In 2003 I walked into a building in Wellington, New Zealand, where about a hundred people were trying to finish one of the biggest films ever made. The render farm was a room full of servers with rain dripping through the ceiling into buckets. A single frame of video took hours to compute. Everyone was working late, every night, racing a deadline that was not going to move.
This was Weta Digital. The film was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
My job was data wrangler. Managing sequences of images, backing up files, restoring files when things went wrong, making sure the right data got to the right people at the right time. In the evenings I would stay late and do rotoscope work, which means cutting out characters from their backgrounds frame by frame so the compositors could layer in the visual effects.
It was a very small, tight, focused team. A lot of people working incredibly hard, putting together sometimes thousands of effects shots as we raced towards the deadline. Many people worked many hours into the night. Everyone was proud. Those films, decades later, are still considered some of the greatest ever made. I went on to do a little work on I, Robot with the same group.
That period fused two halves of my brain together. Storytelling and computation.
The rubber duck
I use a technique called rubber duck debugging all the time. The idea is you explain a problem out loud from absolute first principles, as if you were explaining it to someone who has never seen a computer.
What happens is that by forcing yourself to articulate the basics, you build a clean mental structure from the ground up. By the time you reach the point where the problem lives, the solution is often obvious because you have cleared away all the confusion and assumptions.
I do this constantly when I am stuck. I sit back and explain the whole system to myself from scratch.
Another thing I rely on. When something breaks, I do not start from the beginning and try to reproduce it. I find the point where it is broken and walk backwards until I find where it was not broken. Then I move forward again, step by step, until it breaks. Narrows things down very quickly.
I also try not to dismiss potential causes too quickly, even when they seem unlikely. Exploring dead ends forces you to think about a problem differently. Sometimes the dead end is not the answer but the detour shows you something you would have missed.
The builder who got the job
Years ago I was running a web development agency with my business partner. We needed to hire a programmer. We advertised. Got a lot of applicants. Some of them had just graduated with computer science degrees. Sharp, motivated, well-qualified.
I have always believed a simple challenge tells you more than any CV. So on the Friday I would give each applicant the same task. Build me a contact form on the web where I can fill in my details, submit it, and receive the information by email. You have the weekend. Show me what you have got on Monday.
This was twenty-odd years ago, so it was more of a challenge then. But entirely doable.
What we found was that many of the graduates got buried. They had been taught that the correct approach was to write an implementation plan, produce class diagrams, specify the technology stack, document the architecture. They spent the whole weekend writing documents. On Monday they showed up with a beautiful folder of specifications. No working contact form.
One of the applicants was a builder. As in, he built houses. He had broken his arm and decided he wanted to move into software. Over the weekend he taught himself enough PHP and HTML to build a contact form. On Monday it worked. I could fill in my details, press submit, and the email arrived.
We hired the builder.
The graduates were not bad. They were talented. But they had a rigid way of thinking. They could not switch off the process when the situation called for just getting it done. The builder had no baggage. He just solved the problem.
What predicts success
After years of hiring and working with people I have noticed patterns. The people who thrive are flexible. They do not have much ego. They are happy to be proved wrong. They love learning from everyone around them, even people who are technically less experienced. They absorb ideas. They change their thinking when they get new information.
Every time something goes wrong they see it as a challenge. They get excited. They love change and experimentation and risk. They communicate well and bring energy.
I would hire someone like that in a heartbeat over somebody with decades of experience and qualifications who was rigid and defensive and difficult. Skills can be learned. Attitude cannot.
How I tracked down Mark Knopfler
I was a massive Dire Straits fan as a teenager. I learned guitar by watching videos of Mark Knopfler in the 1980s. When Dire Straits came to New Zealand in the early 1990s they were one of the biggest bands in the world. There was no way to meet him through any normal channel.
So I called every hotel in Auckland. Are Dire Straits staying there? Every hotel said no. Except one, which said, I am sorry sir, we cannot release that information.
Bingo.
I went to that hotel. Sat in the lobby for seven hours with my guitar. Mark Knopfler walked past. We chatted. He signed my guitar.
That taught me something I have carried through my entire career. If you want something and it is physically possible, you can find a way. The established routes and rules, those are just obstacles for people who have run out of ideas.
How this shows up in my work now
I have a tendency to say yes to everything. New industry I have never worked in? Brilliant. Problem I have never dealt with? Even better. I love jumping into someone else’s world and seeing it with fresh eyes.
Business owners who have been in their industry for twenty years sometimes cannot see the obvious improvements because they are too close. I get to come in with a fresh pair of eyes and a suite of tools and experience and turn things around for them. That is very exciting to me.
I am a people person. I love helping people and inspiring people and helping their dreams come true. I have been a mentor for years. If I can take a weary business owner who is overloaded and losing the spark for their own company, and give them back their time and their enthusiasm by automating the grind, that is the whole point. I have the tools and experience and knowledge to do it and that makes me very happy.
The lesson I keep coming back to
There is no shortcut to learning. No shortcut to hard work. No shortcut to experience. If you put in everything you have, you will create something you are proud of.
I am proud of the work I did on Lord of the Rings. I am proud of the people I worked with. And when it comes to building AI solutions, the same thing applies. AI makes the ceiling higher. That does not mean the standard should be lower.