I’m definitely interested in the Vision Pro. And I say that as someone who’s been a VR enthusiast since the Oculus DK2 and someone who spent a few years making a VR product for healthcare, but *not* a fan of Meta and their “leadership” in the space. It’s been great that they put a tremendous amount of money into trying to build out a VR ecosystem, and a lot of absolutely brilliant people have worked under Meta’s umbrella. But Zuckerberg’s obsession with “social” as a driver for *VR* is about as big a mistake as I’ve ever seen at that scale.

I’d love to have seen someone with that kind of $ work on VR as a great “transportative”, isolating experience, which is what VR does extraordinarily well.

While Vision Pro’s price is obviously limiting, it’s clear that this is a “top-down” approach that I think is likely to work. And it’s likely to work because VP offers a competent, usable AR *work* device, where the Quest Pro/2 have been limited by their screen resolution and comfort, and their general … “social-first” approach.

It feels to me like Apple’s approach has been a focus on AR. But instead of getting sucked in to the massive problems that Hololens and Magic Leap and nReal have had trying to make waveguide-based “overlay” tech work, they’ve instead cranked up the resolution and fidelity of pass-through tech… which seems like the correct option to me given the fatal problems of the current crop of AR headsets.

I do *not* think Vision Pro is the thing that will make AR/VR take off like a rocket. There’s a technology limitation that will keep this a niche device for a few generations, IMO, around either “true” AR, or some sort of trickery that lets passthrough-style VR appear invisible. When that happens, AR will instantly become a gajillion-dollar industry faster than anything else, ever. This isn’t that.

But VP is a *huge* step in the right direction if it works as advertised, which, given Apple’s history I presume it will. Which will baffle folks looking at specs and $, and wondering why not Meta Quest Pro?

But the last bit of this puzzle is trust. XR requires a huge amount of environmental and personal data. I *do not want* Meta to have that data about me, because I know it’ll be abused at every opportunity. While all big companies are highly incentivized to utilize that data as much as possible, Apple’s shown a commitment to data privacy that’s well beyond anything their competitors are even willing to talk about.

And this means that once there’s a viable alternative to Meta, I’m going to drop Meta’s products like a hot rock and never look back. And that means as a developer, working on VP is a prospect I’m unlikely to pass up.

You may see parallels with the modern political landscape, but it’s just as relevant at work.

You can’t beat an effective con(person) by playing fair.

One of the most common questions I get from people who are “stuck” in their career is “when should I leave my job?” and my answer is usually “when you can’t see a way forward.”

And one of the things that people run into sometimes is that they end up in a situation where you’re at odds with someone who’s essentially a charismatic con(person) who’s excellent at managing up. I’ve encountered this multiple times in my career, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s simply no way to win.

You can fight a mediocre con(person) by realizing that part of your job is not just being right, but helping your stakeholders understand that by not just logical but also emotional appeals, etc. etc. But the problem is that a great con(person) is better at doing this, because they can do everything you can, and aren’t constrained by things like integrity or honesty or facts or reality.

You can’t beat that. Don’t try.

I know that sucks to hear, and I’d love to have some sort of playbook to beat them, but I don’t. I’ve tried everything *I* know how, and have lost *every time*. So the advice I can give is just this: There are times in your career where you hit a brick wall. And you can beat your head against it for years and maybe make progress, but at extraordinary cost to you. You feel like you should be able to overcome any obstacle, fight through any bad situation.

But if you can’t see a way forward, it’s time to go. There are times when your progress at a place will come to a complete stop, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. It sucks, but understanding that and finding a way out is much, much better than fighting an immovable force. And yeah – it sucks. Bad people win. Happens all the time. You need to prioritize what is best for *you*, and that’s often just accepting that if you’re fighting a con(person) and they’d good, and have their hooks in the stakeholders who you need… the way forward is out.

One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.

Videogames are software. And as critical as engineers are to videogames, if a game team fired most of its designers and artists and said that engineers would constitute the majority of the development team and that all other disciplines were secondary… you’d end up with some terrible videogames.

No disrespect to engineers at all. But just because software is code, software is a creative collaborative multi-disciplinary effort that requires top-level work from ALL disciplines involved working *together* toward a shared vision.

Creating a world where designers, artists, audio folks, producers, project managers, etc. are “second-class” citizens relative to engineers is not how to create great software. I say that with a 20 year history, and at least a few significant successes that illustrate that I know what I’m talking about.

