Confusing Error

I've been hacking away at my extension again, based on the fact that the old version is completely broken by Chrome version 35.

One of the major operational pieces that I did not have in place is error reporting -- I relied on anecdotal error reports from users, which have typically been enough in the past.  However, with a major refactoring and rewrite, there are so many problems that can pop up, and I have no way to know if I'm causing bad regressions.

So I've been building version 1.0.31, with opt-out error reporting.  But when making the changes and firing it up for the first time, I kept seeing this error in the console:

Error in event handler for (function name here): TypeError: The first argument is the receiver and must be an object.

WTF?  It only seemed to come up when registering a callback, but I didn't change anything significant with any callbacks, I just added some error aggregation and reporting.  After struggling with finding the cause, I used the time-tested method of commenting out large blocks of code and then un-commenting until things work.  I eventually narrowed it down to this new function-class that I added:

function Error(code, message) {
  this.code = code;
  this.message = message;
}

Why would this class cause problems, it's as basic as it gets...?  And why would it cause this weird error? The only answer I could think of was that "Error" is a reserved name and declaring this function effectively overwrote it, causing all sorts of disaster.  So I renamed the class to "ErrorReport" and things worked again.

If you encounter this error, there's a chance somewhere that someone is inadvertently clobbering a "protected namespace" function...one of the wonderful joys of Javascript is the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in mysterious ways.

Brew For You Service

Here is a quick double feature of what I'm grateful for, and some ideas I came up with:

I'm grateful for:

• Staying in touch with good friends over 20+ years leads to some awesome (hilarious) reunions that seem like you never drifted apart.  I'm grateful for having life-long friends.
• I'm grateful for the opportunity to get 5+ free hours to brew.   That picture below is a Belgian Wit, which I'm hoping will come out with a nice light orange-y flavor.  My feet are up on top of the mash tun.

[Bad] ideas of the day:

• A "brew-for-you" service where you specify the recipe that you want to brew, and the service gets all the materials, brews a 5 gallon tester batch for you, and you pick it up when it's fermented and ready.  I would love this service so I could try out new recipes or tweaks without having to commit an entire afternoon of working to find out if it worked.
• A DSP that targets mobile ads specifically at *mobile web* rather than mobile app, and detects when users are zoomed in & in a residential geolocation (i.e., at home, browsing).  Not sure if that would be all that useful.

A new 30 days

So I've reached the end of my 30 day challenge to write a blog post a day.  It's taught me a lot about both trying to do something regularly (set a schedule and do it the same time every day) and writing (super hard, kudos to people who do it full time).

But now I need a new challenge to do something completely new for 30 days.  I thought about all the things I wrote before, like writing code every day, doing shoulder mobility drills, etc.  But these are things I kinda-sorta do now; they're not completely new.  It's like setting a goal to floss twice a day instead of once.

I've been feeling dissatisfied with my professional work as of late, and it's made me more mopey, and probably not fun to be around.  I want to be able to focus more on the positive, be grateful for what I have, and be a better person to be around.  There are studies that have shown that just reflecting on what you are grateful for will make you happier and more satisfied with your life.  But I also want to do something beyond just improving my attitude -- I also want to actively work on something that could build into another professional opportunity.

So I can think of two things that will help me do this:
- every day for 30 days, think of and post something I'm grateful for
- every day for 30 days, at the same time, I'll post an idea for something I'd want, or want to build

I'll either post them on G+, which is where short stuff like this will likely be more 'visible', or the blog, if there is an idea that I really need to write about (or talk myself out of.)

So, day 1-  March 16.

What I'm grateful for:

I get time every day after the kidlet goes to bed to work on my "own stuff", writing blog posts, checking facebook, etc.

Idea of the day:

Wind chimes that make the sound like palm trees do in the wind.  I dunno, it sounds dumb, but I like the sound of palm trees when they blow in the wind, but they can be nasty to maintain and get really tall.

Ok, so maybe that's in the "talk myself out of it" category?

The Old Startup Guy

I'm sure many of you spotted this article about the "new guard" versus the "old guard" of Silicon Valley.  The article is uniquely insightful and detailed, a pretty accurate view of what draws and keeps people in Silicon Valley.

As someone who is nearly 35 and "over the hill", I'd like to give my own perspective on the topic.  I feel somewhat knowledgeable on the topic, since I lived and worked in the valley for nearly four years, and I worked at several  startups over my life, and now I work at one of the "old guard" companies named in the article.  I guess I fit the mold pretty well.

