11 ms·

Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers

380 points by GoRudy 8y ago

orenjacob 8y ago
I developed the curriculum for and then taught the first Pixar University course for newly hired Technical Directors (10 weeks, full time, from day 1 when you started). That was probably around the Summer of 1996 as the studio was growing rapidly to staff up for A Bugs Life. Randy joined some short time after to help grow PU from the 2 new-hire courses (technical and animation) into the much broader curriculum that it has grown into over the subsequent 20 years. I was a close friend of Randy’s then, and still consider him one. He is an amazing person in many ways. And when my wife and I got married in 2001, he was the master of ceremonies at our wedding. :-)
_robbywashere 8y ago
Great! Now let’s add a juggling performance to whiteboard interviews.
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  Plate Spinning is another excellent skill for software developers to be able to demonstrate live at job interviews. The trick to successfully managing a lot of projects at the same time, as well as spinning plates, is to only try to spin one up at a time. Once it's up and spinning, you can hop back and forth between spinning projects as needed to give them a little more energy and balance. But it's much more difficult to start several of them spinning at once! Erich Brenn "Plate Spinning" on The Ed Sullivan Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404 It also helps to show how you can recover from errors gracefully: Charlie Callas Spinning Plates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
aerophilic 8y ago
I particularly like the advice on how to hire: > 1. You want to find people with mastery, true depth. > 2. The problem is, that isn’t enough. You need people who had failed and recovered. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. > 3. Breadth, meaning curiosity about things beyond what you’re deep in. > 4. Collaboration. Not a synonym for cooperation, but the ability to magnify others. As a separate aside, I didn’t realize Apple invested that much in training.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  It takes a true #2 to recognize a #2. Otherwise, it's just crazy risky to put failures on your resume kind of thing. Corporations are full of people competing on a political level, failure is just a stain, so risk taking is minimal. In a regular corporation you could get looked at very oddly for suggesting anything outside of normative.
  - GoRudy 8y ago
    I wonder what some good examples of people that have gone on to have a strong second or third act after failing.
    - joewee 8y ago
      Probably 40% of fortune 1000 c level executives. You can reach a point where you continually fail upward. Some companies are willing to accept someone who failed at a company twice their size if they think the executive can get them to double their current size before they reach their point of failure.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        I respectfully disagree and would say c-level people of major companies are the most risk averse of almost all people. They run from failure like it's a stain. They want to always look good in the eyes of 'the big boss' and often have very little interaction with them and so are keen to always impress. In business politics, perception is the only thing that matters, so it's really hard to spin failure as success.
brandonmenc 8y ago
> Susan Kare, the first artist hired in the computer industry Citation? This seems like an unbelievable claim. At the very least, PARC must have had an artist on the payroll.
- webwielder2 8y ago
  Why must they have? Part of what distinguished the Mac GUI from PARC’s is the former’s refinement, elegance, and whimsy, contributed in large part by Kare.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Yet they did, in the person of David Em: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6-david-em/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6...
    - cmacaskill 8y ago
      Good find. I wonder if Andy Hertzfeld said one of the first and I misquoted him.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Because any time you say some is "the first", you obviously looked at some sources to find who was the earliest one fitting some criteria. Relaxing the criteria and/or looking deeper is very likely to find someone else. But you can never win an argument either way, because the criteria are arbitrary. So many disputes boil down to definitions.
  - brandonmenc 8y ago
    > Why must they have? Because PARC was an intentionally multi-disciplinary group working on the earliest incarnations of visual computing. Also, no one is disputing that Susan Kare is highly accomplished and hugely influential.
- cmacaskill 8y ago
  That's a good question. It's Andy Hertzfeld who told me she was the first true artist in the computer industry and I've heard him say it a lot. Somebody had to design the icons at Parc tho. https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook-of-susan-kare-the-artist-who-gave-computing-a-human-face/ https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook...
