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At the ASOT 500 celebration in Buenos Aires last night, trance/progressive superstar Markus Schulz played a brand new track called Rotunda. “Rotunda” is a collaboration between Markus and fellow trance producer Jochen Miller.

With those two guys hooking up, you pretty much knew it was going to be a banger. Sure enough, it is. Markus + Jochen have delivered, big time. The crowd of 10,000 in Buenos Aires ate it up. And I’m eating it up, too. Classic 2011 trance anthem. Huge lead synth, fun little stabs and plucks here and there, and — naturally — a great build and climax.

The juicy part here, though, is the social media angle of this. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, electronic dance music fans were able to watch the creation happen in realtime and help shape what it eventually became.

Fellow artists need to watch and learn. This is how it’s done.

Monday, March 28

Just after the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Markus invites fellow trance producer Jochen Miller over to his Miami-based studio. Something starts to brew.

Ok @jochenmiller, Dinner break. I think we have an anthem brewing in the studio.

March 28, 2011 3:32 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@MarkusSchulz

Markus Schulz

These are two guys at the top of their game. This is going to be good.

Wednesday, March 30

Markus tweets that he’s putting the finishing touches on this “still untitled” track.

Final touches in the studio to this still untitled monster with @jochenmiller.

March 30, 2011 11:36 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@MarkusSchulz

Markus Schulz

That tweet gets automatically reposted over to Markus’ Facebook page. Within minutes, fans start suggesting track titles. Fifteen minutes in, to be precise, a fan named Jeff Williams suggests the name “Rotunda”:

Around that same time, Markus’ team uploads a sneak preview video to YouTube, straight from Markus’ studio:

“Love that” is damn right. I’m with Markus. That quick little stab right at the end of each bar is a great touch. I’m really digging what I hear. And it’s just plain fun to see the guys right there in the lab experiencing their creation while it’s still completely fresh to them, knowing they have a monster on their hands. But back to the story …

Later that night, co-creator Jochen Miller tweets:

Track with @MarkusSchulz is finished! "rotunda" is the titel, and sounds BIG!!

March 30, 2011 1:05 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@jochenmiller

Jochen Miller

Nice! The track was completed in three days … and Markus & Jochen just let the fans name it.

Saturday, April 2

A few days later, down in Buenos Aires, Markus introduces Rotunda to the massive crowd.

A photo posted to Facebook captures the moment.

And several videos pop up on YouTube to send it around the world:

And that, my friends, is how an anthem is born in 2011.

Let’s recap. Two very popular dance music artists collaborate on an incredible new piece of music. The music goes from conception to worldwide distribution in less than one week.

During the course of the track’s creation, tweets are posted to keep in the loop. One of those fans ends up responding with a suggested track title. The artists bless that name and make it official.

Then, we’re treated to a sneak peek of the track straight from the studio. And when the track finally gets played for a massive audience just days later, a photo is taken of the moment that it happened and we’re able to hear the crowd’s reaction even though we are thousands of miles away.

We live in amazing times.

As engineers, when we think about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, we often think about scalability, APIs, etc. But often times it’s fun to just sit back, put the “regular ole user” hat on, and marvel at the powerful experiences that these technologies allow.

And since Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are free services, none of it costs us a dime. Great job to those teams as well. Markus and Jochen are definitely not the only ones crushing it right now.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to put the headphones back on and turn this one up.

While in school at the University of Illinois from 1995-2000, I spent some time working at NCSA. This was just a few short years after Marc Andreessen had worked there, but even by then, the stories about the development of Mosaic were starting to become legend.

His work on Mosaic with Eric Bina changed the world forever, and he’s clearly a brilliant guy, so I’ve always enjoyed hearing his thoughts on things.

His talk with Charlie Rose on the February 19 episode of The Charlie Rose Show is a great one. There are few conversations I enjoy watching more than when these two hook it up. You will, too. Give it a look.

Without fail, if you work at any small software company long enough, you will one day end up in a meeting where someone is introducing new ideas or new tools to “keep Engineering on track.”

“It seems like we’re slipping deadlines a lot lately.  With this tool, we’ll be better able to communicate the current status of Project XYZ and keep that from happening.”

This will undoubtedly have followed weeks of rumblings about how “the Engineering team is talented, but just seems to be a little off track.”

In my experience, when this happens, you can almost always bet that the Engineering team isn’t lacking process, it’s lacking passion.   And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that process can never replace passion.  Never.

This S%!t Is Gonna Be Huge, Man

Small, agile, talented engineering teams can change the world, but it can only happen when they passionately believe that this is in fact what they are doing.

That’s why hackathons are such a beautiful thing to watch.  That’s why startups in their first 6 to 12 months are such a beautiful thing to watch. 

Super-talented engineers often love both, because while some traditional rules of software development get broken, you’re completely engrossed in a blissful state of Flow.  Simply put, you’re passionate about what you’re doing and, because of it, you’re at the top of your game.

Fix The Right Problem

My advice for any Engineering organization that feels like there’s a process breakdown occurring is to investigate whether the real problem is that their engineers simply aren’t passionate about their current projects. Diagnose this incorrectly at your own peril, because introducing new formal processes when passion is low does nothing but bring the failboat into harbor more quickly.

How do you tell the difference? It’s fairly simple. If the general sense is that productivity is too low, and you’re attempting to introduce a process to raise it, you’re solving the wrong problem. On the flip side, if productivity and the rate of activity is so manically high that you need a tool to herd the cats and keep track of it all, you’re probably solving the right problem. Nicely done.

That’s More Like It

If there’s a passion problem, and you fix it, you won’t have an organizational problem with keeping them on task for 8 hours a day, you’ll have a problem of angry significant others asking where your employees are at and why they’re not making it home for dinner like they promised they would.

Passionate engineers won’t bitch about not having mockups for the latest design; they’ll get into Photoshop themselves and hack some up.  They won’t complain about not having completed specs; they’ll write up some user stories themselves and pitch you on them.  They won’t complain about having to write status reports; they’ll be excited and anxious to proactively show you what they’ve completed.

Before you know it, the urgent issue of “needing a better process” to “keep Engineering on track” will melt away, because in this environment your developers will do the extra work to fill the gaps and keep things moving. Count on it.