Entries from February 2008 ↓

Funny that right after my lottery dream job post I read this is Seth Godin’s blog:

Then, over time, things get soggy. They slow down. Decisions aren’t so black and white any more.

[...]

3. The paper isn’t blank any more. Which means that new decisions often mean overturning old decisions, which means you need to acknowledge that it didn’t used to be as good as it was.

Perhaps the idea of starting anew every quarter isn’t so daft afterall.

What’s your “win the lottery dream job”? If you think “If I won the lottery I’d just go sit on some beach” you’re wrong. Trust me. Being idle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So if money is no object and you have a good amount of money to invest into something what’s your dream job?

For me it’s an expanded version of Startup Weekend.  In case you’ve never heard of it before, Startup Weekend is a project that goes to a city and with the help of an all volunteer staff and the support of some sponsors attempts to take an idea from concept to finished project in a weekend. It draws people from a variety of backgrounds from marketing to design to programming and they together agree on an idea and seek to build the damn thing in just around 48 hours.

I’ve never actually been to one - found out about the D.C. area one after it was over - but it sounds like both a hectic mess and a lot of fun. Now these Startup Weekends haven’t generated the next Google or anything but at least one or two of them have launched sites that are at the very least interesting and somewhat functional.

Given my lottery dream scenario I’d love to hire a team of great people with the goal of cranking out a new product every quarter or so. Actually I’d like to generate a product in around 2 months and then do version 2.0 in the second month and then go on to the next (very possibly) unrelated idea.

In some small ways I’m trying to get into that kind of a routine now. The major difference being that I can’t afford to hire a team of great people. If you’re a brilliant web designer, programmer, marketer or whatever who’s independently wealthy and you’d like to work on such a project let me know. Certainly there’s going to be some people who’s Google stock is vesting soon.

When you’re a programmer sometimes you can be too quick to jump to a programming solution.

I’m working with a partner on a website that’s about parenting and education. The owner of the business has a background in teaching and developed some materials she’s been presenting in workshops. She’s had a site but it was little more than a brochure for the workshops. We’re working to build the website into an important part of the business.

One of the things I recommended to start with was a blog. Blogs are great for building traffic fairly rapidly. Google loves blogs and there’s a whole blogging community to tap into. So I installed Word Press and decided it might be a good idea to run the whole site in Word Press.

Now Word Press isn’t a full blow CMS but it’s capable enough to use as a CMS what’s for now at least a pretty simple site. And for someone who isn’t tech savvy it’ll be nice that she can use Word Press tools to edit the pages.

The only problem was I don’t want the site to look like a blog with a couple pages. I want it to look like a site that has a blog. The main issue being what’s the home page look like. So I start digging into modifying a template to make a Word Press Page the home page and thinking about using .htaccess and mod_rewrite rules when I stumble across the fact that someone else has thought of it.

Current version of Word Press have the capability to set your home page to a Page and put your blog posts under another “Page” which is really just a placeholder in the navigation menus. How cool is that!

And no programming required.

(BTW, I don’t want to reveal the site just yet since none of the new work appears yet. When it’s in place I’ll be sure to mention it here.)

I find it absolutely hilarious that pundits will come up with amazingly complex theories behind an action when a simple explanation is far more likely to be correct.

I’m sure everyone has heard about Microsoft’s semi-hostile takeover bid of Yahoo!. Most of you have also likely heard that some Google lawyer posted a blog about how the merger would be a bad thing and Microsoft was a big nasty monopolistic bully. Old hat. And of course all the bloggers responding with how Google is their own big monopolistic bully (in the online search and advertising realm).

But along comes Scoble to explain to us why we’re all wrong and he knows better. According to Scoble Google doesn’t mind the merger and just want to tie up Microsoft and Yahoo for months of legal wrangling while Google develops the next-big-thing which is mobile.

Now maybe (probably) Scoble is right that MicroHoo! wouldn’t be a bad thing for Google. Maybe Scoble is right that Google want to dominate in mobile. But what I can’t believe is that anyone (even at Google) is smart enough to come up with this complex scenario that Scoble seems to think he’s uncovered.

My guess is that Google does at some level fear a combined MicroHoo! Google’s been eating Yahoo!’s lunch for years and with an injection of cash, talent and ruthless ambition Yahoo! can only become a more effective competitor for Google. And despite Google’s ambitions in mobile and other markets I’m absolutely certain that Google doesn’t want to lose the dominance that they have in the online search and ad game.

I call my blog Solo Programmer and when people ask what I do I say I’m a programmer but lately the work I do isn’t really much what I’d call programming. Actually I have a bunch of real programming project on my plate but today’s work involved installing Word Press and a bunch of plugins, configuring Google analytics and other such tasks. Not really programming and yet something that I can do in large part because of my tech background.

Sure “non programmers” can do all the above. You don’t really need a ton of tech savvy to install Word Press. But “non programmers” do HTML right? Well if you’re writing HTML by hand what you’re doing is pretty close to programming. Certainly once you get into JavaScript or PHP what you’re going is legitimately programming.

I remember once in grad school a Professor saying “In the near future we won’t need programmers at all”. I was momentarily concerned since this was how I planned to make my living. He then proceeded to show how you could tie together some (I think it was) ActiveX components to build a new application. And then if you wanted some specific behavior it’s “just a little code”.

Ignoring the very important idea that someone somewhere needs to be writing these components in the first place, the very combining and writing “just a little code” to glue it together is actually programming. Perhaps not something that you need an advanced degree to accomplish but something beyond the reach of your typical computer user.