This photograph came from Corvisa’s office at Schlitz Park in Milwaukee. It was not my desk. The nameplate behind the poster ends in “aves”, and I do not know whose it was. The orange “Champion Of Chili 2012” cup came from an office contest we held every year.
The office mattered more than the objects. Nick Purvis was my team lead there for a long time. He gave me room to try strange tools such as Zippy and Xacto, use them while they were useful, and move on. He also pushed back when I built farther than the problem required. He listened well enough that pushback could go both ways. I later worked with him again at ZipRecruiter for several years. He also drew the illustrations for my wife Emily’s coloring book, the logo for my VR team, and at least one coffee cup.
I remember one submission interface. It was a submit button and a couple of other things, and I built it far past what the problem needed: parallel and fancy where nothing about the load called for it. I wanted it to work a certain way because I thought that way was ideal. Most of my excesses then were like that, about performance or latency, and not scaled to the actual problem. I also encoded state in colors, and picked bad ones; a tester on our own team was colorblind. That was the icing on the cake. I had spent too long building it without communicating enough. The version we kept probably took Nick an hour or two, and we threw mine away.
I sometimes say “close enough to be practical.” I do not know where I picked up the phrase. Nick helped me apply it to software.