Adam Keys is Thinking

Earlier this year, after working at LivingSocial for four years, I switched things up and started at ShippingEasy. I didn’t make much of it at the time. I feel like too much is made of it these days.

These are jobs, not adventures.

It has, thankfully, become cliché to get excited about the next adventure. Instead, I’m going to flip the script and tell you about my LivingSocial “adventure”.

• Once upon a time I joined a team with all the promise in the world
• And as a sharp person I’d meet there told me, the grass is always greenish-brown, no matter how astroturf-green it seems from the outset
• I wrestled a monolith (two, depending on how you count)
• I joined a team, attempted to reimplement Heroku, and fell quite a bit short
• I wandered a bit, fighting little skirmishes with the monolith and pulling services out of it
• I ended up in light management, helping the people taking the monolith head on
• I gradually wandered up to an architectural tower, but tried my best not to line it in ivory
• I had good days where stuff got done in the tower
• And I had days where I feng shui’d the tower without really moving the ball forward
• In April, it was time for me to hand the keys to the tower over to other sharp folks and spread what I’ve learned elsewhere
• In the end, I worked with a lot of smart and wonderful people at LivingSocial.

Sadly, there was no fairy tale ending. About a third of the people I worked with ended up leaving before I did. Another third were laid off in the nth round of layoffs just after I left. The other third made it all the way through to Groupon’s acquisition of LivingSocial.

It was not a happy ending or a classic adventure. It was an interesting, quirky tale.

Leaders of business and thought have been putting out statements showing unity or acceptance of Donald Trump’s election. I feel this is normalizing what has just happened to this country and therefore these statements are awful.

If I were a captain of industry or leader of thought, I’d use this statement and encourage everyone else to do the same:

As a private citizen, Mr. Trump has said and done numerous things which are indefensible and which we as a country cannot endorse or accept. While we regret that he’s been elected, as he transitions to life as a public servant, we are willing to consider his actions and act together when they are mutually beneficial to all of our customers, employees, partners, and the greater public. In any case where there is a conflict of benefit, we shall stand opposed to Mr. Trump as is our duty based on the founding principles of this nation.

Mutual benefit. It’s so easy to draft laws and make changes that benefit everyone. It takes nothing away from me if Black Lives Matter. Pricing the cost of pollution into the gas for my car means there’s an incentive for me to use less and what I do use pays for the negative effects of using it. Letting a gay couple marry or someone change their gender takes nothing away from my marriage or identity.

We will not let Trump do as he’s said to our neighbors and our country. If he wishes to change course for the better now, fine. Otherwise, we will refuse to allow Trump-style business and rhetoric to become business-as-normal in our country.

A few years ago, I was re-infected with enthusiasm for cars. I came upon One Car to Do It All and found a new reason to obsess over cars.

I read Car and Driver and Road and Track as a teenager. I was excited by the agency that cars bring (who isn’t?). It was a fun thing for me to nerd out about: technical specifications , comparing feature lists, and of course benchmarks! There was also a slight bit of romance to automotive journalism, ostensibly all writers traveling the country (or world) driving neat cars in beautiful places, often quite quickly.

Now, I’m taken by the history of specific manufacturers and how older models of cars became the current models. The technology and coordination needed to produce the modern car appeals to my technological side. The shape of cars new and old is a fun subjective conversation (e.g. are exterior about form or function?).

Most people do not view cars this way. They are automotive pragmatists. They want a car like they want a refrigerator or washing machine. The car is an appliance. It takes you from where you are to where you want to go without drama, in a modicum of comfort. The quality of the steering feedback, the particulars of the engine, or the predecessor of the car from two decades ago are nothing. The optimization is all around cost of ownership and utility.

(For the sake of symmetry I feel compelled to write another couple paragraphs on automotive pragmatism. But, there’s really nothing else to say. It’s pragmatic through and through.)

A curious thing happens when my car enthusiasm interacts with pragmatic car owners. Some of them will encourage me to talk about my enthusiasm. Mostly, it seems a little awkward, as though they’re afraid I somehow experience cars in a better way than they do. This is totally not the case, I can’t even really drive a stick!

In a way its not actually that curious. Car enthusiasm and the cars enthusiasts own correlate highly with elitism, which is by definition intimidating. But it does make me wish I had a shorthand for “I drive this car because its interesting to me, but I won’t judge your car, now tell me what you’re enthusiastic about that I don’t understand”.

When I didn’t drink coffee, the thing I enjoyed about coffee was the smell. It has a really great aroma. Unlike popcorn!

Now that I do drink coffee, I don’t notice the smell as much. I have to stop myself to take notice of it. That’s sort of a bummer.

I’m acclimated to coffee. I love drinking it, and tasting it. But, I wish I could drink coffee, regularly, and still smell it.

Riding the Rails: Celebrating Trains and Subway Commuter Life:

Train time is essential time, and rail travel isn’t strictly pragmatic. For many, the commute is their only time to read, think, and zone out.

For a brief window of several months, ten years ago, I rode the Dallas light rail to work. It was exactly as quoted. It was when I read, when I reflected on the world or just the day gone past. I often miss it.

…as Jacquelin Cangro writes in The Subway Chronicles, the “New York Subway is a microcosm of world culture. The train is the great equalizer. When the doors close, all of us — black or white, Sephardic or Catholic, Chinese or Indian — are going together, and no one will arrive any faster or in better style.”

Even more, I wish everyone had to partake of public transit. We spend too much time in our bubbles. Our offices, homes, social networks, and cars isolate us from each other. Perhaps we wouldn’t find ourself in this strange election cycle if people from different backgrounds and circumstances had to spend twenty minutes with each other several days a week.

Taking polluting cars off the road, reshaping our communities, greater safety, it’s all secondary to me. Growing our empathy with one weird trick to see each other and relate is the outcome I find most intriguing to good public transit.

Pet peeve #73: threaded discussions. You may have seen it in a Usenet reader or perhaps even your email. It may seem like a great way to manage a long conversation with multiple ideas and lines of discussion. OK, that’s fine, I think you’re wrong and looking at this a little too technically but it’s not forcing that perspective on anyone else so fine.

I get peeved when its suggested that conversational tools like Twitter or Slack should implement threaded messages. Nope. You have now failed my secret test, please disembark from the pragmatic train.

If a conversation requires threading, that conversation has already gone way off the rails.

Two people talking about one thing and another two people talking about another thing in the same conversation is the definition of talking past each other. Why should our software enable that?

If an email or chat ends up covering two important topics, e.g. whether to use solid or liquid fuel on a rocket and what color to paint the rocket, it was poorly written in the first place. A reasonable person can easily jump in and say “let’s talk about the fuel now and we can figure out the color later”.

Bottom line: I think people can and should handle breaking off side discussions on their own instead of trying to push weird hierarchy on participants.