(Listen to this interview - 8.57 MB)

This is Arden at DT Geeks again.  I’m here with Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, who has agreed to an interview and is looking just a little bit tired.  So, let’s get started: do you have any interesting short stories of your earlier life, by any chance?

How early?

As early as you want to go.

Well, I guess, you know, there was one time I tripped over a dinosaur, I don’t know.  I’m really old!  Uh… I don’t know, I started programming when I was 12.  My dad actually enrolled me in a college course in Basic, and I’m actually old enough that I started programming on punch cards, on a Cyber NOS system, so that was my big start into computers.  It’s gotten a lot more fun since then, but, yeah I don’t know.

So why exactly did you decide to start programming?  What prompted you to take that route?

It’s a really cool way to sort of play with your mind, to do things entirely in your own head.  It’s always seemed like a game to me, and I’ve always loved it.  I actually wanted a computer all my life, and when I was, you know, 13 or 14 I actually, well I’d just write down programs in long hand on a piece of paper, and I just used to program and program with all these pieces of paper in a notebook.

Did they work?

Uh, I don’t know.  I mean, I guess at the time I thought they would work, but it’s hard to remember.  I don’t think I still have those notebooks, although I have a lot of my early notebooks, but the ones I’m thinking of, I don’t think they still exist.

So have you picked up any strange programming techniques over the years, and are you using any unusual techniques still?

The biggest thing that I’ve changed is that I used to program for speed, sort of how fast and efficient I could make the code to run, and now, I very strongly believe that code should be very beautiful, very maintainable, and I’m actually willing to sacrifice some speed to do that, largely because I’ve found that in the long run that beautiful code doesn’t blow up, it doesn’t get really, really slow because you understand what’s going on, so when you find a problem you can just fix it, instead of wondering “Oh my gosh, what the hell’s going on, I have no idea what this code does, oh I’m afraid to break it, I won’t touch it, whatever.”

Okay, so for, um… some of our readers may not be familiar with what you do.  You program Delicious Library, so could you describe that for us really quick?

Delicious Library is for building a visual card catalog of all your physical stuff, so it’s a lot like the catalog in a library that you find, except this card catalog is your stuff, and we actually draw all the covers, and all the information very visually.  We draw all your books and your CD’s and your DVD’s as if they were sitting on a shelf in a computer, so it’s sort of a very natural, intuitive way to look at your stuff.

So how would Delicious Library scale to a larger operation like, say, a public library?

We’ve had some libraries, like in Singapore, tell use they’re using like 27,000 books in it, and I guess it works reasonably well.  The problem is as the file gets bigger, because right now it’s XML, it takes a long time to save anytime you make a modification, but if you don’t modify it a lot, it’s not so bad.  So I don’t know, I don’t recommend people use it for more than like 2,000 items right now just because I find it sort of pokey, but it’s certainly possible.  One of my good friends has 2300 items in it and I’m constantly testing against his database.  The next version will be very, very, very fast for very large databases, the two-oh version, that is.

So besides speed, are there any features you can tell us about Delicious Library 2?

Yeah, I’m looking to integrate web export into the app itself so that it’s very easy to share your collection.  It was always our intention when we designed this to have it so that it was for, you know, for sharing and for actually, you know, for expressing your personality, and we just kind of ran out of time on version 1 to do everything we wanted, so we decided we were going to cut some features and do some stuff really well.  But version 2 I very much want to come back to that, let people share their collections and loan stuff out to people more easily, you know.  It would be really great if a group of friends could all have their collection on the ‘Net and you could say, “I want to read this book,” and just look around your friends’ book collections and say, “Oh, Bob has it, I’ll just ask him if I can borrow it.” So that’s sort of the intention for version 2.

How does Delicious Library hook into the iSight, and who wrote the code for this, for these features?

