Hello!

Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.

How many talks did you give in 2012?


Looking at my published archive from 2012, I've got 43 pieces of content in total for that year: 35 PDFs and slide decks, 6 videos, and 2 audio recordings and podcasts.

That said, the number of slide decks and recordings isn't quite the same thing as the number of talks I gave. A single talk can turn into a slide deck plus a video recording plus an audio version, so those 43 items don't map one-to-one to 43 distinct presentations. And plenty of talks never get recorded at all.

2012 was a busy year on the road. I was giving my Multi-Device Web Design & Beyond workshop walking people through the new and different way of doing Web design, all built on the idea that you only need one Web design: a multi-device design. And I was still out there peddling Mobile First to companies who knew they needed to do something with mobile but had no idea what.

So the honest answer: my archive shows 43 items authored in 2012, but I don't have a clean count of unique talks in my writings. If you want the actual recordings and slides, the Presentations section of the site is the place to look.