If you think of words like emotional, romantic and beautiful your are not talking about me or my work. What defines me and my work is functional, accurate, comprehensive and analytical.
That is the reality for all engineers. Some know that and some are in denial.
I'm working on one of the biggest features for Sampa yet. Just a handful of people know about it so I can tell you yet (come back next week).
A few days ago another entrepreneur friend of mine stopped by to chat and I told him about the feature, and how cool and "Ajaxy" is going to be and all that.
Despite the fact that he is an engineer as well, he's very good at asking the right questions. A few of the questions and points he said made me realize I was missing the big picture. I've got what he said immediately, but only the next day the full power of what his points sunk in.
As engineers, we think in terms of classes, protocols, input, output, how to cover border cases, how to make sure the input is valid, etc. We are very deterministic and analytical on our approach to solve problems. It's hard for us to create a system that solves 80% of the cases. We are instantaneously drawn to solve 100% of them. And that might work well if you are doing software that will be used by other engineers, or by businesses, but consumers are not like that.
They don't care they can choose between 800 different font types, or have 16 MM colors to pick from. They care if the 2 fonts they want are available and the 3 colors they pick match each other. Better yet, they care if the system picks the fonts and colors for them. It took the Office team about 15 years to realize that, but the new sytlesheet system in Word 2007 is an example of that.
Now, the good news for us about this new feature is that all the competition is making the same mistake I was about to make. I might not be able to execute perfectly on the new vision, but at least I'm enlightened by this new knowledge and it will have a great influence on how this feature will shape out to be.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
