I missed lunch today

I had an interesting little chat with some really smart folks instead of lunch today, thanks a lot :)

I was trying to explain the image I have of a future feature where I could listen to music anywhere and everywhere using a magical streaming receiver device. Anyway the folks I was talking with are really smart and they have experience in making things like this a reality. But I watched them doing the same things I do when people start telling me what my software should do. I start trying to figure out how I'm going to implement their requests in the software, before they even got done telling me what it is they want. It has taken me a long time to be able to turn off the coding engine in my mind and turn on the imagination engine to try and help figure out what people are trying to do and only afterwards start thinking about how best to do it.

I remember sitting in a meeting with another engineer where someone was asking for some really difficult to implement features. I sat back and watched as the engineer started to explain how difficult that was going to be to implement within our software. We just didn't have an easy way to do that within the structure of our system, there wasn't even a hard way to do it. I could see the person that was asking for features sitting there thinking, "this engineer must be lazy and doesn't want to do the work." I didn't help by jumping in and saying we should do even more than what they were asking for, stuff that was even more difficult to implement, but would be great features for someone using our products. Well, they at least sounded like great features. I thought the engineer was going to reach over and strangle me when I started adding months worth of work to his plate.

Now I take great enjoyment trying to describe the most outlandish pie in the sky stuff. There was a time back in the mid 70's when personal computers were starting to happen that my brother and I tried to imagine what it would be like in the future. We described a black box that would sit in a closet and store all the "stuff" of our lives. The music we listen to, the movies we watched. It would talk to a big flat screen display that would hang on the wall, and you would drive it with a keyboard of some sort. I don't remember all the details anymore but it sounded really cool at the time. Now many of the things we thought about are here or soon will be. Makes me wish I had written all that down back then so I could see how close we were in our dreams/predictions.