Should
you fail to pilot your own ship,
don’t be surprised at what
inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
-- Tom Robbins in Jitterbug Perfume
If you probe the interstices of an industry increasingly dominated by
Big Business, you’ll discover a microculture of hackers motivated by
the mad bliss of invention, surviving on the sweet contagion of
creative energy. Employment bonuses mean nothing here; fancy
packaging and market share are viewed with contempt if a product lacks
art. Beauty, now that’s
the thing—the beauty of elegant code, of a robust network, of a
balanced design that “just works” without duct tape and feature bloat.
It is from this culture that the Internet emerged, as well as the Open
Source movement. Less obviously, it’s also a diverse community of
home-shop machinists, PIC magicians, guerilla solar experimenters,
human-powered vehicle designers, robotics hobbyists, amateur radio
satellite builders, and countless other independent developers.
If you want to see passionate invention without the sloppy overhead of
a big R&D budget or the weird constraints of maximizing shareholder
value, go find a hacker… someone who gets a techno-boner from
circumventing limitations and knows how to get things done.
This has been my world for 30 years—a world where fun is the bottom
line and livings are made on the opportunistic spinoffs of creativity,
not selling one’s life for a salary. We subsist in the dark
matter between industries, trolling flea markets and dumpsters for
Obtainium, mail-ordering goodies, making holy pilgrimages to the
surplus Mecca of Silicon Valley, re-purposing the detritus of corporate
America to our own obsessive ends. Scattered among us are
conjurers, alchemists, wizards, lone-wolf inventors, quirky
entrepreneurs, larger-than-life writers, and the origins of more than a
few disturbing geek stereotypes.
In this parallel universe, the motivation for creating is highly
personal. In industry, you can bet that any massive development
effort is associated with a business plan—there’s no room for slack in
a bottom-line world, and seldom are things done for fun. But here, you’ll find
entire lifetimes given over to chasing quixotic dreams; you’ll see
personal fortunes whittled down to marginal subsistence in the name of
invention and reputation. Occasionally there’s an imagined pot o’
gold, to be sure, but most likely it’s just a reassuring fiction to
keep the spousal unit calm in
the face of demonic focus, Every Goddamn Night Out There in the
Shed. No, our motives are usually as guileless as passion
itself: chasing daydreams, building tools, realizing obsessions,
shattering limits, publishing, earning grins of appreciation from the
cognoscenti and accolades from neophytes.
These are things that touch the soul more than the bank account, and
there’s definitely a conceit about it—our sense of security lies more
in our toolsets than our 401-Ks. We feel sorry for vested
employees with their BMWs and well-appointed houses, even as we
decorate our labs with rusted hand-me-down office furniture and pay for
system upgrades by mining our hardware boneyards through eBay.
But money is not the point. It’s the exhilaration of surfing the
knee of the learning curve, the almost erotic bliss of a machine
flickering to life—catching the spark and glowing while the rest of the
world sleeps.
Of course, getting to that point can involve a ludicrous amount of work.
The Microship
OK, so what is it, exactly, that has induced fellow techies to devote
their time and energy to a crazy technomadic quest, attracted
sponsors, and gobbled up all of my available resources while my
contemporaries have been feathering their nests? This project has
been a moving target and an all-consuming obsession at the same time,
and one of the biggest challenges has been holding on to a central
vision that drives the design... even as it changes, sometimes
radically, from year to year.
The machine has to satisfy the urges that spawned all this and be
intrinsically sexy, yet address practical issues like serviceability
and sufficient adherence to standards to ensure the availability of
competent help. The underlying fantasy must be potent enough to
withstand dead-ends, evolution of technology, and the cyclic wax and
wane of passion. And it
has to be beautiful, a bit weird (but never in a gratuitous sense!),
and so profoundly enchanting to geek sensibilities that it takes on a
life of its own and infuses the very dreams of the participants with
visions of the system in action.
Why should you care about some bozo's boat? Simple: in this
sprawling website, we are embarking on an exploration of gonzo engineering, an almost
embarrassingly intimate look at how crazy unbalanced people can take an
ambitious dream and pull together the resources to make it come true
(and then go out and play). You’ll never get a corporate middle
manager to admit it, but such lunacy, driven by emotion and other
unquantifiable wild cards of the psyche, lies at the very heart of the
design process. You can formalize tools and implement procedures
all you like, but you can’t fit passion on a PERT chart; trying to do
so will repel the very people you need most.
The first step is one of the most fun: indulging in a fantasy
rich enough to trigger secret grins of hard-core technolust.