I loved working at a startup when I was young.  We wrote code, played video games, had nerf wars, played soccer, had parties together and generally just tried shooting the moon and having good times as a group of friends trying something big.  We worked long hours (we actually got paid by the hour, which when you are 21, was amazingly good pay, and for the company, it was a steal to get developers that cheap)  Those times were perhaps the most fun and memorable times of my life, and I would give nearly anything to do them again.  It all worked out at the time because the pay was really good for living in a house of 7 roommates and eating Domino's pizza.

I imagine this is exactly what Silicon Valley is like today, and this article seems to confirm it.  Trying to make something cool and fun while working / living / partying with smart people, and having one small sliver of a shot at making it really big.  It gives me chills just thinking about it.

But it doesn't last forever.  You eventually either get old, or sick of it, or find someone and settle down and have kids, or really sell the company for a billion dollars, or fail so hard you have to move home, or whatever.  Then what?  You have to pay a mortgage, take kids to soccer practice, work less than 80 hours a week because there are people who want to see you, live in the valley because soma got too expensive, and work at a job that will really be there next week because health insurance ain't free.  And then you're working the "old guard" making routers and measuring email uptime because it means all of those things.  

There's a generation of us "old people" working at those "old guard" companies because risk tolerance is lower and having a family will always come first.  Hell, I'd work at a startup in a heartbeat if it meant I knew I loved what they were doing, it would afford my mortgage, and I could see my kids.  I'm sure a standing army of similar "over the hill" hackers and hustlers working at the old guard companies are in a similar position.  

These "new guard" companies are designed specifically to work as high-risk-high-reward, time-intensive ventures that don't fit the needs of someone with something to lose.  When I kick off my startup -- and I will -- there will be several rules that I will need it to live by to make it viable for me, as someone with something to lose:

• There is a clear separation between work and home life.  I'm all for being good friends with who I work with, but you've got to have time apart to stay sane.
• Some time during the day is going to be for my family, and is non-negotiable.
• The benefits have to work for everyone.  Having unlimited Ramen and Mountain Dew is great but pales in comparison to health insurance.
• If and when I sell, I want to make sure every employee walks away well-off.  None of this "liquidation preferences" bullshit.

Anyways, perhaps it's all just hot air because I haven't gotten off my butt and just done it.  But perhaps these are just the words to my future self.  Good luck, buddy.

A few lessons learned about writing for 30 days

So my personal challenge is almost up, with a month coming up tomorrow (I think I may have a few days left to write to get to 30 full days...) And there are a couple of things I've learned from my daily habit:

• Coming up with a new, interesting idea every day is tough.  There are some days where I want to take a picture of a sandwich, or post a link to an article, or something more fit for a social post somewhere.  But coming up with a lot of thoughtful things to say on a daily basis is hard.
• It's hard to come up with ideas on work days.  Not a whole lot new happens during a long day of the same ol' same ol'.  Plus, fewer free hours in the day to write / take pictures of stuff.
• It takes a long time to write the posts themselves.  It's an hour-plus to write, and if you're strapped for time, sometimes you have to quickly write something out before the end of the day.  Maybe if you don't have to write every day, you can let posts "brew" over a couple of days and get something well-crafted out.
• You can't always write what you really want to say, mostly because it will be public forever.  So I would sometimes start writing furious rants just to stop myself and back off to write something else (except in the case of texting and driving).  Maybe that was therapy in itself?
• Sharing on G+ generated far more traffic than not sharing.  So I would sometimes not share on days I knew it would be really short / boring to spare people from G+ feed spam.
• Motivation is high at the beginning and at the end.  Maybe I had a lot of writing topics ready to go at the beginning -- it's different and new.  And by the end, it was old hat and the light was visible at the end of the tunnel.  But the middle is what required the consistent reminder and daily routine to build up the motivation.

Anyways, I still want to write, and going through this experience has made me want to write consistently.  However, I don't think I could do it every day.  I'd save up my most interesting thoughts and maybe post every couple of days.

