Boston that created on-line training, demos and the like for technology and media companies.
I had managed to create libraries of reusable functions, one for Grasp and one for Visual Basic that turned, in some cases, days of work into hours. (I was very proud of this.) Not infrequently, a major new project required an expansion to one of our core libraries.
Which created some tension with the rest of the company when we received a new commission. Everybody else immediately wanted to start typing.
I would say “stop.” Sketch a user interface. Go for a walk. Talk in a move. Go square dancing. Give me 48 hours without typing.
I would then spend 24 hours drawing boxes in a spiral notebook and determining the additional functions required for our core library. (Attached photo a poor recreation of the indecipherable chicken scratch I used to create. For Grasp i would also sketch out the central control loop. (VB did a lot more about this for you.)
And then I would spend 24 hours coding the additional core functions. And then I would encourage people to start typing. And also get some sleep
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