If you’ve been in the music technology field for any length of time, you may have encountered the visual programming environment called Max. Maybe you’ve wondered what kind of people work on a computer program that doesn’t really seem to do anything?
In this talk David will share the unlikely story of Max’s transformative impact on both people and organizations, starting with his own life and that of his company Cycling ‘74. 25 years ago he was a reluctant entrepreneur with no real goals other than continuing to work on some cool software. Over time, he became more interested in exploring new ways of working, and realized that Max itself was an inspiration for the culture he was seeking as a software developer. Max's design and philosophy has allowed us to work as a fully remote team since the beginning with little need for planning and hierarchy. David will identify some properties common to both software and organizational architecture — many learned through trial and error — that seem to sustain creative flourishing of both people and teams. Some of these include learning to solve less than 100% of the problem, parameterizing interdependence and personal development, and building trust through innovation instead of rules. Finally, David will discuss some limitations of the Max approach and show how they’ve tried to address them in their most recent work related to code generation and export.
IF YOU ARE ATTENDING ONLINE, ALL TALK SESSIONS CAN BE ACCESSED FROM THE MAIN LOBBY:
https://conference.audio.dev
