3 reasons to search for your programming soulmate
thoughts on "The Friendship That Made Google Huge" from the New Yorker
Inner Monolog - sharing one fresh idea a day with a side of medium rare thoughts
Today - thoughts on “The Friendship That Made Google Huge” from the New Yorker.
College is a great time to find your team to tackle the world with. Such a high concentration of knowledge and skill. Looking for small opportunities to replicate that atmosphere. I found a team to tackle social music with. We made an app called Ellomix. Unfortunately we never launched due to the cofounders not being aligned on what a sustainable business looked like. And that speaks to why you should find one person you really vibe with.
My friend Josh was that for me. During college, we spent so much time together. We talked about music. We entertained crazy ideas. We helped the Dallas Morning News build an events chatbot. We worked on Ellomix together. We pondered questions like, what if pixels were circular?
When you effortlessly mix work and play with someone, you’ve found a great relationship.
Here are a few reasons why you’d want to find your programming soul mate instead of working alone.
never get writer’s block
John Lennon explained that either he or Paul McCartney would “write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was.” One of them would get stuck until the other arrived—then, Lennon said, “I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.” Everyone falls into creative ruts, but two people rarely do so at the same time.
Joshua Wolf Shenk quoting a 1971 interview with John Lennon
find key insights
“Most of the fragile insights that laid the foundation of a new vision emerged not when the whole group was together, and not when members worked alone, but when they collaborated and responded to one another in pairs”
create transformative, complex innovations
“great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources. An invention, especially one as complex as the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm but from a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity.”
Walter Isaacson, The Innovators
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