skilled 8y ago
All things aside, I found the concept of Cake to be really fitting for these types of posts/conversations. Whomever made it and got traction for it -- good job!
- GoRudy 8y ago
  yea i'm a fan, I started using it in the past year or so. pretty promising signal to noise ratio and a lot of G+ refugees hanging out now.
- Geee 8y ago
  The author of this post (Chris MacAskill) is the co-founder and CEO of Cake. I was kind of wondering how it's possible to have this kind of insightful post on such a niche platform and figured out it was the founder himself feeding it. He seems to post quite a lot if you look at his profile.
  - cmacaskill 8y ago
    Remember Victoria Taylor, Reddit famous for being in charge of AMAs? She joined Cake a couple weeks ago to get conversations going with fascinating people there.
- EpicBlackCrayon 8y ago
  Yeah, it's neat. It's sort of like Reddit + Twitter.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  What do you like about it? To me it just seems like a blog post split into multiple pieces for no particular purpose.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I'm a programmer, but I can make a cake without a recipe. Don't ask me to juggle though.
bb88 8y ago
The lesson of juggling is this: A juggler has to often fail thousands of times before he is capable of learning a trick. While some people can pick up the three ball cascade easily, it's rare to find one that can do a 9 ball cascade, because of the years of practice it takes to build up to just being able to attempt it. We don't want people to experience failure, but the sad fact is that we need it to grow. 5 years ago I was a typical software engineer who was fired because my boss didn't like me. Now I fly across the country and work with companies helping them with their SaaS issues.
- Reck 8y ago
  As a coincidence, today I was feeling down, looking over every major failure I had experienced in my life. This comment cheered me up! I'm glad that you have found independence, bosses who pick on employees over personal traits aren't worth it :) Hoping I can do something similar one day.
  - bb88 8y ago
    Thanks for the comment. Failures are just really inflection points in your life, and that's really all that they are. The key thing is to keep perspective. Everyone fails, and at some point, and you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. The major benefit out of that debacle, is that I used to live in fear about being fired. Now I don't. And there's a tremendous amount of freedom that brings. As my wife says, I have this uncanny ability to always land on my feet.
- vbuwivbiu 8y ago
  Yes the lesson of juggling is picking things up and starting again and again. Then as soon as you master n objects the jump in difficulty to n+1 objects is exponential and even when you get it perfect your audience will be bored of it after 15 seconds.
- matwood 8y ago
  This is why things like working out and power lifting in particular are such good mental teachers (also any of the fight sports like BJJ). When I was on my quest for a #500+ deadlift it took _years_ of training. I would fail over and over, with it taking months to add 5 pounds to my single at the high end. What you learn is to love the grind. You realize there is no end goal, you just keep pushing forward. Not everyday is rainbows and butterflies. Not everyday is a perfect flow day. You learn to say so what, and push forward. This is what experiencing failure does to people who get up and go again.
wespad 8y ago
My daughter (13) is a juggler. I am not. I'll just leave this here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap
milhous 8y ago
Here's Randy in action demoing OOP in NeXTSTEP Interface Builder (1:17 in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw
- waynecochran 8y ago
  Brings back memories.
MrTonyD 8y ago
Yeah, I remember Randy. After we got enough complaints about the classes he was delivering we assigned technical people to sit in every class with him. I'm sorry, but I've developed curriculum and taught technical classes - and those were some of the worst classes I've ever seen. Everybody was confused, and the instruction was really just a show from a juggler who had memorized a bunch of facts from the doc. Yes, he got great reviews - but students had no idea how much they didn't learn. I think I was the only technical staff there with a real Training background - so nobody understood the obvious - successful training involves skill transfer. Students left after hearing lots and lots of facts about NeXTStep and OOP, but without any real teaching happening. Sadly, this is a lot like most current training, since most companies don't hire people who can actually decompose complex topics and make them teachable and create sequenced labs which can develop real skills. Companies equate presentations with Training. But that was a long time ago. Hopefully he has worked with real Trainers since then, and figured out how to get beyond the pure showmanship.
- bondolo 8y ago