I do have several options of things I can do for 30 days once this challenge is over, and I have yet to decide between them:

• Write some code every day.  I'd have to get my dev environment up to speed, but man, I'd love to get some hacking in every day
• Do 100+ shoulder pass-throughs with my PVC every day.  This would greatly help with my terrible shoulder mobility
• Come up with 3-10 ideas every day (even if they're bad).  I had a few previous posts on this that showed my terrible "ideation range"
• Take a photo/video every day.  I certainly don't take enough, and I'd like to leave them all for my kids to see one day
• Meditate / breathe thoughtfully for some amount of time every day.  I had a former boss who did this every day and it certainly helped focus and de-stress, it would be nice to do with all of the stress that I get from work these days (probably worth a post of its own -- maybe tomorrow)

Anyways, I'm digging the challenge of doing something every day for 30 days, now I get why it can have such an impact on your life -- the muscle memory and consistency of doing something every day makes it part of your daily routine.  I'd recommend it for you too, it will make you a better person!

More Silly Extension Ideas

Today, the Chrome web store launched some more monetization options for app/extension developers.  It's a welcome change to allow easier free trials and in-app purchases, which is a good thing if you have something people are willing to pay for.  I have to say it's admirable that they want to make things easier for app/extension developers, but it doesn't exactly help me figure out what to do with my extension.  Should I charge for extra services?  Give a free trial?  Argh.

There's a more difficult hurdle to face as a developer: most users expect apps to be free or extremely cheap, and copycats are easy to create (download the javascript to some other extension, modify it slightly and re-upload as your own); making free knock-offs isn't difficult.  I'm of the mind that any valuable extension or service has to have an offering that is not part of the extension / app itself, but is rather an online service of some sort that is difficult to copy.  The extension itself is just a delivery mechanism.

Anyways, I'm going to try making up some crazy ideas some more, since I wasn't able to find a specific article about startup recruitment from a while ago.  So instead I'll try to make up some more silly, bad ideas:

1. Enhance my user-agent extension so that people can manage all their settings online and have them automatically pre-populate to anyone who installs it in their company / domain.  (and maybe charge for it?)
2. An encryption extension that looks for certain headers from specific websites (that know your personal public key) and encrypts all the traffic between you and the website, on top of ssl.
3. An extension that tracks your web usage and shows you where you went, how much time you spent on different sites, etc.
4. A chrome app that is a glorified text editor where you could easily edit extensions, save them locally, and upload them to the web store (now with programmatic uploads!)

Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much about writing Chrome apps/extensions today because of the post, but at least it's good practice...

Silly ideas

I ran across this article today, which really got me thinking about career choices.  The basic gist of the article, if I can do it justice, is that most people never feel ready to do something daring and audacious (say, starting a business.)  However, the wildly successful people that are billionaires, etc., just go do it even before they feel they are ready.  I'm not sure if it inspires everyone, but I found it particularly enjoyable.

When I first applied to Google, one of my reasons for wanting to go to a big company was that "I wanted to learn what I needed" to start / lead my own business (as if I would learn those things at a big company).  But if this article is true, I already had everything I needed.  Similarly, I have everything I need right now to do it...which is a scary proposition considering I have a family to support.

But why don't I, or others take this advice, and just keep at our drudgery instead of doing something we're passionate about?  Like many others in my situation, one of the mental blocks that we face is having a "good idea."  (I suspect #2 is not having enough funding / too high of a personal burn rate)  Hell, there's nothing like watching Shark Tank to make you feel like you don't have any good ideas.  Talk about being humbled by people that make chocolate bars and velcro pants.

James Altucher recommends writing down 10 ideas per day, even if they're terrible, just to practice generating ideas.  I don't think I could even come up with 3 a day, let alone 10.

So here are my three dumb ideas for the day (I'm sure someone might already do these):

• A stand for phones that keep them upright so they can record video without having to be propped up against something
• A halfway decent HTML5 / web-based video game.  Seriously, can no one do this?  I know so many people who want to do this, but I haven't seen it yet
• A security device that rings your phone when a window/door is opened/broken

Probably all very silly, or done by someone else, but at least it got me thinking...

PVC

I rounded out my gear buying weekend with a PVC pipe for home use.  After checking out both the the 3/4" pipe and 1" pipe, I decided to go with the one inch.  It's much thicker than the way a 'normal' barbell feels, and I can't really hook grip it easily, but the 3/4" inch pipe felt flimsy, almost like it would break.

The amazing thing was how cheap it was: it cost less than $5 for the pipe, but it's something I could literally use every day to improve my mobility and practice form at home.

