Mozilla Talks (Best Of): Minimum Viable Bureaucracy

January 28, 2014 § 4 Comments

Listen to Laura Thomson @lxt, Sr Web Engineering Mgr,  describe Mozilla’s “MVP”  Minimum Viable Bureaucracy.   We do this not only in Engineering but everywhere inside Mozilla (especially Finance and Operations).

https://air.mozilla.org/minimum-viable-bureaucracy/

Best of Quotes from this Minimum Viable Bureaucracy talk:

The basis of any self-organizing system = TRUST

Awesome communication processes require practice

Every project should have a URL

Let subject matter experts emerge (module owner or Benevolent Dictator For Life)

A 1 person = 2 day marathon Prototype + Momentum gets people motivated and makes the PATH clear

Iterate toward greatness

Ruthless murder scope creep   “Not in This Iteration”.   NO! ….. is a complete sentence.

There is no such thing as a structureless organization  (there is somebody at the end of the day organizing “stuff”)

Knowing how to work hard is a skill some people have never learned (especially if they are incredibly smart and have intellectually cruised through life)

In this talk, you’ll hear Laura reference several other current and former thought leaders at Mozilla.

This talk appeared at OSCON 2013 and the slide deck has garnered some attention, but the talk was not recorded, so as per requests, Laura re-delivers it on Air Mozilla as a brownbag.

For more of Laura:  http://lanyrd.com/profile/lxt/ < you’ll find all her slide decks here.

Other talks referenced by Laura:    John O’Duinn’s “We Are All Remoties”  > http://oduinn.com/blog/2012/04/04/we-are-all-remoties/

John Lilly’s Preso on Mozilla and Managing Chaos  http://www.slideshare.net/johnolilly/stanford-presentation-on-mozilla-presentation?type=powerpoint

30th Anniversary of Mac Computer

January 26, 2014 § Leave a comment

On this 30th Year anniversary of the Mac, the Computer History Museum released an Exclusive (Unseen since 1984) ;  the original Steve Jobs Public unveiling of the Macintosh Computer.   Interesting and fascinating on so many levels from the only seen once on public television classic Orwellian commercial to Steve’s still developing and now famous presentation skills.

For you computer history and tech buffs, the specs (minute 6)

  • $2,495
  • “LISA” Technology (mice, point, click, cut, paste, windows)
  • 68,000 CPU running at 8 Mhz that “eats 8088’s for breakfast”
  • 192K bytes of memory! 64K of these bytes are ROM and an amazing 128K bytes are RAM!
  • Inside the 64K ROM is the entire OS!  Entire graphics, entire Windows user interface – All in ROM!
  • Introduction of breakthrough 3.5 inch floppy disk with 400K bytes!
  • A super high definition, high resolution 9″ bitmapped black and white screen! (Twice the dots of an IBM PC or and Apple II)
  • Took 2 years to make it.

Don’t miss minute 9 with the classic Chariots of Fire video debut!

Some interesting quotes”We want to make Macintosh the 2nd Desk Appliance” (1st = Telephone)

“The last thing the world needs is another Local Area Network” (Ethernet really never took off)

“Lotus has announced 123 for the Macintosh and it’s in their development labs now”

Apple’s First Public Demo of the Mac in 1984

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