  I was one of the students in those classes and appreciated having someone with more technical depth in the class. I ended up making notes in every lecture of questions to ask the real experts during the breaks. I remember questions to Randy produced tangential stories rather than answers.
- sodosopa 8y ago
  Sometimes you cannot learn the lessons you are taught.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  >how to get beyond the pure showmanship. That was the lesson. Put on a show, and people will spend money. Real life example- Cousin got a Macbook Air for Christmas, was shocked to see it had 0 USB ports. She was uninformed and bought a product she didnt want. This is Apple's target demographic.
  - briandear 8y ago
    The MacBook Air does have USB ports; just not the old ones.
g_b 8y ago
> The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. Can anyone expand on this? So far my biggest failure has been unmaintainable spaghetti code.)
- brandonbloom 8y ago
  I guess the standard response here would be that means you’re not pushing yourself hard enough to try bigger and riskier things.
- xapata 8y ago
  The easiest way to avoid failure is to attempt nothing. This has the unfortunate side-effect of never succeeding.
- taneq 8y ago
  You don't get from zero to one by making a perfect plan and then following it. You get there by making a workable plan, starting on it, then re-evaluating constantly and updating the plan as circumstances change and new information becomes available. It's a constant process of error recovery and responding to circumstance in order to keep the end goal attainable. The code equivalent would be refactoring as you go to keep your code maintainable at all times.
trott 8y ago
Should developers also teach juggling to professional jugglers?
yipbub 8y ago
I'm getting a 301 on cake.co (Firefox 64 on Fedora from India)
- rconti 8y ago
  https://www.cake.co https://www.cake.co? http/https cake.co gives a 301 to www from California but that's about it. I assume you wouldn't post about it if the 301 didn't have a location, but you don't mention it.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I only looked because of my fondness for this video that uses juggling to good effect to teach math in an entertaining way: https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0 https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0
taneq 8y ago
Steve Jobs also tried to cure his cancer with acupuncture and woo.
- chapium 8y ago
  Well, he is more noteworthy for being a successful businessman than an oncologist. A more relavent criticism perhaps is that he recruited Scully. Also, did he hire other jugglers or similar individuals later in his career? I dont think the stunt should be praises without measuring its outcome.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  I don't see Apple as anything other than a successful marketing company. Their software and hardware are not better than their competitors. At best, they are on-par with the best. Not surprising given the enormous cost. Easy-Cheap-Good. Pick 2. Easy and Good. Should anyone praise Apple for anything outside their marketing department?
  - landon32 8y ago
    It's hard to argue that they have not made some of the most important inventions of the past 100 years: - A personal computer that people could afford (Apple II) - Nice GUIs, window based operating system, etc for the masses (Macintosh) - Best designed MP3 player (iPod) - the first smartphone that people liked (iPhone) Yes, a lot of these were inspired by prior work but iPhone still brought critical (often 10x) advances to each one—lowering the cost of the Apple II, designing a touch screen interface that worked, etc.
  - luckydata 8y ago
    If for marketing you mean product marketing and management then yeah. Apple is very good at figuring out what is the zeitgeist and package the perfect product for the market. It took them a while to figure out the formula and I argue Scully was actually a good mentor to Jobs in that sense (plus his multiple professional failures before coming back to Apple).
  - baxtr 8y ago
DonHopkins 8y ago
Randy Nelson is awesome and brilliant! He deeply understands programming, teaching, performance and entertainment, and is really great to work with and learn from. I was very lucky that we worked together on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs, where he was in charge of training developers to program ScriptX. Yes, of course, he would actually juggle in class! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx... This old poorly compressed ScriptX propaganda video is embarrassingly cheesy, but it shows John Wainwright (who went on to wrote MaxScript for 3D Studio Max) and Randy Nelson explaining dynamic composition by juggling objects, at 6:28! I love his lucid explanation and delightful motivation of object oriented programming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s Here's an article "ScriptX and the World Wide Web" that I wrote around 1995 describing the possibilities of integrating ScriptX with the World Wide Web -- kinda like what kids these days call "AJAX": >"Link Globally, Interact Locally" https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx... My job was writing code, documentation and white papers to demonstrate ScriptX