Musk may be smart in some fields, but it’s clear he’s got a 101-level approach to building consumer software, and if I was a Twitter employee, I’d take the severance and GTFO. This is the wrong approach, and since it’s worth calling your shots, it *will not succeed*.

Caught COVID a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten all the vaccines & boosters. I’ve worn masks indoors and at public gatherings well after most people stopped. My kids are masked up at school almost the entire time. We weren’t perfect by any stretch, though, and our luck finally ran out.

Do I regret all the precautions having gotten it anyway? No, not for a second. My experience was relatively mild. One of my kids got it, and had similarly mild symptoms, and the other didn’t get it at all. Certainly a far cry from if we’d gotten it in 2020.

Here’s the thing – in business, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes some small bit of bad luck will be fatal, and sometimes everything will go wrong and you’ll miraculously be fine.

The only thing you can do is to try to be prepared for things. To take smart precautions. To try to mitigate risk as much as possible. And sometimes stuff just goes cattywumpus anyway. You can’t control everything. All you can do is mitigate risk and try to be prepared.

For me, having gotten vaccinated, having worked to minimize whatever exposure we *did* get – the result was that it was a mild experience, and I’m grateful for that. This is the same approach I did my best to take when at work – to anticipate the things that were coming at us, to try to prepare, to minimize risk, and maximize our flexibility and reactivity, so that we could change plans on a dime when needed.

And yeah – that may be COVID, that may be business. But it’s also almost everything. Be prepared, but also be flexible. Mitigate risk where possible. Assume disasters are inevitable. Work to prevent them where possible, but build in the resiliency and flexibility to deal with them when they happen.

If you think you can prevent or avoid all disaster… you’re in for a bad time. Which probably leads to a future post about ostrich optimism, and how much I hate working with people who believe “it’ll all work itself out”. 😐

The last few months have been interesting. I’ve been helping folks with their resumes for cheap and/or free, mentoring a bunch of randos – individuals and companies – also for free or cheap. And it’s taught me something: I don’t like it.

I want to like it. But I don’t. And it’s worth acknowledging that. I don’t need the money, so it’s not that. Well, it’s not *strictly* that. There’s a few things:

* It’s too slow. 1:1 mentoring is great, because you can get to really understand the person and help them specifically. But it’s a huge investment to transfer some experience/knowledge, and it feels extremely inefficient.

* Doing this for free devalues my experience. Not just to me, but to them as well. I think there’s some balance to be had with “pay me for my experience,” because then you’ll actually *act* on it, rather than getting it for free and maybe deciding to do some of what I’m suggesting.

In a way, money is sort of a guarantee that they’ll take you seriously. Charge $1,000/hr, and no one’s going to ignore your advice. And they won’t question your credentials, either, because theoretically they’ve validated that before paying you.

Devoting a week of time to help a small startup out, only to have them say, “Well, we trust our judgment so we’re going to do X,” when you know their current course of action is suicide is just frustrating. Particularly when “our judgment” consists of exactly zero relevant experience. It’s wild.

But this has happened a few times, now. I’ll invest an hour or two helping someone with their resume, then they come back with a revision having done *literally nothing* I told them to, and want feedback. The feedback is, “Yeah, the text is different, but all the problems are the same. My suggestions are the same. Glad to see you’ve found a direction that you’re happy with, but I can’t (and won’t) help you anymore.”

My time’s too valuable for this kind of shit. If you need help, I’m more than happy to help. But the caveat is that either you do what I suggest, or we *talk about* why you’re hesitant to do so, because sometimes circumstances can be subtle. But if you’re just rejecting my advice outright, then no, I’m not spending any more time with you, and I regret spending any with you at all.

So yeah – I dunno. This year, I’m hoping to find a way to have a “second phase” career either doing some mentoring or advising for $. If the rate is reasonable, and the people are good to work with and willing to take input, then that’d be super satisfying. Ideally, I’d like a one-to-many arrangement – something where I can impact more people at a time, because a lot of the advice I give is applicable to fairly broad ranges of folks. But the 1:1 stuff and the volunteer stuff? I’m winding that down in 2023, barring a few minor exceptions.

But, glad I gave it a go. It’s interesting to feel parts of it work, and parts of it grate, and realize what the problems are. This isn’t so much a failure as it is a refinement and discovery of what does and doesn’t work for me, and the kind of impact I want to have.

