Do stuff

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Sometimes the most important part of a project is doing it:

You see, he is an awesome programmer and has worked with me enough to know that I do all right myself. At various times, both of us have implemented bits and pieces of the technology that makes up Facebook. It doesn’t look like all that big a deal.

I answered, “Because we didn’t think of it.”

The technical details may or may not have been a big deal. Once implemented, they look straightforward. In any case, though, the real reason was that it never occurred to us to write Facebook. We were techies who got along nicely with the tools available to us in 1999 or 2000, such as e-mail, wiki, and the web. If we needed to improve our experience, we did so by improving our tools. Driven by one of his own itches, Troy had done his M.S. research with me as his advisor, writing a Bayesian filter to detect spam. But neither of us thought about supplanting e-mail with a new medium.

We had the technical skills we needed to write Facebook. We just didn’t have the idea of Facebook. Turns out, that matters.

Post external references

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    http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-10.html#e2010-10-28T16_27_55.htm
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