programming and capabilities for developers, which Randy would explain in class. Dynamic composition of interactive downloadable multimedia objects was something that Java just couldn't do at the time, so I develop some demos to illustrate what the point of all that was, and to prove the possibilities of distributing interactive multimedia objects via the web in 1995. One demo of dynamic plug-together composition of downloadable objects that I developed was the "ScriptX Pizza Demo". It distributed separate pizza crusts and topping objects in ScriptX Bento "title containers" that you could download and plug together into an interactive pizza. To demonstrate interactive behavior, you could drag the individual toppings around on the crust, and it featured spinning "eyeball" pizza toppings (inspired by Jeremy Huxtable's "NeWS Big Brother", which was also the inspiration of xeyes, of course.) >ScriptX Pizza Demo >The ScriptX Pizza Demo, at "http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza" http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza", lets you construct a pizza by plugging together ScriptX objects from several title containers delivered via the World Wide Web. First you select a pizza crust in one title container, then you can select any number of pizza toppings in separate title containers. They're dynamically loaded into the KMP and locally composed in a window, that you can interact with by dragging the toppings around on the crust. There's even a "big brother" spinning eyeball topping, that animates as you move your cursor around the screen! >This demonstrates network distribution of cross platform code and media, with local interactivity, direct manipulation, animation, dynamic binding, and plugging together objects from different containers. >There is an extension to ScriptX on the Mac that enables it to ask NetScape to open any URL, so ScriptX can cause NetScape to display a web page, load another title container, and even send messages to interactive web services (like submitting an order for a pizza). >ScriptX Web developers will go far beyond mere pizza toppings, publishing innovative interactive experiences on the network, no longer limited to the static text, graphics, and forms of HTML. >Benefits of ScriptX to Web Developers >As a general purpose object-oriented multimedia scripting language, ScriptX has many uses for web developers. It can import and export various file formats, index, search and manipulate multimedia databases, automatically generate HTML from macros and templates, draw and composite images and produce corresponding image maps, and serve as an open ended programmable hypermedia synthesizer. You could think of it as a simpler but network distributed componentized version of PizzaTool, which I developed earlier at Sun: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... Here's the documentation for the ScriptX web module, which let you use ScriptX as a server-side scripting engine via WebStar, in conjunction with a client-side scripting engine as a Netscape helper app, to dynamically (and pre-) generate html and title containers for users to download, plug together, and play with in the ScriptX Kaleida Media Player helper app. Having the same scripting language on both the client and server (like JavaScript in the browser + node on the server), and dynamically generating and downloading interactive persistent objects and HTML, are all pretty common and boring clichés now, but it was exciting and needed to be explained and demonstrated with a working proof-of-concept in 1995: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.htm... >This is the documentation for the ScriptX Web module. The Web module is a toolkit for integrating ScriptX with World Wide Web browsers, generating HTML, and implementing interactive services and distributed multimedia authoring tools. Here's an illustrated transcript and video of a live improvisational ScriptX demo that I gave at the 1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference -- you can see how Randy inspired me to improvise crazy live performance art by the seat of my pants! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... >To make any sense of this, you should realize that it’s live improvisational performance programming art. The graphical and audio artwork are just ugly placeholder “programmer art”. The references to “great content” are laughably ironic! ScriptX may have failed in the market and lost out to Python, Java and JavaScript, and Steve Jobs finally said "No" to it, but I sure learned a lot and recovered from the mistakes, I continue applying the lessons to later work, and I had great fun working with Randy Nelson! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s... >“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”. Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC’97 video: “Focusing is about saying no.”
flowjuggle 8y ago
Absolutely makes sense if it doesn't make sense to you you should look for pictures of Claude Shannon juggling on the unicycle, if you want to learn to juggle or ride a unicycle pee free to contact me to get your toys and your lessons. www.flowjuggle.com

