26 8 / 2011
Ship or Die!
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The quote is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It sources the ship building enterprise of days gone by when builders couldn’t time the high tides accurately. The smarter builders would launch their vessels even when unfinished, into the waters when the tide hit and hope to complete it at sea. And meanwhile those who chose to ignore the tide in favor of perfectly built ships often dealt with a perfectly build ship rotting away perfectly.
Aside for the navy, the ships were built for a simple purpose - sail to far away lands, acquire goods, raw material, spices for the cheap and return home to sell them at a margin that would cover the cost of the trip and then some more. That’s it.
The essence of the enterprise is to get to these other lands and NOT sit around in the harbor fawning over your creation. Unfortunately that’s what a lot happens in software — gold plated code with unit tests, agile up the wazoo, but too late to the market. Sitting around in the source repo, rotting away perfectly.
I have learnt lessons over a decade plus of writing software and only recently achieving success in shipping it such that the enterprise was successful. We returned home to wine and song and our own sanity. On the way I earned friends and fellow shippers, earned their respect and learned humility to ditch my ideas of what will it take to ship, park that ego or whatever else is in the way and commit to the cause.
Last year (2010), we ended a tremendous journey with exit of (Lil) Green Patch to Playdom/Disney which was one hell of software sprint during which the team reacted to not only changing cloud scale landscape but the very notions of business amidst social media’s nascent awareness of itself. We won. The fat lady sang.
I now spend my waking hours thinking about what am I shipping today and my sleep about dreaming stuff I want to ship as soon as I wake up, if I don’t ship, I might as well be dead:
And we must take the current when it serves
Acknowledgements: Thanks a lot guys for helping out with the draft! Avichal Garg, Brian Lynch, David King