What a weird year. As cautious as we were, and as much as we hoped to avoid it, all of us but J got Covid at the end of the year. Mild symptoms, but pretty darned unpleasant regardless. Fortunately we’re all negative again, and it seems like we dodged the “long Covid” bullet (for now).

Overall, I think 2022 was a bit directionless for me. We did a lot of fun stuff – we did a week-long Legoland + Universal trip with Eric and P, which was awesome, and we spent three weeks in Hawaii, which was really memorable. It was really nice to be able to go there and actually do things leisurely. We did a lot of stuff – Diamond Head, snorkeling, a private historical tour of the island, but we weren’t in a rush, which was great. We spent most of the time with Hajeong, and it was nice to have someone else around. Ei-Nyung’s family met up with us the last week of the trip, and they had a really memorable experience running into Masaharu Morimoto at his restaurant.

The rest of the year I did some mentoring and consulting and teaching. I think overall, the thing I got the most enjoyment out of was teaching. Mentoring is fine, but it’s a huge time investment that doesn’t particuarly “scale”, and it’s super disruptive. Consulting was … frustrating. I think the problem is that my input is really only useful at the right time, and in one of the cases this year, the company had gone way too far down the wrong path before I was ever involved, and as a result, they can’t make the call to actually *act* on any of the things that they need to. Which is just frustrating, and led to more stress than satisfaction.

We got more stuff in the backyard – the hot tub & work shed, and I think with that, the bulk of our backyard is “done”. Not just interim done, but legitimately “done”. As good as we want it, needs no upgrades. Maybe a retractable awning off the house to shade the deck at times, but that’d be icing on the cake. The funny thing is, we have a lot of cosmetic work in the house that’d make a huge difference, and it’ll be interesting to figure out if we can ever pull the trigger on it. Stuff like re-flooring the downstairs (I hate the bamboo flooring we originally got, and it was installed really badly) or trimming the upstairs rooms properly. Some drywall fixes are necessary – as the house has settled, the taping at the corners has become all warped, and it’s beyond my skill level to fix. But those are details. The vast majority of the house is in great shape, and it’s just cosmetic details. Still, if we were ever to hypothetically sell the house, these are the kinds of things you’d have to do before selling, but I wouldn’t want to not be the beneficiary of that work, either. So at some point, we’ll probably do it.

Health-wise… I didn’t get off my ass enough. I did some winging this year, but the algae bloom over the summer and relative lack of wind kept me off the water for a lot of the summer. I did manage to get on foil more regularly, which was great, and found a great learning place in Marina Bay, which meant I spent a lot more productive time that wasn’t just pure constant frustration. Feels like in 2023, I might benefit from a lesson, rather than trying to beat my head against this for another year without any instruction.

The kids continue to get older. J’s taller than Ei-Nyung, now. K’s significantly taller than J when J was K’s age. Both are creative and ridiculous. J’s made a “cover” of Battle Cats called Battle Birdy, which is incredible. K’s art just gets better and weirder all the time. I couldn’t be prouder of these two goons. J’s also started in Animation Club in school this year, which is neat – he’s working on a stop-motion animation on Friday afternoons.

Overall while 2022 was a bit directionless, it was also excellent. I genuinely can’t complain about anything – good friends, family in good health (though my dad’s mental faculties are noticeably declining), and everyone’s happy. I’ve spent a bit more time doing music-related stuff this year, and built a guitar from a kit, which was fun. Played a ton of boardgames (though pandemic still means this happens less frequently than I’d like). Gloomhaven with Max & Ei-Nyung continues to make slow but satisfying progress, and we’ve cracked open a lot of new, interesting stuff this year. Purchasing of boardgames has slowed way, way down, though. In part because we have more games than time, and in part because I feel like my collection of games now has something for every situation, and finding new games that are interesting and fit some new slice of the hobby is something that happens less and less frequently. If anything, I think my future in the hobby will be starting to whittle down the collection, and upgrading whatever things I like to their “best” versions. Which is, TBH, probably the theme of 2023. Less, but higher-quality everything. Except sleep and exercise. Those have got to go up. Time with kids. Experiences. Stuff that matters.

New Year’s resolutions, a little early:

• Under 210 lbs. for the *majority* of the year
• Frequent exercise – 3-5x/wk, either winging, rowing, cycling, swimming
• Play at least one boardgame in person with friends a month
• Make something from start to finish

Gonna throw something out there I’m quite ashamed of, because I’m curious if it’s just me. If it is, hoo-boy, I’m screwed.