380 points by GoRudy 8y ago

I developed the curriculum for and then taught the first Pixar University course for newly hired Technical Directors (10 weeks, full time, from day 1 when you started). That was probably around the Summer of 1996 as the studio was growing rapidly to staff up for A Bugs Life. Randy joined some short time after to help grow PU from the 2 new-hire courses (technical and animation) into the much broader curriculum that it has grown into over the subsequent 20 years. I was a close friend of Randy’s then, and still consider him one. He is an amazing person in many ways. And when my wife and I got married in 2001, he was the master of ceremonies at our wedding. :-)

_robbywashere 8y ago

Great! Now let’s add a juggling performance to whiteboard interviews.

DonHopkins 8y ago
Plate Spinning is another excellent skill for software developers to be able to demonstrate live at job interviews. The trick to successfully managing a lot of projects at the same time, as well as spinning plates, is to only try to spin one up at a time. Once it's up and spinning, you can hop back and forth between spinning projects as needed to give them a little more energy and balance. But it's much more difficult to start several of them spinning at once! Erich Brenn "Plate Spinning" on The Ed Sullivan Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404 It also helps to show how you can recover from errors gracefully: Charlie Callas Spinning Plates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

aerophilic 8y ago

I particularly like the advice on how to hire: > 1. You want to find people with mastery, true depth. > 2. The problem is, that isn’t enough. You need people who had failed and recovered. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. > 3. Breadth, meaning curiosity about things beyond what you’re deep in. > 4. Collaboration. Not a synonym for cooperation, but the ability to magnify others. As a separate aside, I didn’t realize Apple invested that much in training.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
It takes a true #2 to recognize a #2. Otherwise, it's just crazy risky to put failures on your resume kind of thing. Corporations are full of people competing on a political level, failure is just a stain, so risk taking is minimal. In a regular corporation you could get looked at very oddly for suggesting anything outside of normative.
- GoRudy 8y ago
  I wonder what some good examples of people that have gone on to have a strong second or third act after failing.
  - joewee 8y ago
    Probably 40% of fortune 1000 c level executives. You can reach a point where you continually fail upward. Some companies are willing to accept someone who failed at a company twice their size if they think the executive can get them to double their current size before they reach their point of failure.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      I respectfully disagree and would say c-level people of major companies are the most risk averse of almost all people. They run from failure like it's a stain. They want to always look good in the eyes of 'the big boss' and often have very little interaction with them and so are keen to always impress. In business politics, perception is the only thing that matters, so it's really hard to spin failure as success.

brandonmenc 8y ago

> Susan Kare, the first artist hired in the computer industry Citation? This seems like an unbelievable claim. At the very least, PARC must have had an artist on the payroll.

webwielder2 8y ago
Why must they have? Part of what distinguished the Mac GUI from PARC’s is the former’s refinement, elegance, and whimsy, contributed in large part by Kare.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Yet they did, in the person of David Em: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6-david-em/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6...
  - cmacaskill 8y ago
    Good find. I wonder if Andy Hertzfeld said one of the first and I misquoted him.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  Because any time you say some is "the first", you obviously looked at some sources to find who was the earliest one fitting some criteria. Relaxing the criteria and/or looking deeper is very likely to find someone else. But you can never win an argument either way, because the criteria are arbitrary. So many disputes boil down to definitions.
- brandonmenc 8y ago
  > Why must they have? Because PARC was an intentionally multi-disciplinary group working on the earliest incarnations of visual computing. Also, no one is disputing that Susan Kare is highly accomplished and hugely influential.
cmacaskill 8y ago
That's a good question. It's Andy Hertzfeld who told me she was the first true artist in the computer industry and I've heard him say it a lot. Somebody had to design the icons at Parc tho. https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook-of-susan-kare-the-artist-who-gave-computing-a-human-face/ https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook...

skilled 8y ago

All things aside, I found the concept of Cake to be really fitting for these types of posts/conversations. Whomever made it and got traction for it -- good job!

