brian boyer

listen to, and love, nerd porn auteur:
www.ernestcline.com/spokenword

fantastic comedic spoken word - his other stuff is awesome as well

read a very interesting essay by paul graham the other day in joel spolsky’s new collection of great software writing. it’s about great hackers. (for those of you not in the know, hacker is a term of endearment for a great programmer.)

it’s a great essay on hackers and hacking, but i took a particular bit from the essay to heart from a totally different angle. the bit:

“The problem is, if you’re not a hacker, you can’t tell who the good hackers are. A similar problem explains why American cars are so ugly. I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don’t have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? By definition you can’t tell from his portfolio. And you can’t go by the awards he’s won or the jobs he’s had, because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. There’s no way around it: you can’t manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. American cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with bad taste.

Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company’s products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.”

now, i know full well that i am not a great hacker. i’m a pretty good programmer, at best. similarly, i am not a great writer, artist, cook, music critic, political wonk, or design geek. but i am pretty good at these things. i am definitely a jack of all trades, and a master of none. but this essay made me think about what i am good at… i do have pretty good taste. if i don’t know about something, i am good at absorbing all the available information (acquiring the taste), and making an informed decision.

why was this such a profound moment? because i’ve always been pretty down about the jack of all trades thing. but what i figured out the other day is that i am quite capable at having good taste. this puts me in a unique position… i could probably hire the great designer (not the guy who designed the aztek). and i know full well that i can hire great developers, i’ve been doing that job for months.

i want to start a company. i want to get some great minds together and produce something awesome. i might not be able to think of the best new product on my own, but i’m sure that i could get together the people who could. and i’m pretty sure that i could tell which idea is great, and which is a dud.

so, who wants in? want to open a great restaurant, give away the next killer app, build a better voting system, or start a publishing house? let’s talk.

saw this posted on boing boing today:

it reminded me that i’ve meant to post a link to my buddy dustin’s site, omar mung. he’s one funny dude.