Since this is a pretty cool opportunity and I almost have something worthwhile to say I decided to pitch a talk about my giving your future self a voice idea. It’s nowhere near the high level of altruism and awesomeness of the other ideas pitched so far, but hey … we can’t all be spectacular right?

Talking into a computer is insanely weird for me, I prefer a crowd – it’s somehow easier, probably because I can feel for a connection, get a few cheap laughs and generally feel how I’m doing and whether I should change the pace around or whatever.

After a few takes I came up with this:

The voice is crappy, the lighting sucks because you can’t see my face well, but if I tried going for a different shot I’d have to clean my room and that just sounds too much like an excuse to avoid studying for exams.

It’s a long shot and I probably won’t be asked to present, but at least I tried

Related articles

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• TEDx speaker auditions to come to Sydney – but no product-hawkers, jargon-junkies, dullards, motivator wannabes or spouters of new-age fluff (mumbrella.com.au)
• TEDx coming to Nagpur (meinewalt.wordpress.com)
• TEDx 2011: Embracing Risk (Live-Blog) (midd-blog.com)

A brewer

Yet.

An article surfaced on HackerNews yesterday arguing that Programming is the new High School Diploma, the main argument being two facts:

1. Computers are everywhere
2. Automation is pushing out middle-tier jobs

The basic idea is really simple – in the not very distant future programming will and should be as important as basic literacy is today. Not just basic computer literacy, but programming in the sense of combining and extending apps in novel ways to fit your problem area.

There are a lot of professions for which automation is almost impossible to imagine – an artist, a firefighter, a winemaker, brewer, baker; the list goes on and on. In fact this was the top voted rebuttal of the whole story. A lot of professions need so much human touch it is inconceivable they would ever need programming.

Someone else can do the coding

And if parts of their jobs do become automated, they still won’t need programming because there will be special people to program special tools for these professions and just show them how they’re used.

Image via Wikipedia

All well and good, but that’s missing the point entirely.

There is no need for an artist, or a baker, or anyone working in meatspace to be a good programmer. They have no need for pointer arithmetic, functional programming, P=NP or knowing javascript and python’s list comprehensions.

They just don’t.

Somebody else can do all that stuff – an actual expert. But how much does a programmer sitting at home, watching code and cat pictures all day, know about the problems of a baker or an artist? Or about fighting fires?

Problem areas

You can’t solve problems you don’t know exist!

Someone with problems who doesn’t know of a whole field of solutions can’t ask for help either.

And so we reach an impasse. On the one hand you have an industry full of people so hungry for problems they create better and better ways to share ever more boring stuff, and on the other hand you have … the other ~70% of the population drowning in real, hard, solvable problems.

While you can check foursquare to see where your friends are, there are firefighters who would (probably?) love nothing more than a real-time map of where all their buddies are in a building. And what are the best and brightest of the world doing? Nothing much, I heard there’s a meme making rounds about something or another.

High school is about broadness and giving pupils a little bit of everything. Some history to understand the problems with large-scale ethnicism, a little bit of biology to help you talk to the doctor, a dash of this and that. All in all, none of us become experts in every field we study in high school, but studying them gives us a better understanding of the world.

A chef

And yet high school deprives us of even the simplest knowledge of a field touching everything in our lives.

To innovate, to even begin to really use this amazing tool, we need to give the general populace the ability to begin the process of automation – that spark of Hey, this is kind of repetitive, I wonder if a computer could do it.

Chances are it could.

In fact, we know a computer can solve any problem we consider solvable … even subsets of those that aren’t solvable. But you first need someone who knows how to actually solve a problem.

That’s why most problems programmers solve are those other programmers have. It’s like an echo chamber out there, nothing but better and quicker ways to make development easier. These are then used to make development even easier and suddenly it’s become impossible to keep up with the world of computing.

Most other industries innovate much more slowly. Most of them can’t solve their own problems and they don’t even realize a solution exists because they don’t realize they have a problem. The greatest handbrake on innovation is a worker with too narrow a worldview to understand their job could be made better.

What you can do?

Because changing how high school works is hard, I have a suggestion for something you can do right now! Only needs three steps too

1. Find a nonprogrammer friend
2. Take them out for a beer
3. Teach them about programming

Give them the bug of automation. Do it with passion. Do it well. When they start looking at the world in terms of Hmm … I wonder how this could be made better, easier, more interesting. They will start coming back with real problems. Problems out of their solution scope, but something you can work on.

And hey, startup opportunity! You now have somebody with a real problem looking for a real solution! Hooray.