GoRudy 8y ago
yea i'm a fan, I started using it in the past year or so. pretty promising signal to noise ratio and a lot of G+ refugees hanging out now.
Geee 8y ago
The author of this post (Chris MacAskill) is the co-founder and CEO of Cake. I was kind of wondering how it's possible to have this kind of insightful post on such a niche platform and figured out it was the founder himself feeding it. He seems to post quite a lot if you look at his profile.
- cmacaskill 8y ago
  Remember Victoria Taylor, Reddit famous for being in charge of AMAs? She joined Cake a couple weeks ago to get conversations going with fascinating people there.
EpicBlackCrayon 8y ago
Yeah, it's neat. It's sort of like Reddit + Twitter.
Deimorz 8y ago
What do you like about it? To me it just seems like a blog post split into multiple pieces for no particular purpose.
perl4ever 8y ago
I'm a programmer, but I can make a cake without a recipe. Don't ask me to juggle though.

bb88 8y ago

The lesson of juggling is this: A juggler has to often fail thousands of times before he is capable of learning a trick. While some people can pick up the three ball cascade easily, it's rare to find one that can do a 9 ball cascade, because of the years of practice it takes to build up to just being able to attempt it. We don't want people to experience failure, but the sad fact is that we need it to grow. 5 years ago I was a typical software engineer who was fired because my boss didn't like me. Now I fly across the country and work with companies helping them with their SaaS issues.

Reck 8y ago
As a coincidence, today I was feeling down, looking over every major failure I had experienced in my life. This comment cheered me up! I'm glad that you have found independence, bosses who pick on employees over personal traits aren't worth it :) Hoping I can do something similar one day.
- bb88 8y ago
  Thanks for the comment. Failures are just really inflection points in your life, and that's really all that they are. The key thing is to keep perspective. Everyone fails, and at some point, and you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. The major benefit out of that debacle, is that I used to live in fear about being fired. Now I don't. And there's a tremendous amount of freedom that brings. As my wife says, I have this uncanny ability to always land on my feet.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
Yes the lesson of juggling is picking things up and starting again and again. Then as soon as you master n objects the jump in difficulty to n+1 objects is exponential and even when you get it perfect your audience will be bored of it after 15 seconds.
matwood 8y ago
This is why things like working out and power lifting in particular are such good mental teachers (also any of the fight sports like BJJ). When I was on my quest for a #500+ deadlift it took _years_ of training. I would fail over and over, with it taking months to add 5 pounds to my single at the high end. What you learn is to love the grind. You realize there is no end goal, you just keep pushing forward. Not everyday is rainbows and butterflies. Not everyday is a perfect flow day. You learn to say so what, and push forward. This is what experiencing failure does to people who get up and go again.

wespad 8y ago

My daughter (13) is a juggler. I am not. I'll just leave this here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap

milhous 8y ago

Here's Randy in action demoing OOP in NeXTSTEP Interface Builder (1:17 in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw

waynecochran 8y ago
Brings back memories.

MrTonyD 8y ago

Yeah, I remember Randy. After we got enough complaints about the classes he was delivering we assigned technical people to sit in every class with him. I'm sorry, but I've developed curriculum and taught technical classes - and those were some of the worst classes I've ever seen. Everybody was confused, and the instruction was really just a show from a juggler who had memorized a bunch of facts from the doc. Yes, he got great reviews - but students had no idea how much they didn't learn. I think I was the only technical staff there with a real Training background - so nobody understood the obvious - successful training involves skill transfer. Students left after hearing lots and lots of facts about NeXTStep and OOP, but without any real teaching happening. Sadly, this is a lot like most current training, since most companies don't hire people who can actually decompose complex topics and make them teachable and create sequenced labs which can develop real skills. Companies equate presentations with Training. But that was a long time ago. Hopefully he has worked with real Trainers since then, and figured out how to get beyond the pure showmanship.