I have super tight shoulders, which limits my overhead mobility, so I'm thinking if I practice 100+ shoulder pass-throughs every day, I could eventually improve my mobility enough to improve on some of these movements.  I think I may end up doing that as my next 30 day "trial".

Also, over the weekend, I got to taste some Habanero Sculpin IPA, which kind of blew my mind.  It packed some powerful heat, which coupled with a kick of an IPA, made it a challenge.  Interestingly, the spice was manageable, but drinking it sans food was not the best idea.  But it was a fascinating beer.

New Toys!

I got my first set of palm protectors today, and they're going to absolutely save my hands.  I saw that Dick's sporting goods carries the protectors and headed over to check them out.  The rip on my hand is right in the middle of my palm, and is slightly larger than the size of a pencil eraser, which puts it squarely protected by the protectors.  I think if I give the rip one more day to heal, and my shoulders one day to rest, I'll be ready to give 14.2 one more shot and get past 81.

Much to my surprise, Dick's also had a wide array of other crossfit gear: wall balls, jump ropes, foam rollers, bands, and one item that I've been itching to treat myself to for a while:  rings!  I've wanted to get some work in on my muscle ups for a long time, so this is finally a good opportunity.

I'm not exactly sure where I can hang them -- my garage is probably the most likely place.  I'll have to drape them over rafters that have seen better days, so I'm worried that I'd break the wood and bring my garage down on top of me.

There is not a lot of space behind the rings to get a full kip, so I may have to go through getting a full rig before I can really work on my muscle ups.

Humbled Again

So I did 14.2 this morning, and was humbled once again:  I was only able to get 81 reps, which is far short of what I thought I would be able to get.  I didn't even get to the third round.  My right hand ripped while doing the pullups, which may be part of the reason I did not do well.

Not only that, but Jason -- a close competitor -- was able to beat me by 2 reps at 83 (he ripped too, much worse than I did).  So overall it was a pretty crappy day overall.  I want to retest, but my hand is ripped, so I'm debating if I can get some palm protectors and redo it in a day or two.

The overhead squats aren't an issue at all -- I was able to do them all unbroken.  It's definitely the pull-ups that burn you out, especially if doing regular kipping instead of butterfly kipping.  I'm tempted to re-do and pace myself slower and break up the pull-ups into smaller groups.  I really need to work on my butterfly pullups.

Argh.  The open has been far more frustrating than rewarding.  I'm understanding more and more why people don't sign up for it....maybe I need to lower my expectations for myself.

14.2 wow

So the 14.2 open workout is posted, and I'm watching the two beasts duke it out on the YouTube livestream.  It's freaking impressive.

It's an evil workout:  an increasing 95# overhead squat / c2b pullup couplet with fixed 3 minute rounds.  So any time left in each 3 minute round is rest, but the reps go from 10/10 x 2 to 12/12, 14/14, etc.

It's pretty clear that the kicker here is the rest time.  The strategy is either to go super hard on the movements and maximize rest or stay even throughout the movements.  For beast mode athletes, they are definitely going the former, but for us mere mortals, we'll have to go even throughout to not burn out.  Watching the two top athletes do this, the limiting factor looks to be the pullups, where the arms just burn out or you rip.   (320 reps is crazy good)

After being humbled in the first open workout, I'm hoping that I can get through 14.2 with 2.5 rounds, or 116 reps.  I'm going to split up the pullups to make sure I don't burn out.  I'm strong on the overhead squats (regularly squatting over 300 makes 95# look...relieving), so I'm not too worried about those.

Tonight, I'm going to work on my shoulder mobility and try to get the system ready to go for this one...

Pet Peeve

As I live in LA, I spend a lot of time in traffic -- thankfully less than many others.  It's pretty much par for the course for all of us.  When stopped in a parking lot of a boulevard during rush hour, I get a chance to look over and see what other people are doing.  I got to do the same thing when I rode a bus to work every day.  And almost every day, I see someone with their head pointed down towards their lap, texting away while driving.  Presumably they could be surfing the internet or navigating a map or something but you can often recognize the thumb moving to the predetermined keyboard locations at the bottom of the screen.

This drives me absolutely bat shit crazy.  This kills people, and even at best, you're holding up the people behind you and causing worse traffic because the light is green and you're not moving.  I get that checking your messages while all of traffic is stopped for minutes at a time is appealing -- I've certainly felt the draw.  But I'm not talking about quickly checking the messages while stopped.  I've seen people doing 70 and texting with both hands.   Seriously?

