by Charles Edge | at Minnebar 17
The standard role-playing game has Rangers, Fighters, Clerics, and many other types of characters that can be played. We write a game, or a series of games, that follow a plot. We follow and play as characters, who develop and progress. We throw unknowns at our characters, often randomly generated. The modern trope really only includes a few kinds of these adventures that have evolved slightly - but still resembles the original work done to define the game mechanics from the 1970s. This is true with startups as well. There are missions, visions, and values. Maybe we're building software, but we need the same types of characters, responsible for many of the same things. And just like in a long campaign of any game, sometimes we have to throw out the rule books and just ad lib it. In this session, we're going to look at how our early days in a startup map to character classes, the types of campaigns we may choose to run, and unpack what the difference really is between chaotic and lawful good.
Charles Edge is the CTO of bootstrappers.mn and the CTO/COO of Secret Chest and a former director at Jamf. He holds 35 years of experience as a developer, administrator, network architect, product manager, entrepreneur, and CTO. He is the author of 20+ books and more than 6,000 blog posts on technology, business, and history. Charles also serves on the board of directors for a number of companies and non-profits (including this one), and frequently speaks at conferences like DefCon, BlackHat, LinuxWorld, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and a number of Apple-focused conferences. Charles is also the author of krypted.com and a cofounder/host of the MacAdmins Podcast and The History Of Computing podcast. Personal/technical site, at link.