bondolo 8y ago
I was one of the students in those classes and appreciated having someone with more technical depth in the class. I ended up making notes in every lecture of questions to ask the real experts during the breaks. I remember questions to Randy produced tangential stories rather than answers.
sodosopa 8y ago
Sometimes you cannot learn the lessons you are taught.
robertAngst 8y ago
>how to get beyond the pure showmanship. That was the lesson. Put on a show, and people will spend money. Real life example- Cousin got a Macbook Air for Christmas, was shocked to see it had 0 USB ports. She was uninformed and bought a product she didnt want. This is Apple's target demographic.
- briandear 8y ago
  The MacBook Air does have USB ports; just not the old ones.

g_b 8y ago

> The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. Can anyone expand on this? So far my biggest failure has been unmaintainable spaghetti code.)

brandonbloom 8y ago
I guess the standard response here would be that means you’re not pushing yourself hard enough to try bigger and riskier things.
xapata 8y ago
The easiest way to avoid failure is to attempt nothing. This has the unfortunate side-effect of never succeeding.
taneq 8y ago
You don't get from zero to one by making a perfect plan and then following it. You get there by making a workable plan, starting on it, then re-evaluating constantly and updating the plan as circumstances change and new information becomes available. It's a constant process of error recovery and responding to circumstance in order to keep the end goal attainable. The code equivalent would be refactoring as you go to keep your code maintainable at all times.

trott 8y ago

Should developers also teach juggling to professional jugglers?

yipbub 8y ago

I'm getting a 301 on cake.co (Firefox 64 on Fedora from India)

rconti 8y ago
https://www.cake.co https://www.cake.co? http/https cake.co gives a 301 to www from California but that's about it. I assume you wouldn't post about it if the 301 didn't have a location, but you don't mention it.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I only looked because of my fondness for this video that uses juggling to good effect to teach math in an entertaining way: https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0 https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0

taneq 8y ago

Steve Jobs also tried to cure his cancer with acupuncture and woo.

chapium 8y ago
Well, he is more noteworthy for being a successful businessman than an oncologist. A more relavent criticism perhaps is that he recruited Scully. Also, did he hire other jugglers or similar individuals later in his career? I dont think the stunt should be praises without measuring its outcome.
robertAngst 8y ago
I don't see Apple as anything other than a successful marketing company. Their software and hardware are not better than their competitors. At best, they are on-par with the best. Not surprising given the enormous cost. Easy-Cheap-Good. Pick 2. Easy and Good. Should anyone praise Apple for anything outside their marketing department?
- landon32 8y ago
  It's hard to argue that they have not made some of the most important inventions of the past 100 years: - A personal computer that people could afford (Apple II) - Nice GUIs, window based operating system, etc for the masses (Macintosh) - Best designed MP3 player (iPod) - the first smartphone that people liked (iPhone) Yes, a lot of these were inspired by prior work but iPhone still brought critical (often 10x) advances to each one—lowering the cost of the Apple II, designing a touch screen interface that worked, etc.
- luckydata 8y ago
  If for marketing you mean product marketing and management then yeah. Apple is very good at figuring out what is the zeitgeist and package the perfect product for the market. It took them a while to figure out the formula and I argue Scully was actually a good mentor to Jobs in that sense (plus his multiple professional failures before coming back to Apple).
- baxtr 8y ago

