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Tinkering: prototype your way out of uncertainty Ten years ago I found myself near Portland talking to Bill, a brilliant colleague who was working at one of HP’s printer divisions. We were both worried about the lack of tools available for the particular set of problems we were working on —figuring out the algorithms that decide which drops to print, and when, in an ink-jet printer. It turned out we had both been thinking along the same lines: we wanted a set of libraries for image processing, written in C++ for speed, and accessible from Python for ease of prototyping. We were all avid users of the available toolkits for manipulating images (the classic pbm, ImageMagick) but there was nothing out there that could meet our rather special needs. ...

I enjoyed how the 3.16 section of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence class presented the Bayes theorem. Instead of giving a formula and expecting the alumni to apply it, they gave us a problem that the Bayes theorem would solve and expected, I believe, that we figured it out ourselves. Being as I am counting-challenged, it took me a while to figure out a way of solving it that was simple enough that I could be reasonably sure of my results. It turned out to be a very interesting detour. ...

Note added in 2021. When I wrote this 10 years ago I had no idea that what I then saw as a fascinating side project would become my company, and sustain my family for years. I was wondering, back then, who would want these wonderful maps I was making. The answer ended up surprisig me beyond anything I could have imagined. The sky as seen from South Goa I’ve been obsessed for the last 24 hours, ever since I put on-line the version of http://greaterskies.com that I thought was the first one to deserve promotion. I knew that I shouldn’t really care; I knew that, most likely, nothing would happen; I knew that I should expect to be ignored in Hacker News. And I’ve done it because it was fun. I’ve had a good time figuring out how to build the puzzle of Common Lisp, Python and Javascript that serves the star chart PDFs. And hosting is free. But still. It’s hard not to give in to what I would naturally do at this stage: add features at a frantic pace, assuming that the next thing is the one that will make the difference. ...

I still remember my first fountain pen. It was a beautiful thing, green and blue, nice to touch, that would caress the paper when you wrote. To this day, holding a fountain pen in my hand puts me in writing mood, in thinking mood. It opens my mind, as Paul Erdös would say. I became conscious of this not long ago when, as I was reading Daniel Kahneman’s wonderful Thinking, Fast and Slow, I understood for the first time how prevalent this effect is, and how important it probably is in my life. ...

We cannot predict how the development of something large and complex is going to play out. We are not sure about what the right product architecture is, nor where the snags are hidden. In most cases we don’t even know what we’ll actually want by the time the product is done, when the compromises that reality will inevitably impose on us are bought off. Nor whether anybody will actually want what we envision today. ...