Lunch With You: Mike Lee

By Matt in Interviews, Systems, Business

Mike Lee makes an impression. Several, actually.

The first: this guy is in an aloha shirt and he could break me in half with his pinkie finger. The subsequent impressions, taken in over Brazilian barbecue for over three hours, make you realize this guy has a lot of big ideas and opinions. So, it was our pleasure to have him and his wife Mary inaugurate our “Lunch With You” series when he visited Honolulu recently.

For those who don’t know, Mike works at Delicious Monster, whose flagship product Delicious Library is a best-selling library management software for OS X. The app allows you to scan in all of your books, movies, music, and video games (using either your iSight camera or a custom barcode reader) and keep them organized, automatically pulling in cover art and a plethora of other data from Amazon. It keeps track of to whom you’ve lent what and is kind of addicting for those crazy about organizing.

We asked Mike a number of questions that we’ll paraphrase his answers to here.

The Delicious Monster team has just begun the Library 2.0 private beta, after about two years of work. Leopard has caused the team a lot of work — nearly every change they make has caused problems and incompatibilities that require bug fixes and adjustments. Mike said, “We spent a year working on what was going to be Delicious Library 2, then delayed it a year after deciding to go Leopard, all the while cramming in features. It’s almost like we skipped 2 and are shipping 3.” He said it’s been frustrating for them. But, such is the nature of building software for an evolving platform, said Mike, and it’s the most difficult part of working at a commercial desktop software company. But it’s not just Apple — all of the cover art and metadata for the software comes from Amazon, making the software’s functionality subject to Amazon’s whims.

We asked some technical questions. Delicious Monster uses Subversion for version control. The team doesn’t do any automated unit or functional testing. Mike’s opinion is that all the testing in the world won’t make your software free of bugs, and there’s just no way to account for things you can’t account for. A serious insight that we definitely concur with and that we see a lot of people missing is the importance of planning for but not implementing the plan for ‘what if’ scenarios. There’s a good chance that those things may never even happen. Citing his boss Wil Shipley, Mike put it well: “If we ever get to the point where we have so many users that this is actually a problem, we will be so rich we can pay someone else to deal with it, while we sip rum on a beach in Tahiti.” Take care of the real problems today, and don’t worry about what’s going to happen if your servers are hit by a flaming tornado filled with sharks during an earthquake, or three hundred people with the same name sign up for your software.

Being coffee shop hounds ourselves, we wanted to know what it was like to work out of one every single day (Delicious Monster works out of Seattle coffee shop Zoka everyday). Mike said it has its ups and downs. There’s no office overhead, it’s cheap, and it’s brought some great publicity. But it doesn’t take long to get sick of the menu, the intrusive atmosphere, and the not really having an office.

Getting back to Delicious Library, Mike admits that the app has its detractors, many of whom ask the obvious question: “What’s the point?” Well, if you don’t get what the point is, then there probably isn’t one for you. But the fact remains that Delicious Library is selling extremely well, meeting the needs of a niche market that includes families, collectors, and, interestingly, Bible scholars, each with lots of different media that needs organizing. In Mike’s opinion he thinks it helps that Library is so well put together and the competition isn’t, but also that their competitors are few and far between.

But while Library is the only thing Delicious Monster is focusing on at the moment, they don’t seem to have any shortage of ideas. What else is the team thinking about? Pinball, human slide-puzzles and Pokémons on the iPhone. We waxed nostalgic for Sonic Spinball. It’s true — there is no great pinball software for the Mac. Delicious Monster obviously has no fear of peripherals if they help get the job done, having developed a barcode scanner to use in place of an iSight for scanning into Delicious Library. The ideas were flying: Network play, of course, and how about some flipper dongles and customizable boards?

But none of it has begun to crystallize yet. Delicious Monster has their hands full with Library and their professed object is keeping it The Best Solution. This idea — complete dedication to a vision and executing it well — kept popping up and telescoping in scale as lunch went on.

If we got one thing out of the conversation, it was that Mike Lee loves to write software. He says it best himself: “I was born a programmer. The rest is just implementation detail.” Whether it’s working without pay in Wil Shipley’s basement designing the application that won multiple Apple Design Awards or developing a poker program with lemurs for face cards for his wife’s birthday (really!), programming is Mike’s creative outlet, and one that he says he can’t seem to turn off. And he wants to tell you about it. His blog and Twitter feed, named exactly what you think they’d be, are the best evidence of his outspokenness.

Which is not to say he lacks other passions. Mike’s email signature pegs him as the “Delicious Monster Majordomo. He’s as likely to be programming beside [the Delicious Monster team] or cooking them dinner. He serves as bodyguard and confidant, jester and enforcer.” He’s in love with lemurs and wants to save Madasgascar. But he first and foremost thinks of himself as a software engineer. We got the impression that he understands the economics of being a productive human being.

When I asked whether he had thought about helping Madagascar directly, making the move from computer scientist to natural scientist, the answer was instantly and unequivocally “No.” He’d obviously thought about this, and immediately compared his approach to work to that of a diesel-electric locomotive. Much as the diesel and electric components of the engine do what they are designed to do and pass on the output of their work to other pieces of the system, Mike wants to do what he’s best at — programming — and offer his resources to the charitable organizations already helping Madagascar.

We talked a lot about charity, actually — Mike was in the middle of a piece he’s just published on his blog with a number of ideas about how to work charity into software development (and everywhere else). Mike thinks working against human nature isn’t just difficult, it’s a bad idea — intelligently leverage the compassion and tendencies of people, and there’s no reason you can’t build a better way to keep spam off blogs or prevent the extinction of a cute ancestor. We think Mike Lee is genuinely interested in applying his skills to have a wider impact on an audience greater than a single piece of software’s immediate user base. It downright gave us some inspiration.

He is, after all, the (self-titled) World’s Toughest Programmer. He said what was on his mind and it’s clear he doesn’t tolerate nonsense. And while the rest of us are too full, you better believe he’s going to finish what’s on his plate. (Literally — we couldn’t possibly finish all that Brazilian barbeque.)

So, Who’s Next?

Would you like us to have Lunch With You? Are you in Honolulu? Will you be soon? Have some good ideas or some insight to share? If we know who you are (or if you think we should), let us know, and we’ll take you out to lunch on us.

Email us if you’re feeling talky.