Related articles

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• How to Become a Firefighter (answers.com)
• Programmers are fucking lazy (swizec.com)
• Programmers are born not made (swizec.com)
• Who should learn to program? (cdixon.org)

Image via Wikipedia

I was told to come back in a month.

Today.

The experience taught me two things:

1. My teeth are made of magic
2. I am far more afraid of dentists than I had thought

Ever heard of the expression white with fear? Turns out it can actually happen. Just like Tom turns completely white when a train is rushing towards him, so too my face turned white when I was sitting in that damn chair. Nearly fainted too.

I never did like dentists much – seven years since my last appointment after all –  but to nearly faint from fear? Nausea, tunnel vision, white face; the whole shebang! Didn’t even feel that bad, but you know shit’s going down when the dentist removes your glasses “just in case” and puts a wet rag on your forehead.

Lucky for me, I have magical teeth and the tally from all the years of neglect is just:

• one broken filling
• three wisdom teeth with some caries
• inflamed gums

None of that OMG my wisdom teeth are breaking my head and trying to destroy everything!!! I honestly expected much worse, but hey, I’ll take the deal

It also turns out I suck at keeping my mouth open and will be having much fun the next time I visit … something about working on the back teeth and not being able to get the drill completely vertical and maybe not even being able to work on them …

Now my face feels funny from the injection, the optional injection. Can’t imagine the amounts of pain there would be had I not told them that yes, yes I do want that injection thing. You did notice I almost fainted when you were just cleaning my teeth right? WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME THIS!?

Those things take a while to really kick in. She was almost done drilling before I stopped feeling everything and even then just the air blowing over my teeth hurt like hell. Not to even mention the disinfectant.

Another appointment in a few weeks and then I guess I’m good to go for another seven years. Right?

Related articles

• No Dentist Appointment? No Problem. (bellasugar.com)
• Wisdom Teeth Extraction Complications (uclaislamicstudies.com)
• Should my seven-year-old son’s dentist knock him out? (ask.metafilter.com)
• Hiding from the hygienist (kilnviews.wordpress.com)
• Military Dentists (oppathfinder.com)
• weird feelings in my teeth! (ask.metafilter.com)

I. Don’t. Know.

Three simple words. Almost impossible to say. As developers, as entrepreneurs, as men we never want to admit we don’t know. If you don’t know, you are weak and an army of angry huns will come to steal your women, your business and your honor.

When founders don’t know what the hell they’re doing, people leave, investors say “maybe” and users aren’t showing up. Especially if they openly admit they don’t know.

But just as some consider not knowing a sign of weakness, always knowing is definitely a sign of weakness. Selling your best guess as absolute fact works very well in the short term, in fact it works spectacularly well – there’s a reason there are whole books devoted to the practice of eliminating excuses from your speech. Phrases like  I think, in my opinion et cetera.

Island of knowledge

While it’s important to commit to what you say without hedging and ways to weasel out when you’re proven wrong. It’s even more important to admit when you don’t know. In fact all that hedging just defends you from admitting you are wrong and don’t know.

The best thinkers of our species, like Feynman, Einstein and others, are glorified for their ability to embrace what they don’t know. To look ignorance straight in the face and spit in its eye. Most of us cower from such an opportunity, we like nothing more than to stand firmly in the middle of what we know and never looking beyond the horizon lest there be monsters.

Someone once said Every man lives on an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance. The bigger your island, the longer the shore of ignorance.

Most people can’t even comprehend how much they don’t know about a subject, because the more you know about something, the more you understand the intricacies involved. A common saying amongst developers is What the fuck man!? How can That Startup spend so much money on that simple problem, it’s just <x>, <y>, <z> and you’re done. I could do it in a week!

Chances are, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. The hardest problems seem the simplest when given only a cursory glance. So put down the ego for a moment and prove it. Prove that the problem is simple.

You can’t learn what you already know.

Related articles

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• Inspiring and Powerful Science Quotes (iantimberlake.wordpress.com)
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Presenting

Yesterday I gave a talk at Kiberpipa on the awesome #wwwh weekly event. The talk was about this blog and how after that one insanely popular posteveryone suddenly decided I know what I’m doing and should tell others how its done.

Video at bottom

It’s funny how difficult coming up with a talk is when somebody tweets you Hey, you should totally come give a talk about blogging. The problem with these kinds of talk is that you don’t really know what you’ll be trying to say. Every time you’re up there on stage you should have a message – something to convince the audience of.