That’s the stuff that makes otherwise sensible engineers willing to
devote years, if that’s what it takes, to getting it right.
A Touch of Nomadness
I suppose I should begin with a philosophical perspective. After
all, the Microship isn’t just a pedal/solar/sailboat, wireless-linked
embedded system, or node in a flotilla of like-minded wanderers; nor is
it just a telemetry probe, babe magnet, or sneaky way to get back on
the corporate speaking circuit now that BEHEMOTH is retired alongside other
silicon-encrusted marvels in The Computer History Museum.
One of the great secrets I’ve discovered is that even someone with
stupendously bad work habits (like me) can get a prodigious amount
accomplished by applying one simple and obvious technique: keep
moving in the same direction for a long time. Unfortunately, that
can lead one down the path of specialization—an
essential part of the great symbiosis between those who dream and those
who produce. Specialization along with its concomitant skills is
obviously necessary to get real work done, but if you’re not careful it
can also become a filter through which you see the world, attenuating
everything that is not somehow related to your primary focus.
Over time, this can cause severe perceptual distortion from which it
can be difficult to recover (especially if said specialty ends up, not
necessarily through any fault of your own, becoming an evolutionary
dead end in a rapidly changing industry).
That’s an easy platitude for a self-proclaimed generalist to spout, but
how do we resolve the problem? How do we hold on to a central
design objective for a decade or more without becoming like one of
those single-issue political or religious zealots who lose the broader
context entirely and descend into extremism? It’s much easier to
end up there than you might think, especially when you audaciously
choose to chase a personal obsession rather than sell 40-hour weeks
while hanging onto the remainder for your own sanity-preserving
pursuits.
The trick is at once simple and fiendishly tricky: all it takes
is caring so passionately about the project that it fills your
daydreams, turns trade journals into treasure hunts, induces you to
recruit your friends, inspires doodles, and overlays a sense of purpose
onto every foray into the backwaters of the web. This is a lot to
ask of a job that’s been dumped on you by management, and one of our
central messages here is that if this crazy-talk of passion gets you
all fired up and chafing at the bonds of a career that isn’t letting
you play enough, then maybe some restructuring is in order. For
there is simply no way that crank-turning, even by a well-oiled
department full of Really Smart People, is going to give you a
sustained rush of intense creative obsession; doing that requires a
suite of characteristics that are generally regarded as pathological in
a corporate environment:
Enough chutzpah to believe that you are doing something original
and important, but the humility to steal shamelessly from the work of
those who have preceded you
Enough schmoozing ability to induce others to buy in to the
dream, but the stubbornness to continue believing in your mad quest
when associates have given up on you
Enough optimistic naiveté to interpret catastrophic
failures as steps along a continuous path, but the sensitivity to
recognize the real gotchas
(like your own change of heart) when they subtly appear
Enough arrogance to ignore the warnings and skepticism of people
with far more experience, but the wisdom to shut up and listen quietly
to the advice of practitioners in a completely unrelated field
People who behave this way are often described as having attitude
problems, difficulty working well with others, and a tendency to jump
around and not finish assignments. These are not the things
managers look for in employees.
What I’m trying to tell you here is that if you are one of these
troublesome folks, you need to shape your environment to support your
passions: nothing is more important than removing the barriers
that our culture erects around creative madmen, and few companies are
willing to customize a job description to allow your brain to go
berserk in its own juices. In severe cases, you might even need
to jump ship and accept the insecurities that accompany working
alone. (On the other hand, if you are in management and are
trying to pull off the impossible, then you need to recognize and
encourage the hackers in your midst, giving them the freedom to be
profoundly annoying and unpredictable.)
All this is simply a contextual backdrop for the real point here, which
is that massively audacious feats of creativity fall out of a way of
thinking that is much more a lifestyle
than a toolset. I find
myself smirking at books about management and team-building, when
virtually every world-changing cusp in the fabric of technology can be
at least partly attributed to the obsessive-compulsive behavior of some
intense character who broke the rules, dropped out of school, irritated
colleagues, jumped between careers, got in trouble, or, as the
schoolbooks used to say about the inventors I tended to identify with,
“died alone in poverty, an embittered man.”