Uh, I wrote the code to do barcode scanning with an iSight, so if you have an iSight camera, you can just hold your DVD, or your book, or whatever item that we support, up to the iSight, and it’ll read the barcode off the monitor, the video screen, and look it up on Amazon, download the cover, and all your information is [entered] automatically, so you don’t have to laboriously enter all your items, which is what people like so much about the program.  And I wrote that way back in March of, like, 2003, or 4, I’ve forgotten…

Was it challenging to write?

It was incredibly hard!  I didn’t think I’d be able to do it at first; I just sort of dove in to see what it was like, and it took about a month and a half, all told, which is the longest single part of the project that I worked on.  But the new iSight cameras that are built into G5’s, and the new MacBooks, actually don’t focus.  They have a fixed focal length of about one and a half feet, so if you hold a barcode up to them it’s all blurry.  So I’ve rewritten the entire item from absolute scratch.  It’s a totally different approach, and it can actually de-blur a blurry barcode using some techniques from astronomy.  So I’m really excited about that, and that’s — I’m hoping to get that into the one-six version which is out in a couple weeks, so everybody can use their internal cameras, because I think that’s the way that all machines are going to go, I think that we’re going to have those internal cameras, and it’s going to make it that much more tempting to buy this program when you don’t have to buy this $150 camera to make it fun.

So you founded the Omni Group, correct?

Yes, back in, oh God, ‘91, ‘92.

Was it ‘91, or was it like ‘88?

Uh, there are some reports on the web that it’s like ‘89, but ‘89 is when I started college, uh, or ‘87 is when I started college, sorry… yeah… and I was there at college for a couple years, and I honestly don’t remember when we took the first contract to start using the name “Omni Group,” because all throughout college… The name Omni actually comes from a game that a friend and I were working on, and it was just this big massively-multiplayer game before those things existed, and so I actually got this group of programmers, collected them together, to all work on this game with me in college, and I just called that group, you know, the Omni Group, and then, when I started doing contract work during college, for large companies, I named my little thing the Omni Group, and then I’d bring my friends into it, so… it’s not like when we actually sort of were founded, but we incorporated in ‘93 so that’s sort of the official start, it’s not when we actually started working as Omni Group.

So what about the name Delicious Monster?  Where did it come from, and why did you choose that, instead of something else?

My mother actually had this plant that she’d raised for like the last 15 years, that’s… it’s actually a very common fern, it’s called like a windowleaf fern, and it’s huge.  It grows to be 50 feet tall in the wild and climbs up trees and stuff.  This one, the one I have is about 9 feet tall and about 7 feet in diameter.  It struck me as really funny that this enormous plant, its Latin name is actually Monstera Deliciosa, or Delicious Monster.  And as soon as I found that out, I thought, you know, that’s so cool, I thought oh my God, that’d be such an awesome name for a software company.  So when I found myself looking to found a new company back in March of last year, I said, “Huh, this would be a good name,” so I took it, and it’s been really fun.  But it also expresses sort of the organic nature of software, which is something that I feel very strongly about.  My old company, Omni Group, seems very corporate, very official, which I don’t ever really want it to sound like.  When you hear “Delicious Monster,” I think, I hope that—

It’s like, “What the hell is this?”

Well yeah, but it also says that this is probably a company with a sense of humor about things, and they have a sense of fun, which I think is important, because I really think all software should be fun, no matter how useful it is.  But, also, if you know that Delicious Monster is a plant, then it also says, “This is a software company that believes in organic solutions,” which is very very important to me, that software shouldn’t be sort of cold and clinical; it should be very… it should be like a plant, it should be beautiful, it should be organic, it should feel good.

What do you think about MediaMan?  Are you aware of it?

MediaMan, like the, that’s the Windows thing, right?

That’s — it’s basically a knockoff of Delicious Library, for Windows.

Yeah, I’ve never honestly actually seen it running; I’ve seen a couple screenshots, and it looked from the screenshots like it was very a knockoff of my interface, and that kinda ticks me off because it looks like it’s so close that it actually kind of infringes on copyright.  But I haven’t really spent a lot of time worrying about it, because they’re only on Windows, and it’s not a market I’m really worrying about right now, so… you know, it’s not something… I don’t know, it’s just sort of not worth hassling with right now.  I don’t think they’re doing anything near as well as I am, so there’s no point in messing with them, I guess, right now.