Just giving a general talk sucks for that. It invariably turns into something a bit like this post – a rambling conglomerate of sentences that sort of go together. Always reminds me of that one line in a movie: You talk a lot, but you don’t say much.

I guess the overall message of my talk was this:

Patience! It takes a lot of patience and sticking-to-it-ness, don’t do if it isn’t inherently fun for you.

Despite all of that I think the talk was a smashing success. Sure I forgot to even mention hats – was supposed to mention changing the blog’s name from Cthulhu and Other Crazies to A Geek With a Hat … oops? In general the talk ended up a bit rambley, even finished with “Wait, there was something else I wanted to say … oh well. Questions?”

That’s not a very strong ending. The originally planned ending was: But hey, at least I’m no longer The Author on hackernews, but Swizec

All in all, rhetoric sucked, body language was attrocious, hands found their way into pockets several times, but people laughed a few times, asked a bunch of questions and I think everyone had fun. This one girl even asked for actual advice and I thank her for thinking I know enough to give advice about this stuff.

The slides for Blogging, hats, stuff are over at Speakerdeck whose embeds don’t work with WordPress … there is also a video.

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Can you save a life?

But that’s harsh, so let me explain why this makes you an idiot. There was an article posted to HN yesterdayabout why people don’t go to the gym, it included a simple motivational technique of paying yourself to go.

After commenting that the only thing it takes to go to the gym every day is to go to the gym every day, I was downvoted to oblivion. But there’s really nothing more to it than that. You can sugar coat it whichever way you want, you can come up with dozens of motivational techniques – in the end, all it takes is going.

Even if you don’t go to the gym every day, you should still make sure to exercise daily. Here’s how you do it:

1. Day 1 – exercise when you wake up
2. Day 2 – exercise when you wake up
3. Day 3 – exercise when you wake up
4. Day 4 – eh you’ve exercised three days in a row, might as well do it again
5. Day N – do the default thing [of exercising]

After a couple of days you have to make a conscius effort not to exercise. The default action is simply to exercise and as humans we love nothing more than not having to make a decision. This is also known as the Seinfeld motivational technique by the way.

Exercise also does a better job of waking you up than coffee, thought I’d mention that.

BUT!

I don’t have time

Richard Branson is one of the busiest humans alive, this is what he has to say about exercising daily:

Tim Ferriss tells this story about how Richard Branson was once asked the single biggest thing most people could do to increase productivity. Due to the fact that he’s one of the busiest men on the planet, every single person in the audience leaned forward with bated breath. His answer? Exercise daily. It improves the quality of your sleep, so you need less. It makes you more emotionally stable, so you’re more motivated. And most importantly, it increases mental clarity, so you’re more focused through-out the day. Branson said that it gives him multiple hours more productivity every day. It’s bull to say you don’t have enough time every day to exercise; if you’re that busy then in fact you don’t have enough time to NOT exercise.

And if you’re anything like the average person who spends a bunch of time commuting, watching television and browsing the online … you have no right to complain about lack of time.

It cuts into family time

A popular complaint in the HN discussion was that exercise cuts into quality time with their families.

Sure … but one day your building will catch fire, or you’ll have a car crash, or _something_. Can you be there for your family when family time involves saving the people you love from death?

No, your flabby office worker muscles won’t cut it and that beer+pizza belly won’t help either. Every man should be able to save his life, and the lives of those he loves! Since this is the 21st century, women should too.

Exercise is hard!

Nobody cares. You’re fat, you’re flabby and you are useless in an emergency. Spending 30 minutes every day doing some basic exercises is nothing compared to the dividends it pays in pretty much all areas of your life.

And if you don’t care about any of that, then do it to make the world a prettier place, one flabby human at a time.

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• Mind, Body, Exercise and Emergence (joyofspa.com)
• Some call it cheating. I call it staying warm and dry (nanapamela.wordpress.com)
• Exercise workshop… (coachcalvert.wordpress.com)
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Image via Wikipedia

The contract was full of useful things like “The floor should support such and such weight” and “We need power outlets there and there and there [or our guitars won't work and you'll have a shitty show]”

In the middle of nowhere was a demand for a bowl of M&M’s backstage, without any brown pieces.

An outlandish request, by flamboyant rockstars stretching their decadence? Not really, just a very good way to make sure the contract was followed to the letter and, you know, they’d survive the show. Find a brown piece – go check over the whole production. You will find something wrong.

With the current startup climate developers are the modern rockstars. We may not get all the groupies and we may be quite well behaved for the most part – but it’s time we started making fun outlandish requests don’t you think?