It seems we keep returning to this theme: a lifestyle of
dedication to a mad dream, with everything else shoved aside as
necessary to make room for equipment, learning curves, relationships
with gurus and assistants, testing phases, and the endless quest for
support. It’s not necessarily profitable, nor is it particularly
fun (in the amusing sense), but there is something blissful about
having a raison d’etre, a
central passion, an unwavering navigational objective that allows every
instant of your life to be tagged unambiguously with Distance To Go,
Cross-Track Error, Estimated Time of Arrival, and Speed Over
Ground. Such clarity may be illusory, but it beats
floundering around every day, changing direction on a whim, and
questioning your purpose even while working your butt off and looking
forward mostly to evenings, weekends, vacations, and retirement.
It’s also no guarantee of success. But even going spectacularly
down the tubes feels kind of noble when it’s part of your life’s
enduring quest.
Still, I keep wanting to overlay some kind of formality on this.
If the Microship is indeed to be a metaphor for gonzo engineering, as I
claim, aren’t there a few rules we can apply that are a bit more useful than saying “just dream it,”
like some incongruously successful relic of the 60s who became a
crystal-sucker in the New Age fringes of Silicon Valley before
stumbling into a founder’s pool during the can’t-fail dotcom
boom? Like, it’s all about the fundamental vibrations of your
creative energy, man…
Well, um, yes. But if this level of design is indeed a lifestyle,
then the closest we can get to “formal tools” is a body of behaviors,
attitudes, and hacks. Let’s put on an engineering hat and attempt
to consider the problem in that light.
Formal Tools, Briefly Considered
Sometimes I wish I could claim that Microship development had been a
tightly managed progression in which, beginning with a vaporous initial
concept, we generated increasingly refined formal specification
documents, mapped everything onto a PERT chart to establish
dependencies, used that to drive human resources and purchasing
departments, then underwent a tightly scheduled fabrication and coding
phase focused on milestones and design reviews. That’s how big
companies claim to do it… and, hey, we even have some nifty
project-management software that knows how to convert TO-DO lists into
pretty pictures.
During the BEHEMOTH era, I
spent a very interesting afternoon at Trimble Navigation, makers of the
bike’s GPS. These weren’t colorful, user-friendly handhelds
wrapped around off-the-shelf chipsets back then; they were extremely
complex DSP engines coupled with RF hybrid black magic that pushed just
about every envelope in the book. I remember being captivated by
a massive floor-to-ceiling PERT chart, spanning an entire hallway, the
completed boxes bright yellow, the web of interconnections revealing
Deep Understanding of the design process and accurate predictions of
every step remaining. “I should do this for the bike,” I mused to
my host. “It looks like a great tool.”
“Nah,” he replied. “Project management tools assign resources to
tasks. You work alone. Just do something.”
He was right. Even with first-class volunteers and occasional
contract help, Nomadic Research Labs is a tiny operation, a de facto
non-profit, beset by overload and bad work habits, constantly
challenged by such fundamental issues as demotivation, distraction, and
lack of funds. A PERT chart in this environment would be
masturbatory, and would presuppose a stable design.
Engineering in a Nutshell
What actually happened was much more organic, and I’ve noted with
amusement that, despite protestations to the contrary among the
engineering population, it’s typical of the way things usually work in
industry. Here’s how to manage a huge, complex project:
Accept going in that your first tentative decomposition of the
fundamental concept will yield an over-simplified TO-DO list, distorted
by misunderstanding of key issues.
Avoiding all the items labeled TBDWL (To Be Dealt With Later) or
ATAMO (And Then A Miracle Occurs), dive headlong into the well-defined
parts, finishing some of the electronic design so early in the game
that it is guaranteed to be obsolete before the physical substrate is
built.
Blunder ahead on the non-obvious parts, getting pleasantly
distracted by learning curves and occasional moments of certainty, only
to discover basic flaws in your reasoning.
Now that you are forced to re-think the initial concept, map it
onto newly recognized reality to yield a fresh TO-DO list (with new lab
notebooks and computational tools to keep things lively) and another
cycle of enthusiastic activity.
Repeat steps 3-4 countless times at varying levels of abstraction
ranging from the entire system down to individual components.
Meanwhile, since technology evolves with frightening rapidity,
acknowledge the fact that any computer-based system is such a moving
target that if it’s not completed quickly, it will be irrelevant by the
time it ships.
Respond by simplifying the design, further refining your
objectives and abandoning dead-end ideas while doggedly pursuing others
that have come to represent too large an economic or emotional
investment to allow a graceful retreat.
Compromise here and there, bang out a few things that weren’t on
the list, then add them and cross them off to make yourself feel good.
Get totally sidetracked a few times, and periodically dive into
major development marathons to meet public deadlines like trade shows,
pulling all-nighters in PFD mode (Procrastination Followed by Despair).