DonHopkins 8y ago

Randy Nelson is awesome and brilliant! He deeply understands programming, teaching, performance and entertainment, and is really great to work with and learn from. I was very lucky that we worked together on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs, where he was in charge of training developers to program ScriptX. Yes, of course, he would actually juggle in class! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx... This old poorly compressed ScriptX propaganda video is embarrassingly cheesy, but it shows John Wainwright (who went on to wrote MaxScript for 3D Studio Max) and Randy Nelson explaining dynamic composition by juggling objects, at 6:28! I love his lucid explanation and delightful motivation of object oriented programming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s Here's an article "ScriptX and the World Wide Web" that I wrote around 1995 describing the possibilities of integrating ScriptX with the World Wide Web -- kinda like what kids these days call "AJAX": >"Link Globally, Interact Locally" https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx... My job was writing code, documentation and white papers to demonstrate ScriptX programming and capabilities for developers, which Randy would explain in class. Dynamic composition of interactive downloadable multimedia objects was something that Java just couldn't do at the time, so I develop some demos to illustrate what the point of all that was, and to prove the possibilities of distributing interactive multimedia objects via the web in 1995. One demo of dynamic plug-together composition of downloadable objects that I developed was the "ScriptX Pizza Demo". It distributed separate pizza crusts and topping objects in ScriptX Bento "title containers" that you could download and plug together into an interactive pizza. To demonstrate interactive behavior, you could drag the individual toppings around on the crust, and it featured spinning "eyeball" pizza toppings (inspired by Jeremy Huxtable's "NeWS Big Brother", which was also the inspiration of xeyes, of course.) >ScriptX Pizza Demo >The ScriptX Pizza Demo, at "http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza" http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza", lets you construct a pizza by plugging together ScriptX objects from several title containers delivered via the World Wide Web. First you select a pizza crust in one title container, then you can select any number of pizza toppings in separate title containers. They're dynamically loaded into the KMP and locally composed in a window, that you can interact with by dragging the toppings around on the crust. There's even a "big brother" spinning eyeball topping, that animates as you move your cursor around the screen! >This demonstrates network distribution of cross platform code and media, with local interactivity, direct manipulation, animation, dynamic binding, and plugging together objects from different containers. >There is an extension to ScriptX on the Mac that enables it to ask NetScape to open any URL, so ScriptX can cause NetScape to display a web page, load another title container, and even send messages to interactive web services (like submitting an order for a pizza). >ScriptX Web developers will go far beyond mere pizza toppings, publishing innovative interactive experiences on the network, no longer limited to the static text, graphics, and forms of HTML. >Benefits of ScriptX to Web Developers >As a general purpose object-oriented multimedia scripting language, ScriptX has many uses for web developers. It can import and export various file formats, index, search and manipulate multimedia databases, automatically generate HTML from macros and templates, draw and composite images and produce corresponding image maps, and serve as an open ended programmable hypermedia synthesizer. You could think of it as a simpler but network distributed componentized version of PizzaTool, which I developed earlier at Sun: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... Here's the documentation for the ScriptX web module, which let you use ScriptX as a server-side scripting engine via WebStar, in conjunction with a client-side scripting engine as a Netscape helper app, to dynamically (and pre-) generate html and title containers for users to download, plug together, and play with in the ScriptX Kaleida Media Player helper app. Having the same scripting language on both the client and server (like JavaScript in the browser + node on the server), and dynamically generating and downloading interactive persistent objects and HTML, are all pretty common and boring clichés now, but it was exciting and needed to be explained and demonstrated with a working proof-of-concept in 1995: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.htm... >This is the documentation for the ScriptX Web module. The Web module is a toolkit for integrating ScriptX with World Wide Web browsers, generating HTML, and implementing interactive services and distributed multimedia authoring tools. Here's an illustrated transcript and video of a live improvisational ScriptX demo that I gave at the 1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference -- you can see how Randy inspired me to improvise crazy live performance art by the seat of my pants! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... >To make any sense of this, you should realize that it’s live improvisational performance programming art. The graphical and audio artwork are just ugly placeholder “programmer art”. The references to “great content” are laughably ironic! ScriptX may have failed in the market and lost out to Python, Java and JavaScript, and Steve Jobs finally said "No" to it, but I sure learned a lot and recovered from the mistakes, I continue applying the lessons to later work, and I had great fun working with Randy Nelson! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s... >“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”. Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC’97 video: “Focusing is about saying no.”

flowjuggle 8y ago

Absolutely makes sense if it doesn't make sense to you you should look for pictures of Claude Shannon juggling on the unicycle, if you want to learn to juggle or ride a unicycle pee free to contact me to get your toys and your lessons. www.flowjuggle.com