Designers are usually seen as the extravagant bit of the startup world, getting all the cool toys, working from rooms filled with inspiration and mojo … developers concern themselves much less with these things – give us a good set of monitors, free reign on our computer, some peace and quiet and we’ll be happy.

But when there are so many opportunities out there, you need a brown M&M so you don’t end up wasting even a day at a company that doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

For me, the brown M&M is version control.

If a company isn’t using git or mercurial, I can be pretty certain there will be other problems as well. Everything from a shoddy codebase, to expecting my physical presence before my brain has had a chance to boot in the morning.

Usually the use of old-ish tools also correlates with a corporate feel to the company, which goes directly against my rule of only working with [small] startups. Plus it usually means I won’t be given freedom in choosing the best technology stack for the job, but will have something mandated from above.

I could probably go on, but you can imagine the rest. Use of SVN or, god forbid, nothing, is a deal breaker for me and it’s the symptom I can discover very early in the process … haven’t gone so far as putting it in the contract yet.

Do you use a brown M&M technique to assess potential clients?

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Image via Wikipedia

Good programmers have a special feel, a talent that is difficult to explain and even harder to attain.

A few weeks ago @zidarsk8 came rushing to me “Dude! There’s this guy! I’ve been teaching him coding! He’s already better than me! Hasn’t even heard of a variable before a month ago! It’s so frikkin’ awesome!”

He made me promise to blog about it. Why is it some people just get it? What’s so special about them? Can anybody be taught to program or does it really take a special breed to become even a competent programmer, let alone a good one?

I remember tutoring a high school kid about a year ago. About to fail his programming class (CE high school, we have those), he came running to me. In a month I was to teach him everything I know, or at least enough to pass the class.

Come end of the month and he knew everything about loops, variable assignment, even understood that functions are packets of code that can do stuff. My parting words to his father were “Yeah, he knows everything. Just needs a bit of practice to get it.”

I doubt he ever passed the class. Or if he did it was the teacher’s mercy … and that teacher isn’t very merciful from what I remember of her in my high school times.

But this isn’t just because I’m a bad teacher – others came to me after that one kid on his recommendation and I got a “Thank you! I bloody passed! yay!” email from all of them – there are people who simply aren’t programmers. Never will be programmers. Not even mediocre ones.

The non-programming sheep

Jeff Atwood wrote about Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goatsin 2006 where he mentions a study that claims to have found a test to predict future programming ability.

The test is really simple:

a = 5
b = 20
a = b

What are a and be now?

And some more questions like that. Only 44% of the students formed a consistent mental model of assignment – even a wrong one. The rest failed or didn’t answer the questions.

Worse still, after a semester of learning to program, the numbers were the same. Only 44% of the students understood how assignment works.

Some people just dont get it. Apparently.

But I think there’s an even simpler test ->

Passion.

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes when you give an impressionable young mind (anybody deciding to learn to code, age is irrelevant) two tools and a problem, they will use the two tools to create four more tools. Then they will get on the internets and find some more tools … soon they have twenty tools and what was the problem you wanted me to solve again?

That’s passion!

Pure unadulterated passion for programming. When you can be fascinated, even excited, about this stuff without a need to solve a problem. Hell, even if you are solving a problem that you know is a meaningless exercise … that’s where greatness lies.

It doesn’t matter what age you started coding at – many studies have shown experience is not a predictor of quality in our world – what matters is that you have a passion for this stuff.

Because if you’ve got the passion, then you probably have everything else you need as well.

Related articles

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• Today a programmer was born. And you are my mother. (news.ycombinator.com)

Image by m.gifford via Flickr

What’s so special about a day off, you might think, I have like two every week! Or if you’re more like me, you’re thinking Psh! Dude, I get a day off almost every month.

This was different – I had a day off from me.

None of my little rituals. No exercise in the morning. Not a single cup of tea. No jotting down random-ish actions into Daytum. No tweeting. No instagraming. No marking down every bite into myfitnesspal. No time trackers. No email. Nothing.

Even wrote the 750words at almost midnight.

For a whole day I completely threw away every little thing I do day after day that doesn’t bring a rush of oxytocin there and then. Yes, I will continue doing all those things today, no, none of it is particularly useful, yes, they all tickle the nerd inside me.

I took one more step. I didn’t worry about the pile of email I’d return to. The day’s lull in my data, or the delay in stuff I’m working on.