Announce new completion dates whenever a previously predicted one
has passed, and keep driving your PR engine to maintain interest during
a process that is a textbook illustration of Hofstadter’s Law (“Everything takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.”)
Part of this development heuristic is just sloppy management, but it
also reflects the way we think. This is why engineering is, at its
heart, an art form (and why the average completion time of a homebuilt
boat is 135 years).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this seemingly ugly process is
that it’s iterative and self-correcting. Grandiose or stupid
ideas may not be obvious during first-pass blue-sky analysis (when the
project is glued together by wishful thinking), but it’s another story
entirely when it all has to be converted into Clearly-Defined Tasks
(CDTs) and drawings that make sense to machinists. Without some
kind of closed-loop intellectual process to fine-tune your thinking, it
would be impossible to get to the point where you can start using
engineering tools to convert fantasies into contraptions.
Trying to shortcut this by starting on Day One with formal design
methodologies can have the catastrophic effect of committing you to an
ill-defined goal state, whereupon the end result is shaped more by your
toolkit than by the supposed objective. That’s why so many products
seem malformed, patched, and otherwise inelegant: management
loves formal methods and looks askance upon such frivolous notions as
approaching product design as a delicate blend of art and
engineering. The exceptions, when they occur, are a joy to use.
The rest miss the point, no matter how stylish their exterior or
sophisticated their underlying technology.
So it appears that designing a system isn’t nearly as rigid a process
as typical engineering textbooks would have you believe. Your component
choices affect the shape of the thing you’re building; said shape in
turn creates constraints that affect your choice of components.
Such psychological race conditions can only be resolved by tweaking the
granularity knob while adding inputs to your evolving mental model,
until the correct solution congeals in a flash.
It’s easy, and here’s how to do
it: Prop your feet up on your
desk, relax, and form a fantasy of the desired results. Now turn
it slowly in your head while calmly examining it from all sides,
allowing input variables to float until an unanticipated combination
satisfies your psychic fantasy-comparator and generates a flash of
recognition. Since all your noodling is naturally saved in a big
circular buffer called short-term memory, let this recognition event
pre-trigger a snapshot of the conditions that immediately preceded it
(before accumulated pondering-propagation delays introduce conceptual
drift). There’s your design specification. Take that and
run with it.
This is probably not an engineering methodology that makes managers
comfortable, though it’s a good summary of life in the trenches.
There is a pervasive myth that structured methods and sequential
procedures, used in isolation, will get you there… but I’ve never seen
it work that way. The tools don’t actually start to become useful
until you’re quite thoroughly immersed, and that can take weeks of
appearing, to outside observers, as if you are loafing.
A Sense of Urgency
Speaking of time, there’s another big difference between gonzo
engineering and life in industry. Schedules and deadlines,
the X-axis of project management, are anathema to the independent
worker. Don’t tell me that I have until Monday morning at 9:00 to
hand you a report on the solar array thermal retrofit; I’m still in the
wall-staring phase on that one and expect to be here for days! I might emerge
occasionally to troll the web for prior art to steal, get distracted by
other parts of the project, or just say “screw it” and go sailing on a
friend’s catamaran in the name of research, but a deadline? Imposing order on
the project would send me on a search for something better suited to my
interpretation of the term “work.”
Alas, life isn’t like that in a corporate environment, where people
actually pay you to behave. Critical-path management, release
dates, pre-production prototypes, purchasing cycles, trade shows… there
are countless reasons why the long-suffering denizens of cubicles and
labs are not given free rein to go with their instincts. But
despite the importance of scheduling in coordinating a complex
enterprise, there are huge costs involved: design compromises,
sneaky shortcuts, employee burnout, kluged patches, bad assumptions,
useless documentation, and incomplete testing, just to name a
few. This is analogous to sailing: it is well understood
that a sailor with no schedule always has fair winds. The people
who find themselves calling MAYDAY in a Force 10 gale are usually those
who have decided to push their luck for some time-related reason:
they’re in a race, vacation’s almost over, the crew has to reach port
in time to use a return ticket, or some arbitrary schedule laid out
over charts and cruising guides in a cozy den long ago is now affecting
the skipper’s judgment.
Working alone and with volunteers on something that will be done when
it’s done (and not before), we have the luxury of ignoring the
calendar—although with that comes the dangerous temptation to give in
to the dreaded BEHEMOTH Effect
(“Hey, here’s a cool gadget; let’s see how we can integrate it into the
system!”) Somewhere in there is the right compromise, but we are
going to assume that when you’re building your life around
the Ultimate Project, schedules are not a factor.
