Posted by Tim
Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:40:00 GMT
Joe Liemandt keeps me going. He gave a talk for Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders last October, and I still listen to it once every month or two. You can listen to it too.
In it he often returns to the fact that building a business is full of the highest highs and the lowest lows, and there are times when the highs and the lows are mere minutes apart. Amen, amen. Preaching to the choir here.
"So no one has ever built one before, Bell Labs is having trouble doing it, and the CS department [at Stanford] doesn't think your way will work? Good luck."
Of course his company, Trilogy, went on to do some of the largest software deals ever on record. They just kept chuning, even when everyone said they had no chance. Even cooler, Triology no longer get paid when they license their system. Trilogy gets paid a percentage of the value that their system provides back to the client. Clients who see no value pay no money.
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Posted by Tim
Fri, 01 Sep 2006 05:27:00 GMT
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. I heard that a lot growing up. It was my dad's default response when I would complain about an early bed time. So many people who write about personal growth and productivity focus on the power of rising early. By getting a head start on the day, a person gets one or more quiet hours to focus on mentally intensive work before their friends and family are even out of bed. That's how the theory goes, at least.
I am most productive late into the evening. I sit down between 9:00 and 10:00 PM on an average working night, and I usually work until at least 1:00 with only brief biology breaks. Lately I've pushed the bedtime back to an average of 2:00AM, with the worst case being a 4:00AM night in which I was stuffing wedding invitations. Once I start requiring excessive use of the backspace key, I know it is time to go to bed.
Ben Franklin made the "early to bed, early to rise" phrase popular in his Poor Richard's Almanac. This is just a theory, but perhaps technology has antiquated that advice. Remember, Ben didn't have many modern conveniences like electric lights.
I appreciate the early riser argument about how quiet the morning is, but trust me, things are just as quiet at the late extreme of the day. The personal development mavens will shout "you don't understand, you have more mental energy in the morning!" Sure, maybe they do. Even at my day job, I don't reach my peak productivity until 2:00PM. I have tried to get into early rising routines, but eventually I grew tired (literally) of fighting my natural sleep patterns. During those experiments I was dramatically more grumpy and less productive.
Go get a lamp, I have some midnight oil to burn.
Posted in Life, Entrepreneurship | no comments
Posted by Tim
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:11:28 GMT
All of the Rails applications running on our dedicated server have been upgraded to the latest version, so we should be safe from the big security issue that was recently uncovered.
I wanted to get all of the themes that have gone missing from Typo Garden into Proofread. I'm close -- I have all of the screenshots downloaded, and I have stub directories for each missing theme in subversion. I need to chop up the screenshots in a few different ways with a (yet to be written) small python script before I can add the themes into the Proofread repository. That must wait until tomorrow, as it's already 3:00 in the morning, and I still have a day job. :-)
Posted in Code, Entrepreneurship | no comments
Posted by Tim
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 06:26:00 GMT
Most everyone knew a kid growing up that could draw. I mean,
really draw. Draw so well that you felt like a three year old with an extra large, extra blunt crayon in comparison. Jason, my cousin, was that kid for me. He could so naturally draw ninjas, or turtles, or Ninja Turtlesthat I would get frustrated and give up. But while I would give up to play Nintendo, he just kept drawing. And because he kept drawing, he kept getting better.
Some people think I'm a really competent computer programmer. Thanks, Dad! Self deprecation aside, here's my secret: I am unabashedly optimistic, and I love the act and results of programming. I get restless when I can't code for days at a time. When I started an internship back in 2000 my skills included HTML, basic C/C++, and StarCraft. A few months in to the job, they asked if I knew Java. "Sure!" was my optimistic reply. I knew that Java looked a whole lot like the C++ and JavaScript that I already knew... how hard could it be? What couldn't I learn after a few evenings with Java in a Nutshell?
Lesson learned, there's a lot of nuance to the language. This was only my second full blown programming language, and I had a lot of computer science fundamentals left to learn. Ends up that I hadn't even grasped the basic concepts of object oriented programming, even though there was that one chapter that we skimmed on the subject in CS211. You know, when Dr. George didn't take over the lab monitors to keep us from surfing the net. After those few evenings with Java in a Nutshell, I was writing web applications inJava that read like C programs, complete with inline HTML. It was awesome. Since then I've accidentally crashed application servers and brought down networks with my code. Great, great times! I like to thank my network engineers and system administrators often for their forgiving nature.
Six years later, and I have two more languages firmly under my belt, plus a much deeper understanding of Java that will no longer fit in a nutshell. Once again, it was optimism that pushed me toward growth and learning. One weekend in 2001 I decided that Java wasnot sufficiently geeky, and I needed to learn Python. Five years later and I'm still writing Python, although I cringe when I see what I wrote in the beginning. One and a half years ago I learned about Ruby on Rails, and again, over a weekend I was hooked. My first Rails applications had dumb design decisions baked in. So do my most recent Rails applications, but the decisions are getting less dumb all the time.
Right now I am planning an application with a friend. Our feature list is long, and while many of the features are useful, the list of truly required features is short. So why are we adding things like Jabber and IRC integration into our pet project? Because we've never done those things before, and we're optimistic that it'll be cake managing those integrations.