All right, so can we get the cold, hard truth about why you left Omni?

I guess the cold hard truth, I mean… there are probably lots of reasons, and it probably depends on who you ask.  My impression of why I left Omni was because I still wanted Omni to be sort of a small startup, I wanted it to be an engineer-driven organization where the engineers were paramount, they were the most important things the company and, you know, they were compensated the best, they got to drive the ideas, they got to tell everybody else what to do, they were sort of the top of the stack.  And it turned into a much more traditional company, where there was many, many, many layers of management, uh… you know, at one point it got to the point where there were like, 20 poeople at Omni, and like 5 of them were engineers, and I just thought, this is crazy, there’s no reason for there to be 3-to-1 managers to engineers in such a tiny company.  And you know, you’d actually report to like, 4 people above you, and we had this heirarchy that was deeper and thicker than like Google’s, you know, and I’m like, that’s crazy, I mean we’ve got more layers than Google does, and so in March of, I think it was 2004, although honestly I’m having a lot of trouble with years right now because I can’t do math in my head at this point in the conference, but in March of 2004 I think, it all came to a head; I said you know, look, I’d like to start a skunkwork within Omni and take some engineers and just work on projects on my own, without having to have a project manager, without having to have a requirements document, without having to go through marketing, without having to do all this stuff that I thought was antithetical to the the real software process, and that we’d never done to create any of our best-selling products.  All the products that have won the design awards that we have, that sold so well, that made our reputation, those were all created by engineers for people like ourselves, and we didn’t have, you know, all this extra cruft on it.  So I said, “Can I produce skunkworks,” and they said, “We’ll think about it,” and then… there was a worry that the people who weren’t on the skunkworks would feel bad, because they were left out of the cool team, and I’m like, well if this is considered the cool team, why don’t we just make everything like this, because obviously it’s what people want, and then they said, naw, you should just go off on your own and do your own thing.  So my two partners sort of bid me farewell, and I said okay, and 2 weeks later I founded Delicious Monster with Mike Matas, who had also departed on me a couple months before, and 7 months later we had our first product out, November 8th we released it, and it did incredibly well, you know, $54,000 the first day.  (Chuckles)

So, Mike Matas ended up leaving Delicious Monster and getting a job at Apple, so what is your new employee retention strategy, instead of just being a recruiter for Apple, which I’m sure is a compliment to you, right?  But, um, not good for business, right?

Well no, I mean, it didn’t really hurt me that much in terms of business.  The only thing is, you know, it sucks because I really love the give and take of designing with Mike, and so, you know, it’s not much fun without having him around to toss ideas around with me, but in terms of, you know, the business, he had already finished working on two-oh and doing the designs and stuff, so I have a lot of coding ahead of me, you know, to catch up to where he left things.  And we had started spec-ing out another product, and I would probably have to hire somebody to help me with that, because it requires a lot of artwork.  But I’m not really worried about retaining people, that’s the thing, is… you know, if you want to leave, if you think your destiny lies elsewhere, you really shouldn’t be with me.  It’s never been sort of my strategy to say, you know, you have to stay because the worst thing in the world is an employee that doesn’t just LoveLoveLove his job and isn’t just doing it for, you know, the sheer enjoyment of it.  So I’d much rather have people who are like, well you know, maybe my destiny lies at Apple, I’m just like, please go there, and if it’s not, you know, come on back and we’ll talk, and I’m not all like, oh you have betrayed me for the last time!  I don’t really feel that way.  Mike was offered an incredible opportunity to be one of like 9 UI designers in all of Apple.  You know, he gets to work with Steve almost daily, and he’s on that level, he’s good enough to do that.  So I think it’s the best opportunity for him at this time.  I mean, he took an incredible pay cut to go there, an enormous pay cut, like a factor of 5, so, you know, he clearly believes in it, I certainly don’t begrudge him that.  Also, there’s a cute girl at Apple that he started dating, and honestly I think that’s part of it…

That’s probably most of it.

