#KANMF

Swords in the office, what could go wrong?

“#KANMF” entered the MindTouch lexicon last year as an unofficial company motto (along with our “no douchebags” policy):

• Kick
• Ass
• Ninja
• Mother
• Fu…

…you get the idea. MindTouch has operated very lean for quite some time, and has always tried to hire people that help the organization punch above its weight class: those that see the limits on money, time, and resources as a challenge to get the blood pumping. I’ve had the occasional run-in with former technical colleagues that moved on to more established firms (Apple, Google, etc), and the common (paraphrased) refrain is this: “the results may not yet be exposed to the widest audience, but I did the best work of my career when I had to perform like a code ninja - gaining mastery across the entire surface area of the platform”. Point is, if that’s what you are looking for, you probably aren’t going to find it in big tech.

Some of the sales staff ran with the ninja concept and long story short, now we have swords 🙄. As playful as it is, I do have somewhat mixed feelings about these weapons knocking about the office, without at least a demonstration of how dangerous they can be. I’ve trained with, and taught at, Pacific Martial Arts, for many years, with Shindō Musō-ryū as a significant focus during the last several (I’m very much still an amateur with the bokken):

Update 2019-11-13: I had the opportunity to demonstrate Shindo recently, giving it the level of decorum that a martial art deserves: