Purple Cows and Open-Source Rock Stars

Giles’s career story starts when he left Santa Fe College after his first year. He tried writing screenplays, “but they weren’t good,” and he tried writing music, “which I was better at, but which didn’t pay.” He also temped. Artistic in nature, Giles was drawn to the graphic designers in the companies where he worked and they introduced him to quirky new markup language that was poised to change the world of design—a language called HTML. Giles built his first Web page in 1994, and in 1996 he moved to San Francisco, bringing with him books on Java and Perl, programming languages that provided the foundation of the early Web. He made $30,000 in 1994. In 1996 this jumped to $100,000: The dot-com boom was picking up speed and Giles was in the right place with the right skills at the right time.

At first, things went well for Giles in San Francisco. He enjoyed designing websites and in his free time he became involved in the local DJ scene. But careers have their own sort of momentum, and he soon found himself programming for an investment bank. “I was bored out of my mind,” he recalls, “so I decided to do something bold: I was going to apply to a really interesting start-up.” The day after he submitted his application the start-up went under. The first dot-com crash had begun. “Pretty soon I was the only one of my friends who had a job at all,” he recalled. “I talked to a recruiter about finding something I liked better, and he said I should be thrilled to have a job.”

Giles being Giles, however, he ignored the recruiter, quit his job, and moved back to Santa Fe. He lived in a rented camper on his parents’ land, helping them build a solar-powered house while taking courses at the local community college. He studied painting, voice, piano, and perhaps most importantly, studio engineering, the class that introduced him to aleatoric music: composition using algorithms. It’s here, among the desert landscapes and arts courses, that Giles made a key decision. A career untamed, he realized, can bring you into dangerous territory, such as being bored while writing computer code for an investment bank. He needed a mission to actively guide his career or he would end up trapped again and again. He decided that a good mission for him would somehow combine the artistic and technical sides of his life, but he didn’t know how to make this general idea into a money-making reality, so he went searching for answers. He found what he was looking for in an unlikely pair of books.

“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.¹ As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”² When Giles read Godin’s book, he had an epiphany: For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word.

But this left him with a second question: In the world of computer programming, where does one launch remarkable projects? He found his second answer in a 2005 career guide with a quirky title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job.³ The book was written by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who also dabbles in career advice for software developers. Featured among Fowler’s fifty-two strategies is the idea that the job seeker should leverage the open-source software movement. This movement brings together computer programmers who volunteer their time to build software that’s freely available and modifiable. Fowler argued that this community is well respected and highly visible. If you want to make a name for yourself in software development—the type of name that can help you secure employment—focus your attention on making quality contributions to open-source projects. This is where the people who matter look for talent.

“At this point I basically just put two and two together,” Giles told me. “The synthesis of Purple Cow and My Job Went to India is that the best way to market yourself as a programmer is to create remarkable open-source software. So I did.”

Following Godin’s advice, Giles came up with the idea for Archaeopteryx, his AI-driven music creator. “I don’t think there was anybody else with my combined background,” he said. “Plenty of Ruby programmers love dance music, but I don’t think any of them has sacrificed the same ridiculous number of hours to tweaking breakbeats and synth patches over and over again, releasing white-label records that never made a dime, and studying music theory.” In other words, Giles’s ability to produce a Ruby program that produced real music was unique: If he could pull it off, it would be a purple cow.

Drawing from Fowler’s advice, Giles then decided that the open-source community was the perfect place to introduce this purple cow to the world. In addition to releasing the Archaeopteryx code as open source, he took to the road to spread the word. “I basically took Chad Fowler’s advice way too far and went to speak at almost every user group and conference that I could—at least fifteen in 2008,” Giles recalled. This hybrid Godin/Fowler strategy worked. “I got offers from all over the place,” Giles recalled. “I got to work with stars in my industry, I got approached to write a book on Archaeopteryx, I could charge a lot more money than I used to.” It was, in other words, a strategy that made his mission into a success.