farming vs foraging. the new software development

1. Foragers, Farmers, Forks and Forges:
On Software, Patronage, and Craft Brewing
10.20.2005
Gluecon May 2012

2. Fragmentation of Everything
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3. Explosion of Forms
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4. Language Tiers
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5. Software is Eating the World
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6. Gaming eats pharma
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7. Quantified Self eats Healthcare
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8. Software in the 20th Century
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9. Software in the 21st Century
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10. Software in the 21st Century
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11. Software in the 21st Century
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12. The Developer Strikes Back
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13. Foraging At the Frontier
Foragers Farmers
Heads up Heads Down
Diversity - healthier more varied diet Monoculture- prone to disease
Better exercise More sedentary
Love nature, travel, and exploration Travel less, and move less often from where they grew up.
Move more often to new communities Are more polite and care more for cleanliness and order.
Work fewer hours, more mentally-challenging jobs. Work longer hours at more tedious and less healthy jobs
Talk more openly about sex Are more faithful to their spouses and their communities.
Are more sexually promiscuous Make better warriors
Have fewer kids Have lots of children
Care less for land or material possessions. Expect and prepare more for disasters like war, famine.
Spend more time on leisure, music, dance, story-telling Have a stronger sense of honor and shame
Less comfortable with war, domination, bragging Fewer topics are open for discussion
Group decisions, with everyone having an equal voice. Better accept human authorities and hierarchy
Deal with conflicts more personally and informally Believe in good and evil, in powerful gods.
Prefer unhappy folk to be free to leave. Think people should learn their place and stay there.
Leaders lead more by consensus. Fear others.
Less bothered by violence in war, and toward the other
Inspired by Overcoming Bias
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14. “Recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture,
supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in
many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the
disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
Jared Diamond, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, 1997
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15. Average time devoted to obtaining food per week
12- 19 hours for Bushmen
< 14 hours for Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
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16. Average height of hunger-gatherers toward
the end of the ice ages was 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5''
for women.
With the adoption of agriculture, by 3000 B. C.
average height fell to 5' 3'' for men, 5' for
women.
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17. In the seventeenth century, the lifespan of an average European
was around 40 years, while transplants to Massachusetts (where
colonists by necessity had a partly hunter-gatherer diet) lived to
the average age of 72 years.
source: The Walden Effect
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18. Thesis: what if agriculture was simply invented
to feed slaves building other people’s temples?
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19. The slaves got to drink beer, so it wasn’t all
bad
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20. Göbekli Tepe
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21. You Don’t Need to Farm to Kick Ass
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22. Forage
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23. Farming Didn’t Civilise Us
"We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is
what we've always done—not just before Facebook, but before agriculture."
James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science, UCSD
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24. Permanent War
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25. Foraging in Wartime
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26. “It was at this very plantation that a soldier passed me with a ham
on his musket, a jug of sorghum-molasses under his arm, and a big
piece of honey in his hand, from which he was eating, and,
catching my eye, he remarked sotto voce and carelessly to a
comrade, "Forage liberally on the country," quoting from my
general orders.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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27. “In a well-ordered and well-disciplined army, these things might be
deemed irregular, but I am convinced that the ingenuity of these
younger officers accomplished many things far better than I could
have ordered, and the marches were thus made, and the distances
were accomplished, in the most admirable way.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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28. “By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men
each month, and will gain no result. I can make this march, and
make Georgia howl!”
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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29. “I have known the skirmish-line, without orders, to fight a
respectable battle for the possession of some old fields that were
full of blackberries.”
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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30. Farmers as Foragers
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31. Acqhiring: Foraging for Talent
Google: Aardvark, AppJet, Apture, Like.com, reMail, Slide.
Facebook: Beluga, Digital Staircase, Drop.io, FriendFeed, Gowalla,
Hot Potato, MailRank, Snaptu, Strobe.
Twitter: Backtype, Dasient, Fluther, Hotspot.io, Julpan, Summize,
Whisper Systems
LinkedIn: ChoiceVendor, IndexTank, Mspoke
Zynga: Area/Code, Unoh
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32. Code Foraging
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33. Then Forge
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34. On Quality
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35. Craft
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36. Passing on Skills
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37. Permission Required
“Operating systems, databases, web and application servers, dev tools
all required money. To get anything done, then, developers needed
someone to write checks for the tools they needed to build. That
meant either raising the capital to buy the necessary pieces, or more
often requesting that an employer or other third party purchase them
on the developer's behalf.”
Stephen O’Grady – New Kingmakers
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38. Source: John C. McCallum
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39. No Permission Required
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40. When Web Companies Grow Up
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41. Microsoft Forced to Forage
“We need to think more like the web…. one stack to run them all has gone
away. This stuff about single vendor stacks is behind us. The days of recruiting
developers to where you are is over. You have to go to where they are.”
Tim O’Brien Microsoft Platform Strategy Group general manager
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42. Divergification
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43. The Product
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44. The Community Behind the Product
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45. The Gear Behind the Product
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46. In Praise of Forking
Open Source used to count download numbers as a
measure of developer success.
Today we increasingly use forks as the metric of traction.
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47. Making Differences
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48. Resolving Differences
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50. Credits
Photos:
SF in Cloud – SF Chronicle
Craftsman – A. Davey on Flickr
Berlin Wall, man with hammer – gavinandrewstewart on Flickr
Berlin Wall – antaldaniel on Flickr
Barbed Wire by tacitrequiem on Flickr
The Kernel, photos by The Kernel
Group Shot- the London Brewer’s Alliance
VC chart data from the National Venture Capital Association and the
Center for Venture Research, via @cbtacy from AppFog
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