Thu, May 27 2010
Hi, I’m new here. My name is Nathan Smith.
I am a Silicon Valley refugee. I grew up in a tiny town in California and moved to San Francisco after graduating from UC Davis. I worked as a programmer there for four years before coming to live in New York last Friday.
Although I am new to New York, and new to Quirky, there is one aspect of all this that is quite familiar, which is the desire to work together to create something great.
There is a strong technology subculture in San Francisco (although I’m not saying by any means that SF is the only place where this subculture exists). It is literally hard to walk into a bar in some neighborhoods without hearing someone talking about functional programming, or data mining using MapReduce, or some other incredibly dorky (awesome) thing. In this subculture, community involvement and openness are the norm.
Consider Cassandra, the NoSQL database that Facbook developed and open sourced. Although there are other exceptional NoSQL databases, MongoDB for example, Cassandra garnered a huge amount of attention because Facebook developed it (and Twitter subsequently announced they were going to adopt it). This has lead to widespread community involvement in the project, which has in turn propelled it from science fair status to production ready in a tiny amount of time. It is now used on numerous high profile products/sites like SimpleGeo, Digg, and WebEx. Cassandra changed the way people think about scaling data storage, and it never could have done without the community pushing it forward.
Now, Cassandra is admittedly a niche product, an intangible piece of logic built by engineers for engineers. However, there are also precedent for this process succeeding in creating a consumer-facing product. I recently attended Google’s developer conference, Google I/O, where the mood could really only be described as exuberant. Sales of phones that run the Android OS outpaced the iPhone in Q1 on 2010. In three years, the Android OS was taken by Google and the community from nothing except the idea world needed an open source phone platform, to a fully functioning piece of software that was succeeding in an incredibly competitive space. I think the most exciting thing about the whole situation are the possibilities it invites. If you can take on Apple and the iPhone with an open product and win… well, you know what I mean.
I am incredibly excited to be here at Quirky because I know the process works. I know that the many consistently outperform the few. I can’t wait to see what we build.
