Potemkin Factories, Hand-Painted Labels, and Just About the Craziest Story You’ll Read Today

Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang is kind-of a famous hacker (in the best sense of the word).

A couple years older than me, he got his PhD in computer architecture here at MIT at just about the time I arrived here (I think we overlapped for a year, but I obviously never met him). A lot of people know about him because he was one of the original XBox hackers — an accomplishment about which he wrote a book, although he had some trouble getting it published because of legal threats from Microsoft. Read enough about him, and you’ll get a sense — he’s a ‘wizard,’ in the tech/geek sense. (*)

Anyway, being the uber-competent engineer that he is, he’s now the lead hardware engineer at a company that’s gearing up to produce the chumby: a hand-held, open-source, hackable, wi-fi enabled electronic thing. It looks pretty cool.

And he’s got a blog! (Required reading, for any self-respecting geek.)

Which brings us to the point of this post: he’s been traveling to China a lot recently, setting up and supervising an overseas production line for the chumby. Now that that process is far enough along, he feels comfortable writing about his experiences — and the posts are incredible. Crazy. Crazy! I’ll outline and index them for you, so you can read along too.

[Note: a lot of these posts aren't responsive for me either, at the moment.   His website has had a few problems today. It's a great series, and he just put it up last night, so: I'm betting that his server is getting hammered. Give it a few hours minutes, and try again.]

• First an intro post from a while ago, about the chumby.
• Then, he visits China to scout locations and contacts with the CEO of his company: Adventures with the Venture Communist.
• He later returned this April to a factory in Shenzhen, to get the production up and running.
• And most recently, a series of posts about his total experience, each one super-titled “Made in China.”
  1. Getting Started
  2. Scale
  3. Feeding the Factory
  4. Dedication
  5. Skill

  The last one’s got some video (insane!) too.

I’m really, really, really serious: if you’re interested at all in politics, trade, engineering, or even just what it’s like when a country with a billion-plus people suddenly undergoes rapid industrialization — read these posts. They’re just beyond belief — my mind is completely blown.

(*) You’ll bump into people like this occasionally around here — they’re like the ultimate combination of hardware and software geek, the kind of guy (or gal) who, when you put them in front of a piece of hardware or a computer, seems to be able to build anything. Huang’s graduate advisor at MIT, Tom Knight, was one of the originals — famous enough (and old-school enough) to get an AI koan written about him (also read the “Sussman attains enlightenment” one — that’s great). And Huang is firmly in the wizard mold, one of those guys who has an insane number of interests (truly a polymath), who carries through a huge number of projects to completion, who’s always curious and exploring… just amazing. I can’t speak highly enough about this sort of personality/type. In most corporate or academic settings, you’d be lucky to meet one person who’s even half a wizard, maybe once a decade. Around here, you seem to run into one or two every year. My office-mate is sort of like this too, but Huang’s on another level altogether.