You know when people you know get something you want? Often, when I feel like my first reaction should be, “Congratulations to them! I’m so happy for their success!” instead it’s, “Why not me?” I’ve done stuff like that. Why do they get public recognition and plaudits? Bah! This world is unfair. This is bullshit.

It’s not a huge, loud part of my brain that does this. But for many. many, MANY years, it was always there. A friend got a promotion? Why not me? A friend got a raise? Why not me? A friend won some award? Why not me?

And usually, it’s “Why not me?” with the attitude of “I’m just as qualified for it why not me!” instead of “What is it that they’ve done that I haven’t, that enabled them to get this thing that I want?”

Yeah, I don’t feel good about that. Most of the time I’d do the socially acceptable thing and feign happiness, but there was always that edge of jealousy there.

It’s only been in the last decade-ish that that’s changed. Where I could feel genuine happiness for my friends, and for people I know, who achieved this sort of thing and that jealous goblin in my mind was gone.

It’s taken a lot to realize that 1.) Their success does not diminish me. 2.) Whatever it is they achieved they achieved and I didn’t *for a reason*, and if it’s something that I wanted, being bitter about it doesn’t do anything, I need to turn the lens inward and examine why I haven’t done what was necessary to get what I wanted. 3.) I can be genuinely, wholly happy for other people *even if* they have beaten me to an exclusive goal.

The jealousy did two bad things: First, it made me feel bad. But second, and much, much worse, it was a way to believe that I didn’t need to *do* anything differently. That the world was unjust, and I deserved to be bitter. The thing that changed was a realization that I was jealous because they got something I wanted because they *did something I didn’t*.

And that then leads to two paths: Either I need to understand that I need to change to get the thing I want – growth – or I need to realize that I *won’t do* what they did to get this thing, and therefore, I don’t need to be jealous about it. Some people will work 80 hour weeks and never see their kids. They’ll have a lovely vacation house. I won’t make that trade, and so I can’t be jealous about it.

Now, when I see friends who are successful by any definition, I don’t feel that twang of jealousy. I can be genuinely, wholly happy for them. They can post their awesome vacation photos and I don’t wish I was there instead of them – I wish I was there *with* them. 😀 Or I can think, “What is it that I need to do to achieve what they have?” and not have it be about tearing them down, but about re-examining what I need to build myself up.

Like I said – I’m not proud of that part of me. But it existed. Maybe it exists in you, too.

I know artists are feeling the pain of AI intruding on their jobs. And it’s easy for non-artists to say, “Welp, too late, you’ll have to do something else.” There is some part of that that is true – the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in again. To some degree, it’s a tool, and artists who learn to wield the tool will have a future, and the ones who don’t will have to do something else.

But if you’re looking at AI art and thinking, “Well, *my* job is secure, no AI is going to have the judgment I do”… think back to this moment and whether you extended empathy to the folks who see their jobs at risk or not, because that is where you’ll be at some point.

Engineers, game designers, producers, CEOs, COOs, CPOs, whatever. AI’s coming for all of our jobs. There will be huge portions of our work that can be outsourced to data-hungry pattern-matching tools, because much of the work of *every* job is pattern-matching. There’s a good case to be made that for most judgment calls, AI will be *better* at it than any individual human.

And honestly, for those things, I’d rather have the robots take it over IF AND ONLY IF what it means is that we decouple “living” from “work”.

I’m fine with robots taking over the tasks of most jobs, but what we need to do then is not mandate that every human has to carve out a *job* while competing with AI to “earn a living”. At this point, if AI can do it faster (maybe even better), then that’s awesome. But then we can’t expect people to compete. We can’t expect people to have to “earn a living” as though they need to justify their lives and existence through commercial enterprise.

If we understand that for a lot of jobs – maybe even the majority of jobs – and lots of shitty, repetitive, bullshit jobs – are going AI’s way, then it behooves us to think about our lives not in the context of our work and how it “earns us a living”. We can think of our work as how we help others, how we interact with society, and how we make the world a better place for each other.

Yeah, it’s idealistic bullshit. But the alternative is a nightmare dystopia. Our professional lives are so enmeshed in this weird Protestant work-ethic capitalism that it’s sometimes hard to even think in a different mindset where work isn’t the driving force of your worth or morals or life. But take a sec and give it a shot. What do *you* see?