I stumbled across this gem from a Stanford lecture by John Ousterhout — creator of Tcl and general computer science luminary — and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. The quote is simple: A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Great, more math metaphors.” But hear me out, because this one is actually profound in its simplicity.
Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics. What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is: Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year.
This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1.