There are many satisfactions to being involved with product and software development. There are also many dissatisfactions. The universe is determined to ship as little code as possible. As many engineers and developers and designers will attest to, shipping comes far too rarely.

However, when you’ve experienced a few shutdown projects, a few shuttered startups, and a few failed features, then the sweetness is all the more sweet when all the elements combine for a big launch. A day like today.

My faux-founder, Otavio and I set out to create the greatest product and technology team in Brazil. It was April last year when we started getting our first few yeses from team members. It grew from two to five, to 15, to now over 25. The goal was always quite simple: change the way people shop online. Make it faster. Make it trustworthy. Make it so easy that they stop shopping anywhere else. And that’s when industries start shifting. A brilliant product can get a rival CEO fired. Can get an entire board of direction reshuffled. That was the goal and today we took the first step towards that with the launch of our new web store. The new Baby.com.br.

I say we, but in reality the team did many of the final preparations without me. I left my day-to-day responsibilities at the company I co-founded in December. I ache in a certain way as I see this product launch as I am just beginning development on a new product at a new startup. I’ve written many times on how heartbreaking it is to leave something that demanded so much of your soul, even if it is what you know is the right thing to do.

I miss the team now and hope they can hear me across continents as I shout from the rooftops,”I’m so proud of you guys! You’ve done it! You shipped! And the tides in the industries we will disrupt have begun changing. I can feel it all the way from up here. You inspire me with your dedication and your product accumen. I miss you and am full, full, full with satisfaction in this, your victory.”

Parabéns meus amigos! Parabéns.

I’m naked now. In a very metaphorical sense, but it’s true. Through the crazy emotional journey of fundraising, I’d slowly started putting on someone else’s clothes. Someone from the establishment, someone with old ideas and blinders, someone who wears parachute shirts and shoes I can quite describe other than uncomfortable.

I was listening to the questions of all those around me and was being consumed by them. I was letting others doubts about my business and my very future wear me. An outfit I’m not used to.

Then I had a call with the usability expert on my team. She’s met face to face with dozens and dozens of our users over the past month and as a result has deep understanding of the business. She had slowly watched me changed my clothes. Looking back, I could feel it too, but it wasn’t as obvious to me.

“That’s the wrong question, McKay.” Stacy said. “We’re not selling information. You can get that anywhere.” She went on to describe a doctrine that will no doubt guide this business over the next phase of its life. And maybe forever. The Stacy Doctrine.

As I heard it I felt the strange outfit begin to fall off and I began to feel exposed. Naked. I was once again fighting an industry worth billions with a vision I had relayed to Stacy but had somehow forgotten. I am not here to ask other people’s questions. I’m here to build something for my users. I’m here to make something and make it so well that my users will feel compelled to say, “Boy! This makes things so much easier.”

Not 3 hours later I came across this article in Fortune about the chairman of Samsung.

“In the late 1960s Samsung officially entered the electronics business. In the early years the company was known for cheap televisions and air conditioners. That all changed in 1995, when its chairman, Kun-Hee Lee, paid a momentous visit to the company’s plant in Gumi, a factory town in south-central Korea. Legend has it that Lee had sent out the company’s newest mobile phones as New Year’s presents and was horrified when word came back that they didn’t work. Later, at Gumi, he made a giant heap of the factory’s entire inventory and had it set on fire.”

May we take the precedent of whatever it is our lives have been about until now and make a big heap of it. May we douse it with the fuel of shock and discouragement and pain and skepticism and light it up. Watch it burn. It doesn’t matter what you’ve made up till now if isn’t what you want it to be. If it doesn’t work or doesn’t inspire.

Screw other people’s questions. Go build something. That’s the Stacy Doctrine. And may we ever live by it.

HTC has introduced what many are laughing at, which is a companion device to a very large phone. A phone that solidly would be considered a “phablet”, a phone and tablet in one. Although I agree that having a little cordless phone device in addition to your “phone” sounds funny, there is something about this general concept that feels correct to me.

A few weeks ago I bought an iPad Mini and it has changed the way I work and browse and read. It’s ULTRA-portable. It makes the full-size iPad look clunky and feel so heavy. The iPad Mini is perfectly sized and is feather light. I have stopped using my phone as much as a result. When I got my first iPad I would constantly think to myself, “I’d rather just be doing this on my iPhone.” The roles have now switched with the iPad Mini.

It works so well at everything, it makes me wish it could take calls. Calls?! If you think people who talk on their Galaxy Notes are ridiculous, wait till you see people holding their iPads to their ears. It’ll never happen. But I do want an option to take calls on the iPad. So what is the solution?

There are certain things that are so natively human that we never question them. I believe that speaking in to an object that you are holding up to your face isn’t one of them. It’s weird, right? We seem cool with the idea of holding our phones, which are getting larger and larger, to our faces for now, but I believe this will change. It has to. It has simply been grandfathered in from another time where the future didn’t exist. But today it does. We don’t have to hold these things on our faces anymore, we just do it because there isn’t a better option yet.

Yet.

HTC has introduced a plausible solution. One that may come across as ridiculous right now, but that is only because it challenges the status quo and is coming from a company very few people respect as an innovator. They have released a companion phone device for their phablet. Their solution looks like a cordless phone. Buttons for dialing, a small screen, and a speaker and receiver.

I don’t think this will be the final solution, but I will say that this idea greatly interests me and solves a problem with device size. Talking on the phone isn’t just another app. It needs to be dealt with in a unique way, different from the other native and app functionalities of our smartphones.

In fact they are even called smartPHONES, even though we email, Facebook, text, and do other things far more frequently that talk on them. The phone is different. And as our devices begin homogenizing, companion devices will become the norm.

My news app of choice, Undrip, is using their hip hop skills to help get a few local businesses affected by Superstorm Sandy get back on their feet. Their video embedded below is awesome! It’s a kind of hommage to those who give their life to the dream. I can’t stop listening to it.

After listening you can also donate to help the cause. I already donated this morning. You should too.

I stumbled in to a “news” story aboutBlackberry this evening that proved that they have learned just about nothing since there very public downfall.

In an interview with a German newspaper just yesterday, said Thorsten Heins, Blackberry’s CEO:

“We have taken the time to build a platform that is future-proof for the next ten years.”

That assumes so much. They are basically over engineering an OS that competes with the existing mobile OSes. The status quo, basically. Also called playing catch up. I think it’s safe to say that their new OS, BB 10, is just as “future-proof”as the company itself. Which is to say, not much.

Smart write up on All Things D this morning about making the most of an advertising-centric online world. Although it hasn’t really changed my views, I’m a big fan of making the most of my situation, and that’s largely what I took away from the article.

“What you can do is actually get value from being tracked — while holding companies to a high standard of responsibility, of course.”

Read the full thing linked in the title.

Every now and again a device gets released, that I buy, that everyone I sit next to on planes or at church or just around want to talk to me about. The iPad Mini has been such a device. As someone who has used an iPad from the first version, up until now I haven’t been a huge fan of them. I like the idea of them, but found that I’d rather just be using my iPhone to do basically everything the iPad could do.

The iPad Mini changed that.

Dan Frommer outlines in the article linked above how he feels the iPad Mini is the real size iPad. The size the iPad should have been the entire time. I’m completely compelled to agree. Where with my iPad I kept wanting to simply do every task on my iPhone, I actually am forgetting to take my phone with me now.

In truth, there has been days that have passed without me even knowing where my phone is, and those that know me can attest to just how crazy that is, but its the truth. The iPad Mini is my main iOS device now. More than my phone. I enjoy it more. It’s more functional. It’s INSANELY light. And I highly, highly recommend it.