Everything skillful that we do is learned. EVERYTHING. Talent helps, but talent will only get someone so far. Jason wasn't born with a pencil and eraser in hand, and I wasn't born typing at a Commodore 64. Practice and experience mold our abilities, so unless we are willing to flail about and fail as we experience and practice something new we will never progress to the top end of thelearning curve.
Go out there and break something, preferably your pride, on your path of growth. It is natural and necessary.
Posted in Code, Life, Entrepreneurship | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:27:00 GMT
So tonight my reading list ganged up on me to repeat a theme not once but three times.
And so I write a blog post about how I need to do the things that need doing and build the things that need building. I don’t think the point quite got to me. ;-) Actually it did, I’m just all tapped out of creativity for the evening.
Posted in Life, Entrepreneurship | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:35:00 GMT
I’m reading a new book, To Be of Use by Dave Smith, and at the beginning of chapter five is the following quote.
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?...
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogehter inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not…
—Henry David Thoreau
I am devoting a large amount of energy to finding and executing work that matters, work that improves things, and not just work that pays the bills. How much time on your timesheet adds value to yourself, your organization, and others? My current answer: not enough, but please ask again in six months.
I’ll write more about the book once I am finished. In the meantime, what books are you reading?
Posted in Books, Life, Entrepreneurship | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Sat, 03 Jun 2006 19:03:00 GMT
Late into almost every night this week I was working on a client site. I found a few minutes now and then to turn the wrenches on mImash, but most of my time was spent setting up a private collaboration area and a public blog for the Midwest States Conference of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers. Why yes, that is a mouthful. Next week they will start to show off the work to their member unions, so there may be more changes and improvements to come.
I love working on these things, I only hate the tired feeling I get while at my day job. If you’ve read this blog over the last month, you can certainly come to the conclusion that I have ignored the bed time that I thought would be so important a while back. Naps make things bearable, and I’m anxious for the day when I can try my hand at polyphasic sleep for a while.
Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Sat, 13 May 2006 15:41:53 GMT
This article is cross posted from Digital Achievement Incorporated.
I wrote most of an application last night. Sure, it’s a simple application with only three database objects and lots of javascript. It isn’t earth shattering in any way, but it is full of potential for the people who would use the application, and it is full of new technologies and sheer delight for me, the programmer.
From 11:00 PM until 3:30 AM last night I was fueled by passion and power. The passion flowed from knowing that I was solving a problem voiced by an associate at work, and the power flowed from my weapons of choice, TurboGears and Prototype. When powerful tools allow programmers to progress by leaps and bounds on interesting problems it becomes quite hard to get us to step away from the computer. I love that feeling—that’s why I got into this racket in the first place!
People have questioned my obsession with open source and with the newest of open source at that. The proof is in product. Going back in time, had I started writing in Java last night, I bet I would have been asleep by 12:30. I would have stumbled across some problem that I tangled with many times before, each time wondering why I encounter it in the first place. With my flow disrupted, I would have stumbled lazily down to bed.
More will be published about this mystery application soon—for now I must get back to work on it to see what it becomes.
Posted in Code, Entrepreneurship | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Tim
Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:51:00 GMT
I just pushed a beta version of GOODCalc into production. GOODCalc came out of my obsession over numbers, financial numbers in this case. I read about how making extra principal payments on a house can shave YEARS off of the term of the loan, and I wanted to play with different debt payment scenarios. One problem, none of the tools or calculators that I encountered actually allowed enough freedom. Most were mortgage calculators, and I had more than a house payment. I wanted to see a schedule for efficient pay off of my house, my car, and the bit of credit card debt that crept up on me.
The product that you see today is actually the result of a few years of incubation. I first wrote a desktop tool for my own use, and it wasn’t until a few months ago when one of my partners scolded me for not making it public that I began this web version of the same tool. It’s been a learning experience—this is my first TurboGears application. There are still some rough spots, and we will be making improvements in the coming weeks. Please, leave comments here or send me complaints or praise via email.
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Posted in Code, Entrepreneurship, Money
Posted by Tim
Wed, 05 Apr 2006 17:45:00 GMT
I read this great post on "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" the other day, and I wanted to share it with anyone who comes across my blog. I love the idea of "Call Your Ass Out" day, and I would like to see it as a holiday celebrated at the end of every quarter, not just the first quarter of the year. We might need a name change before the day gets a selection of Hallmark cards, but I think the name really serves its purpose, so I’d rather skip the cards all together.
This year has seen great weeks and horrible weeks in terms of my goals. I seem to be really good at sprinting through problems for a week, and then I extract a week’s worth of slacking even if I try to work. The sprints are great, but I need to figure out a way to deal with my tendency to slack afterward.
I have done a lot of good things in the first quarter. Toastmasters is helping me to improve my verbal communication, I’ve started writing bid proposals for programming jobs, I’ve written an application that is just waiting for our new server, and I’m installing that new server tomorrow. May will see me running my first 5K since I was in high school, and the wedding planning moves along. All that stuff is great, but I don’t feel like I’ve fully tapped my potential yet. I have a long way to grow, and I’m excited about raising the bar in this second quarter of 2006.
Posted in Life, Entrepreneurship, Toastmasters