(Number 2 on the crazy list is people who hold their phones out away from their heads, talking into it like talking into an ice cream sandwich.)

What I want is an app, device, whatever, that blocks people from texting or using their phones while driving.  Maybe it detects if it's moving quickly and being held in one hand, maybe it's a radar gun thing that I can point at other cars and it shuts down their phone communication or something.  Whatever it is, it's got to save lives.

A simple start might be an app that runs in the background of the phone that disables / slows down SMS or phone calls when it detects its going faster than some speed.  (Parents could force their teenagers to have it installed on their phones.)  But it would not be able to detect if you were a passenger in a car or on a train, and you could still text at low speeds, so it's not perfect.  Maybe if it were able to detect if the phone is held by one hand (not sure if there is a way to detect that)

Perhaps another approach is that the app could detect sound, and if the sound ahead and to the immediate left were louder than the sound to the right and behind, it would sense that you were in the driver's seat and stop texts.  However, you could fool it with loud music, or it would get false-positives even if you weren't driving.  But maybe that would be detectable by very small vibrations you normally get in a car.

Anyways, maybe this is something I'm going to hack on in more detail, because it drives me crazy.

A Different Cause of San Francisco's Housing Problem

There is certainly no shortage of coverage of the ongoing debate in San Francisco, with protests, rising housing prices, and this guy.  They keep it interesting!

Having lived in San Francisco twice before, I know a bit about what is going on.  I don't live there now, and I can't call myself a life-long die-hard San Francsican, so my opinions are probably biased or probably perceived as unimportant compared to those who do/are.  But I have lived there long enough and in enough different places in the city to know a sliver about what's really happening.

First, the common facts:
- Housing prices have skyrocketed in San Francisco, up over 13% in one year.  If you had invested at the very top height of the housing boom in 2008, and sold today, you would have made money
- Rent prices increased by roughly the same amount
- Over the next 25 years, another 150K people are expected to move into the city

This sets up a pretty logical supply-demand problem.  The conventional thinking is that the problem is a short supply of housing coupled with a surge in demand from tech workers who either work at startups in the city or commute by shuttle down to the south bay.  And the prices are rising as a natural economic result.  However, I think it doesn't ask the deeper, and more interesting question: why?

Multiple quotes have hinted that it is very difficult to get new housing in San Francisco -- probably because most current residents don't want massive high rises blocking their view (also sometimes passed off as "don't want it changing the skyline/culture of the city" ).   So the very rich people who own very expensive houses in the city don't want anyone else to come in and "ruin" it -- surprise, surprise.  It's not all that this is wrong, per se, but it's a story that could be true in any city anywhere.  This can be fixed by building more housing units, getting more city permits expedited, working out high rises with NIMBYs, fixing rent control rules, etc.  Typical, every day city-planning problems.

The supply question is pretty straightforward, but the more interesting question, one that illustrates how people behave, is: why is demand surging in San Francisco?  For a slew of these tech workers that work in the South Bay (I used to be one of them!) the prospect of living in the city as opposed to somewhere closer to work is, well, nearly silly:  Commute 2+ hours a day on a cramped bus in some of the worst traffic in the US, get home late at night, pay one of the most outrageous rents in the world (insert New York and Tokyo laughing here), deal with freezing cold weather, lack of reasonable public transportation, chronic homeless problems, crime, and more... why?  Most of these articles just say young people "prefer the culture of city".  As if they were going to museums all weekend.

Now for something completely different.  Let's look at a map.

This is a rough travel route from the city down to Facebook main campus (the leftmost pin).  Google and Apple are the middle and lower-right pins, respectively.  If you draw out a line from each of these pins to the city and spin it around in 360 degrees, the commute could take employees of these companies to almost every city in the bay area (and from Apple, all the way to Garlic Capital of the World.)  Granted, the traffic on some of these routes are worse than others, but you get the point: since these employees could live in any place in the whole bay area, why live in the most expensive, "problematic" one?  San Jose is much closer, why aren't employees flocking there and gentrifying those neighborhoods instead?

There are a couple of hypotheses -- San Francisco:

• Is the only city in the area where you can walk to restaurants and bars, and generally live without a car
• Is the only city in the area where there is a significant population of singles  (Santa Barbara is #1!  It worked for me...)
• Is the only city in the area that is not one gigantic strip mall

Indeed, if you ask any of the young people who live in the Bay Area, the common refrain is "if you're single, live in the city".  And "downtown Palo Alto is 'ok'", maybe because of all the Stanford students.  And therein lies the problem.  Check what rents are like in downtown Palo Alto -- not too different than San Francisco.  Who knew that young single people want to live next to each other?

