A recent graduate got in contact about whether Entrepreneur First is worth it, and after a phone call talking them through it they gave me some feedback on my earlier post How to build an app.
Here's why I told a student to go watch Kung Fu Panda.
Daring Fireball
When my friends ask me what I read consistently, few have heard of Daring Fireball. The site is unassuming. Dark with small geometric text. The same as it was when I first visited it as a teenager.
John also has a podcast and has this great voice. Deep, a little husky, completely and utterly calm but with enough intonation when he gets excited or worked up that I get wrapped up in it too.
Perhaps one of the greatest of all time independent tech bloggers (I guess we'd call John a "content creator" now) bringing on the some of tech's best journalists, the show is focused on Apple but every now and again he will cover something else in tech. To get a feel for John's authority and relationship with Apple, he's able to host his own show with Apple executives during WWDC.
Ken Kocienda's Creative Selection
In 2018 I must have been following the Daring Fireball blog and noticed his review of Ken Kocienda's Creative Selection.
it's extraordinary
So with a decade of reading John's blog and taking his word for it, it was an instant buy.
And it is extraordinary. Stories of building not only a web browser from scratch - Safari, but of building the most impactful technology product of my lifetime - the iPhone. Ken was on both teams. There's plenty of writing on Apple's co-founders, the origins of Apple and the big dramatic stories along the way. But other than maybe Folklore (which is fantastic documentation of Apple in the 80s), not much has been written about the actual product development process. The day to day of how the designers and engineers built the products.
Years later in 2021 when I joined Yonder, Craig (our designer) and I were going to go design and build the app together, so I gave him the book hoping we could study it together. What was I expecting to learn by re-reading it? Maybe some divine principles or clever tactics Apple had used to develop its products that we could learn from. Or perhaps a helpful checklist of action points. If we do X, then Y, then Z - the software will be amazing!
But disappointingly, the book didn't have anything tangible to copy. No secret ingredient.
The book contains no mention of any Apple-secret-sauce methodology in making software. There was no mention of some special tool for project management. They didn't use special programming languages or frameworks. There was no secret design tools like Figma or even Design Systems. Where were stand-ups, sprints or retrospectives? Where were the KPIs, OKRs, Strategic Planning? Where were the project managers, agile coaches or scrum masters? Where was Monday.com, Asana, Trello, Jira, even Linear?!
Apple had the concept of Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs). Ken, an engineer, was asked to make design choices about the iPhone's keyboard.
There was only this pattern:
- Build
- Show people
- Get feedback
and repeat again and again.
It was so simple... but so seemingly empty?
Kung Fu Panda
I'll rewatch animated films a lot as there's just something about the intersection of computer science, storytelling, music, art and play-ful-ness.
Animated films also really drive at my curiosity. I can understand, sort of, how someone could paint a great painting. But I have no idea how you make Wall-E. How does it happen? Animated films are a product of some of the most sophisticated software tooling we have, combined with incredible human collaboration and artistry.
Including voice actors, 448 different people put over 21,442 manweeks into the film. That’s 107,210 mandays or 857,680 manhours. It took a total of 391 artists to create “Kung Fu Panda” (the total crew number minus production staff and voice talent). “Kung Fu Panda” was in production for approximately 4.5 years (from Fall 2003 to Spring 2008).
Recently I re-watched Kung Fu Panda, a 2008 Dreamworks with a great score from Hans Zimmer. It's not a typical hero's journey. There's no superpowers. Just an idealistic panda who wants to know the secrets to becoming a master of Kung Fu. I'm not a film critic but there's some really interesting analysis on the film out there on YouTube, and if you need convincing that it's more than a kids film it caught the attention of a philosopher:
It appears just a stupid cartoon... At the same time, the movie's totally ironic; making fun of its own ideology. What is so fascinating is that although the movie makes fun of its own ideology all the time, the ideology survives.
And there's this scene that went over my head as a kid but it finally clicked with me when thinking about how to make great software. There is no secret ingredient.
Any clip in isolation isn't perfect, I recommend watching the full film!
I think there's something great in the message not coming from any characters in the film who are mentors, gurus or powerful masters of Kung Fu. The message comes from a hat-wearing goose who loves making noodle soup.
In an online world full of people creating content to enrich themselves, be suspicious of anyone who says you need a list of actions of what to do. You won't get one from me. You already know what to do - build that thing, show people, get feedback.