Convenient, eh?
An Economic Aside
While we’re ignoring things, let’s talk about money. From an
engineering perspective, this can be even more annoying than
time—there’s nothing like “aggressive cost minimization” to take all
the fun out of a design. Fortunately, one of the intrinsic
features of passionate dream-chasing is that everything else is
secondary, and it’s thus easy to justify spending as much as you have
(and then some). Combine this with poverty consciousness, and one
can get amazingly creative at scrounging. In addition to all the
expensive bits from West Marine and McMaster-Carr, the Microship
contains thousands of parts that were donated, bought surplus,
extracted from dumpsters, horse-traded, repurposed, cannibalized, or
fabricated on the cheap. But one issue that never came up was
worrying about manufacturability and component cost. There’s a
sort of certainty here that is immensely liberating: “This is the
most important thing I can possibly be doing, so it doesn’t really
matter what it costs to get the job done—I’ll afford it somehow.”
Hey,
speaking
of which, want to help
support the Microship project?
<ahem> So anyway, it appears that taking a gonzo engineering
approach lets us
ignore
time, money, formal tools, responsibility, and managers. What do
we have to think about?
The Microship Fantasy
We have pretty well established that the first step in creating a new
system is to come up with a fantasy so compelling, so delicious, that
it pervades your life and becomes the motivation for all subsequent
work and the inspiration for all learning curves. Let’s give it a
try.
What I really want, reduced to its purest definition, is the ultimate toy. That has a
different meaning for everybody, of course: the ultimate toy can
be described as one that pushes all your buttons, and if we all had the
same collection of buttons, life would be not only boring but intensely
competitive.
My buttons, an updated version of the ones that propelled me out of
Ohio 20 years ago aboard a computerized recumbent bicycle, are
these: travel and adventure, nomadic connectivity, unstructured
publishing, ham radio and wireless networking, tinkering with arcane
electronics, collecting environmental data with an eye toward
embarrassing polluters, romance and sweet erotic discoveries, freedom
from responsibility, integrating diverse resources into a single
system, maximizing coding depth and packing density, recursive
wordplay, hooking up with interesting characters, learning almost
anything, being on the water, and getting by on renewable energy
sources. The ultimate toy, for me, is thus something of an escape
pod, packed with electronics and communications equipment, linked to
the Net, and alive with meaningful blinkenlights.
It has to let me make a living (ideally by talking/writing about what
I’m doing), be as untethered as possible, and lead me into wild
adventures without unreasonably increasing the probability of sudden
death. It must satisfy my geek sensibilities by blending innate
complexity with layers of abstraction, synchronizing with the current
interests of various hacker subcultures, and exuding a sense of quality
and perfection at every level from the physical substrate to the
elegance of data structures. And finally, it has to be amusing
enough to the kinds of people I find intriguing to serve as an
effective door opener wherever I happen to roam, attracting the
brilliant, the quirky, and those with hot tubs—not to mention the
media, which is part of the survival formula for a project of this
scale.
I know what some of you are thinking: “My God, what a load of
self-indulgent bullshit! He’s spending his life building
impractical gadgets and showing them off for a living!”
Yep. I never outgrew Science Fairs, and why should I? Success is the ratio of all you put
out to all you get back, and only a small part of that formula involves
money; if one can survive on the fruits of something that’s
intrinsically fun, why not? I have no interest in selling
integrated e-solutions to the road-warrior market, and any parts of
this system that turn out to be useful to others are gravy, ideally
generating a few bucks in the form of articles, books, PDFs sold on our
website, or targeted clicks. This whole thing would be ridiculous
in a corporate context, and any board of directors would have me
ousted in a heartbeat if I were a CEO. But remember, all I
claimed is that I’m building the ultimate toy for myself, not trying to
produce the Next Big Thing.
(Modesty aside, I should admit that the passion-based pursuit of geek
bliss has been such “hacker flypaper” that we actually do push
envelopes now and then, leading us unto technology-transfer temptation.
I’ve learned over the years that I totally suck at business, so these
productizing urges tend to be short-lived… but the information gets
propagated anyway. Maybe someday I’ll find a joint-venture
partner who knows how to extract profit from stuff, but in the meantime
I don’t want to spoil it by fumbling around with startups. I’ll
just go on playing mini-NASA with my pals, being a kid as long as I can
get away with it.)
So yeah, this is just for fun. This whole website is about a
toy. Is this a great planet, or what?