San Francisco is perceived as the only halfway decent place to live if you are single (and "University Ave is ok, I guess") in that entire radius.  Why isn't San Jose perceived as good for dating, as it is bigger and over a million people call it home?  Because to meet anyone, you have to drive there, and there is actually no "there" to drive to.  Downtown San Jose?  Yeah...no.  It's a lovely place for families, and is a very nice place to settle.

What's the real problem with San Francisco's housing?  San Jose.  Young single people commuting 2+ hours on buses every day are running away from the south bay to the lone island of not-needing-a-car-and-might-actually-meet-someone town.

How do we solve the ongoing housing problems in San Francisco?  One solution is to build a whole bunch of high rises in one of the most seismically active places on Earth, cramming more people onto landfill, and have the same problems in 2 years.  The demand will rise to meet the supply, and those new units will fill up and rent for outrageous prices, and we've just hit refresh on the whole issue.

Instead, the area could design a place for young, single people somewhere else.   It's not like they haven't tried.  (But it's still not the right formula:  you still need a car to get anywhere.)  Make it so they don't need cars, so they can walk to many bars and restaurants, has housing that isn't all tract houses, and live in a place that has things to do for single people without kids.  And isn't freezing in the summer.

Since that takes decades to build, even with the right political will, why not improve the public transportation that takes people to and from the city?  Imagine a train that ran once every 20 minutes, had 3 stops, ran 24/7, and got people to the city in under 30 minutes (and had a stop in the Mission, and in Northbeach)?  There would be a lot more young people living at the stops in the south bay.

I'm sure that my opinions may be lost in the sea of others' opinions on how to fix the problem.  And maybe these ideas aren't unique.  But can't we agree that fixing some of the problems of San Fran's housing might lie in fixing the system that generates the demand, rather than just bailing water?

Delicious Crack Delivered by Children

You know what I'm talking about when you see stuff like this:

Pure. Cut. Cookie Crack.  2+ pounds of saturated fatty goodness, that helps our future leaders learn business skills.  Probably isn't going to do my weight any favors, but I know I'm making the world a better place.

Remember to do your part and support your local Girl Scouts!

Filler Words

I'm finding today is a difficult day to come up with some thoughtful ideas.  I thought I'd just write a stream of consciousness that will, in hindsight 20 years from now, seem insightful.

I spotted an article today about public speaking, and this article described the best thing you can do is practice a presentation before you do it -- like, a lot.  This helps you filter out things like "filler words" ("um").  I'm especially terrible at plying many "ums" in my presentations, since often I'm nervous.  Public speaking is one of my own perceived glaring weaknesses, as it were.

But I've found that many of the presentations that I have to give are often last-minute, built-by-committee fraken-decks that have other people's words all over them.  It's impossible to practice these without time and without the freedom to say what I want to.   If it were entirely my work and I had more than a day to practice, I'm sure I'd be a lot better at it.

Maybe my next 30 days' challenge will be working on my public speaking?

ProductCamp LA

I had the great opportunity to attend Productcamp.la (un-confernece for product managers in LA) today, where we had some strong speakers -- Rich Mironov gave a really spectacular talk (I have a lot to learn).  It was good networking with so many other product managers in the LA area.  Kudos to the organizers to making it happen.

A couple of things that I picked up while at the conference:

• Many, if not most, product managers are "INTJ" on Meyers-Briggs, which is pretty profound.  INTJs make up 1-2% of the entire population.  Cross that by the common requirements for a PM -- eng undergrad, masters degree, experience -- and they're pretty rare.
• Product management can be done well enough, be done really well, and be done brilliantly -- and I need to step up and be brilliant rather than "ok".   And brilliance is earned through experience.
• There are a lot more product managers in west LA than I thought.  There were 200+ of us!
• It's really weird to be around hundreds of product managers.  It's like being in a convention of unicorns.
• Agile.  Scrum.  XP.  Waterfall.  Wagile.   It was a constant drumbeat of "well-established development methodologies" that eventually grated on my soul.   Does all this shit really matter?  Whatever happened to "getting it done fast" and iterating?

Anyways, it was a great experience, and I got to see how so many other PMs do their work.