The last time Justinsomnia went under the knife was 2007, and the web has changed a lot since then. Allow me to impress this upon you with a single image. The graph below represents the percentage of mobile browser traffic to my blog over those last 5 years. Hello iPhone and Android users!
Mobile traffic from November 2007 to October 2012
In the span of a single year, mobile traffic jumped from almost nothing to nearly a third of my total traffic (before settling down around 15% this year). Given that there’s now a significant global audience of people browsing the web with smaller screens, I decided it was time to get up to speed on responsive web design. (If you’re in the same boat, I highly recommend checking out Apple’s developer docs on Configuring the Viewport. It was eye-opening.)
Back in May 2009, Mike Johnston of “The Online Photographer” wrote a controversial blog post entitled The Leica as Teacher. (The URL slug of the post, a-leica-year, suggests an earlier title that I almost prefer.) Leica evokes a lot of strong emotions among a lot of people, but for me, as an amateur photographer who came of age in the digital era, it’s never been a brand that meant much. Still there was something in Mike’s post that intrigued me—and I wasn’t alone. It spawned an unusually passionate reaction in the comments (both for and against), and then two follow-up posts, essentially clarifying and expanding on his original proposition:
[If you] would like to radically improve [your] photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you’re completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don’t have to commit to this forever; it’s an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn’t have to be a “good” lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter).
It’s funny because much of the spirit of the exercise I was doing already (thanks to reading T.O.P.): I was carrying a camera with me everywhere, and I was shooting with a single-focal-length lens (at the time, a Ricoh 28mm-e GR-D II, later a Pentax K-7 with a 35mm (53mm-e) lens). I wasn’t looking to “radically improve” my photography, but I was curious to see if I could play the same song on a different instrument, and how that might affect my visual perspective in the long run.
Unfortunately the timing was wrong. I was about to head to my brother’s wedding, where afterwards, while driving through Grand Teton National Park, I would begin scheming with Stephanie about taking a year off to travel. I was also on the cusp of buying my first-ever digital SLR, the aforementioned Pentax K-7, which I pulled the trigger on that August. Since we weren’t planning to embark on our travels for at least a year, I wanted to make sure I had time to get comfortable with the new camera before we left. Alas, “A Leica Year” wasn’t in the cards.
Over the last several weeks, an idea has crystallized in my mind—something I’ve known for a while, but just never put words to. Usually I keep these kind of things to myself but since it’s not something I can do by myself, this is an attempt to plant some seeds, solicit feedback, and hold myself accountable.
I have long known that I am not the stereotypical lone genius programmer (no matter how much I might delude myself into wishing that were the case). That’s not news. At best I see myself as a tenacious problem solver, a skill which up till now I’ve been able to employ gainfully in the art of coding. However, I am starting to wonder if being good with computers has become a crutch that’s preventing me from taking some bigger risks.
The fact is that I have these other hard-to-quantify, non-technical skills that I enjoy exercising. I know how to talk to both engineers and non-engineers (and translate between them). I actually enjoy meetings. I find that I frequently ask (what I think are) dumb, obvious questions (that no one else is asking, to my surprise), and watch them unlock a discussion. I like making order out of chaos, simplicity out of complexity. I love documenting standards and processes and systems in a way that makes it easier for the next person to absorb what I puzzled over. I like email and wikis and IRC. I really enjoy working with people. I get bored and distracted when I’m all by myself. I hate working from home. Collaboration tends to bring out the best in me—I’m amazed at what I’m able to accomplish when I’m working with others. I find it essential to know that someone depends on something I’m doing.
So here’s my idea, my realization: I want to start a company. But I can’t do it alone. No, more important than that: I don’t want to do it alone. My dream is to gather a small group of like-minded people with complementary skillsets and start a company together. I’m not looking for a big payday or expecting to change the world. I just want to work on something that makes me happy every day. I want to have control over quality. I want to have more freedom and flexibility over the types of things I work on. Heck, it could be something online or off. The “what” is almost immaterial, as long as I go home happy and look forward to working every day.
This, I think, is one of the first effects I’ve recognized to come out of the year I spent traveling. I’m no longer afraid of failure. In fact I find lately that I’m easily bored unless I’m taking a risk. Returning to San Francisco and buying a condo and assuming a mountain of debt was one exciting expression of that.
It was a weird confluence: first the entire internet mourning Steve Jobs, then multiple items in my feedreader about Amit Gupta of Photojojo. He was recently diagnosed with acute leukemia and thus will need a bone marrow transplant from someone of South Asian descent in the near future. It compelled me to put a link on my blog calling out to all South Asians.
At first I thought the link I posted for Amit was the most I could do—I’m simply not South Asian. No, the most I could do would be to get tested and added to the National Marrow Donor Program, regardless. So this morning I went to Be The Match to request a free “cheek swab kit”.
I don’t really have the words to sum up our adventure over the last year. So instead I made a map. It charts our path, departing from San Francisco on August 15, 2010 (on the right) and arriving in San Francisco on September 16, 2011 (on the left) exactly (and unintentionally) 13 months later.
Our route around the world (“read” from right to left)
Though it appears almost self-evident in retrospect, the truth is we didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing until we got there. It reminds me of a quotation by Joseph Campbell that I have always loved. He said:
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.
