10.20.2005

Foragers, Farmers, Forks and Forges:

On Software, Patronage, and Craft Brewing

Gluecon May 2012

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Fragmentation of Everything

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Explosion of Forms

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Language Tiers

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Software is Eating the World

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Gaming eats pharma

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Quantified Self eats Healthcare

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Software in the 20th Century

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Software in the 21st Century

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Software in the 21st Century

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Software in the 21st Century

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The Developer Strikes Back

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Foraging At the Frontier

Foragers

Heads upDiversity - healthier more varied dietBetter exerciseLove nature, travel, and explorationMove more often to new communitiesWork fewer hours, more mentally-challenging jobs. Talk more openly about sexAre more sexually promiscuousHave fewer kidsCare less for land or material possessions.Spend more time on leisure, music, dance, story-telling Less comfortable with war, domination, braggingGroup decisions, with everyone having an equal voice.Deal with conflicts more personally and informallyPrefer unhappy folk to be free to leave. Leaders lead more by consensus.

Farmers

Heads DownMonoculture- prone to diseaseMore sedentaryTravel less, and move less often from where they grew up. Are more polite and care more for cleanliness and order. Work longer hours at more tedious and less healthy jobsAre more faithful to their spouses and their communities. Make better warriorsHave lots of childrenExpect and prepare more for disasters like war, famine.Have a stronger sense of honor and shameFewer topics are open for discussionBetter accept human authorities and hierarchy

Believe in good and evil, in powerful gods.Think people should learn their place and stay there.Fear others.Less bothered by violence in war, and toward the other

Inspired by Overcoming Bias

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“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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Average time devoted to obtaining food per week 12- 19 hours for Bushmen< 14 hours for Hadza nomads of Tanzania.

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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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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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Thesis: what if agriculture was simply invented to feed slaves building other people’s temples?

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The slaves got to drink beer, so it wasn’t all bad

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Göbekli Tepe

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You Don’t Need to Farm to Kick Ass

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Forage

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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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Permanent War

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Foraging in Wartime

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“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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“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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“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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“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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Farmers as Foragers

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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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Code Foraging

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Then Forge

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On Quality

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Craft

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Passing on Skills

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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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Source: John C. McCallum

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No Permission Required

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When Web Companies Grow Up

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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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Divergification

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The Product

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The Community Behind the Product

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The Gear Behind the Product

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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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Making Differences

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Resolving Differences

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Credits

Photos:SF in Cloud – SF ChronicleCraftsman – A. Davey on FlickrBerlin Wall, man with hammer – gavinandrewstewart on FlickrBerlin Wall – antaldaniel on FlickrBarbed Wire by tacitrequiem on FlickrThe Kernel, photos by The KernelGroup 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