I’m sure he would deny it, he would deny it up and down, but you know, he’s still a man.

Yes, still a man.  Um… you are a proficient blogger, correct?  So, do you have any thoughts on bloggers’ rights, like what rights they should have and what rights they shouldn’t, and whether they should be compared to journalists or not?

Yeah, I mean, I actually… the only advertisement I have on my blog is for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I have a little badge for them.  It actually says, “I support bloggers’ rights.” So for me, it’s a very important thing that we continue to have a free press, and I don’t think a press should be limited to things where it’s actually just physically pressed paper, I think anytime you’re reporting anything, that’s your press, and you should have the same freedoms as we have enjoyed for hundreds of years, and that are currently being taken away from us one by one by the current administration, which I have spoken against many times, and it’s strange because I have a programming blog, but at this point I just feel like the leaders of this country are so corrupt, it’s no longer like, are you a Republican or a Democrat?  It’s kind of like, are you evil, or are you not evil?  And if you’re not evil, then, you know…

Then you’re with Google.

What’s that?

Then you’re with Google.

Yeah, exactly!  Yeah actually, those guys are great.  I actually just talked to them a couple days ago, and I got a tour of Google, and I was just blown away by them.  They are really amazing people.  It’s like a research campus that happens to make a billion dollars a minute, you know, it’s an amazing, amazing thing.

So, do you consider yourself a ladies’ man?

No, no, actually, I consider myself a total dork.  I mean, it’s kind of funny because, you know, I make all these jokes, and I thinks ome peopple take them seriously, but no, I’ve never really thought that I’ve had any particular success.  I mean, I’ve been single for like 7 years, I don’t think that’s really the hallmark of a ladies’ man.

Well, there’s a contention that you have a “rock hard ass...”

That is true, yes, no it’s absolutely rock hard, it’s like a piece of granite.  I’ve got people, I think I’ve got people right here who can attest to it.

And finally, if you could be asked anything, what would it be?  And how would you answer it?

Uh, I guess it would be, what’s the secret to happiness?  Because, you know, that’s an important question.  And the answer is, uh, it’s such a cliche that most people don’t listen to it, which is, do what you love.  And, to be more concrete, because that’s such a sort of useless cliche… lots of people, when they see me, and they see my success with computers, they say, you know, just everyboyd, when they see the car I drive or whatever, they say, “Oh my gosh, I wish I had gone into computers!” And I’m kinda like, you know, sometimes I’ve seen, like, fathers with their wives, and with their 3 kids, and they’re like looking at my car and they’re like, “Dang, I wish I had that,” and I’m like, “Yeah, well, I wish I had a wife and 3 kids,” and I’d trade it in a second.  So it’s sort of like, figure out what you really want, and have that, and then don’t spend a lot of time envying people who have something different than what would really make you happy.  Lots of times I meet people and they’re like, “Oh, I should have gone into computers because then I could be a millionaire,” and I’m like, no, because you’d be miserable in computers, you wouldn’t like it.  You can’t go into it just for the money.  If you love it, you’ll make a lot of money in it, probably, I think.  But if you don’t love it, you won’t make a lot of money, and even if you did, you’d still be unhappy, because it’s not for you.  I’d rather, you know, I’d rather be poor and doing something I love than rich and doing something I hate, and I’m just in a very privileged position where I’ve managed to make some money doing something I completely love.  But I think, you know, everyone I know who’s really had success has had it because they love what they do, because they work on it 24 hours a day, because it’s all they think about, they eat it, they breathe it, they sleep it.  They go to bed at night, they think up what they’re going to do the next day, and they wake up, they do it, it’s… you have to love it, and you know, you could be running a flower shop and you could be hugely successful if you love it that way.

All right, well that’s all the questions we have for you today.  I’d like to thank you for agreeing to this interview, and we look forward to Delicious Library 2.

Thanks!

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EDIT: A few minor corrections.  Thanks Wil.