Monki Gras 2018 notes Thursday Morning
2 minutes 59 seconds average read (596 words)Aneel Lakhani
How we build things
- We rely on the knowledge of others "Standing on the shoulders of giants"
Assumptions:
- We assume things are reliable
- we're looked after by our society, class, local authority etc
Empowered + Disenfranchised
- we have neither knowledge or power because we're at the end of the supply change
Sustain
- What does it mean to sustain??
- as we're so far from the supplly change we can only
- start law suits
- buy else where
- social media attack
Disintermediation
- get closer to the source, farmers markets etc
Conclusion
The act of innovating keeps tradition going.
Dormain Drewitz - Not Dead Yet
Medieval Crafts Guilds
Over time they turned into monopolistic overloads, e.g The Masons, they could block out other people.
The guild is the coming together of people and setting up apprenticeships, etc
Why are Old Crafts not dead yet
- Letterpress printing stated in 1702
- Offset - 1900
- Digital - 1990
- So why are people still letterpress printing now
- Wedding Invitations alone are keeping letterpress a thing
- The sattionary market in the UK is still growing, but niche
- The rise and fall of the print industry
Why is this still happening
- Matt Hummul Instagram
- Rallys, emotional meetups to remember the old times
- Sentimentality
What About Software
Catherine Dixon
- You can't solve problems just in your head
- It's much cheaper to teach generalism than specialism
- We should look to other areas for inspiration and ideas
- maker-illiteracy - lack of understanding of where things come from
Typeface v Lettering
Typeface is the font what the type looks like
Lettering is the typeface insitue
Chas Emerick
- Revolutionary computing systems from a history of PDFs
- UNIX
- TCP, Ethernet, Bittorrent
- x86, ARM, RISC-V
- Lisp, Visual Basic, Excel Hypercard
- If we can learn for the heritage of PDF to help with the future
- PDF had to solve the "Display Problem"
- The code name for the PDF project was "The Camelot Project"
These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this
problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.
- PDF is a single self container document that works universally
- Unlike PostScript PDF is not a program, it's a well structured object model
- Lessons Learned:
- Small Killer team that were absolutely dedicated to fixing the problem!
- Learnt for the lessons of failure in PostScript
- Open data model meant that anyone could extend PDF to suit their internal needs
- They understood the scope of their case
- Had partners with expertise & gravitas
- Not deviating from the original scope, PDF is basically the same as version 1.1 circa 1994
- Learn a heritage!
Lars Trieloff - 20 Year History of Adobe
@trieloff
- https://twitter.com/dletorey/status/959047469232476160
- Grey Beards are sustainability Santas, they've broken things before
- You need to take out your garbage - Your API surface is bigger than you think
- Process & Tooling helps
- Collect and find configurations that no one uses and then remove them
- Manage Technical Debt
- Treat deprecation like any other hostage situations
- No sudden moves
- Integrate Tension, don't externalise it
- Tension leads to innovation, consensus leads to usability
- Use standards to guarantee compatibility
- Sustainability is about Culture.
- Empathy - know your users
- Curiosity - take on large scale risks, treat them as experiments
- Transmission - soft stories & hard goals (tell stories and establish hard goals e.g. this is the max 2614)
- Sustainability is about the future not about the past
- Nobody had a Master Plan
David Scott - Kew Brewery
- English Malt
- English Hops (even though they're not trendy)
- Recycle brewing waste to local allotments
