(2020-07-14) Martin Reflections On Think Week2020

Jess Martin: Reflections on Think Week 2020. This past week I received an incredible gift: a week's vacation from Lambda School, when I'd just taken a week-long family vacation just a few weeks earlier. What to do with this unexpected gift of time?

I've always been enchanted by Bill Gates' practice of taking a Think Week to read, write, ideate and thing big thoughts.

A Career Checkin

reflect on the last twenty years and reflect on what I want to be doing for the next twenty.

When I look back at my career, I see two consistent themes: I build tools and I educate others.

I'll never forget my first week as a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill

Dr. Fred Brooks, the founder of the computer science department, stood and delivered a welcoming talk entitled "The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith."[1] In it, he said a quote that stuck with me "computer science is the handmaiden of the sciences."

It helped sculpt me as a "product thinker." It ultimately made me a terrible consultant (or a great one, depending on how you view it!), as I continually challenged my employer about what they were asking me to build and why.

It was only after I left graduate school to join a startup that I realized that "teaching" was just as important in industry as it was inside the walls of Academia.

I'm blessed to have grown up with this "bicycle for the mind."

The first twenty years of my career have been ruthlessly practical about my tools: what tool allows me to most productively prototype and build products for end users?

Over the next twenty years, I want to build tools that extend the core capabilities and interfaces of the computing devices themselves. That may take many forms, but one area I'm actively exploring right now is realtime collaborative systems.

I'm a zero-to-one engineer. I've built dozens of products from the first line of code to first contact with users

What I've focused on is how to be an engineer in the critical first 20% of a project. I don't know how good I am at it, but I do know I love doing it. And I don't want to stop.

Zero-to-one is the path I have trodden, and it's where I'd like to show others the way.