A day like there’s no tomorrow! Carpe Diem is fine and all, but dear god we all take it so seriously. When did we collectively forget to enjoy ourselves? That Carpe Diem wasn’t [just] about working day and night to get the upper hand on your competition …

It felt great and against all expectations, my life is not a barren wasteland today.

I didn’t devolve into a fumbling beast, all my good [and bad] habits are still there. I’m still posting my daily blog. Still tweeting like mad. And still dutifully recording all the useless data about my life. I will even do some work despite Jan 2nd being a public holiday.

If you didn’t do anything even remotely like this yesterday – shame on you! You’re an even bigger nutcase than I am!

Give it a try tomorrow, I dare you.

Related articles

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My longboard

Today has been such an epically clumsy day – knocking over everything I touch, nearly killing random people in the street and myself in the process – that I just had to share with everyone. Reading this might give you a good chuckle at my expense

Let’s start at the beginning then, shall we?

The day started out as any other day would. I woke up, looked at the internet, exercised, had a shower, ate some breakfast … pretty normal stuff right there.

Then I had a friend come over and I somehow managed to apply my knee to her ankle in what looked like an extremely painful manner. Judging from her shriek and holding her leg like the best football star in the champion’s league.

On my way to class I nearly tripped over an unwitting pedestrian. But hey, these things happen sometimes, people don’t look where they’re going and traveling on a longboard doesn’t make a lot of noise while still being quite fast for a sidewalk. Plus people don’t really expect to meet a guy traveling on a longboard when it’s below zero outside … I think.

Then at a stoplight I nearly tripped over another pedestrian. She was just sort of standing there and I wasn’t very efficient with my breaking and I think she got a bit spooked when I suddenly ran past her as I jumped off my longboard, narrowly avoiding killing her.

Got overtaken by a classmate on a bike and he offered to pull me to class to make the whole affair much quicker. I agreed … but it took me five tries to get a decent grip on his backpack.

In the process I nearly killed another pedestrian.

Actually, two pedestrians, they were suddenly in my way and I awkwardly jumped off the longboard so it sort off got between their legs and they’re quite lucky neither of them accidentally stepped on it because that would be a pretty nasty fall.

A hundred meters after this incident there was a car idly parked over the sidewalk – and when I say parked, I mean there was a guy chatting on the phone while lazily manuevering a big SUV into his garage thing.

Image via Wikipedia

Had to jump off the longboard. Nearly killed another pedestrian who was just waiting there for the car to move.

Not ten minutes later we approached a stoplight with great speed and I couldn’t decide what to do. Should I jump off? But we’re going too fast for me to run. Should I just brake? But I’m not stable enough at this speed for driving with one foot … and if I just wait until I lose speed I’ll end up a hundred meters beyond the crossroads.

So I did the stupidest thing possible – kept hanging on to the backpack and trying to break like that. Ended up nearly taking the guy over his handlebars. Lost my footing on the longboard and before I knew it I was standing in the middle of a busy crossroads picking up the damn thing from the ground.

Luckily nobody ran me over.

Not sure how many pedestrians I nearly killed on my way home from class, but at one point I nearly smashed into the side of a car who didn’t see me crossing the road. Not even a hint of trying to stop, was just plain going and I had to jump off the longboard at the last minute with about a meter to spare.

Then I went to an event at the Cyberpipe, again with a longboard. At this point I seriously stopped counting the number of pedestrians magically winding up in my way and almost ending up killed. It’s all just a blur, indistinctive people always winding up riiiiiight where I want to go.

As if by magic!

An even more interesting thing happened on my way back home. I was passing a group of pedestrians and another group suddenly appeared out of nowhere so people took up almost the entire sidewalk. Somehow managed to swerve around everyone and just as I was about to propel myself forward I suddenly lost balance and try to catch my footing.

Longboarding

Sure enough, to catch my footing I stepped on the longboard and shot it from underneath me with great speed. Didn’t fall but did have to run after the damn thing. Just when I almost caught it, the longboard went off the sidewalk and into the street.

Ran after it, but there was a bus and … hey, it’s going to come out the other end right!? It did come out the other end, or rather somewhat to the side and juuuust as I was about to pick it up, it approached a car.

And the light turned green. The driver not noticing anything started off and drove right over the front-left side of my longboard, shooting it up into the air about a meter and right in my fucking leg.

The longboard then bounced off my bone and under the bus again narrowly missing being run over by a very huge tyre.

Not counting another guy who nearly ran me over because he didn’t see my crossing the street, the rest of the trip home was rather uneventful.

Should I be happy I’m alive?

Related articles

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A traffic spike

On Thursday I published my most popular post to date Why programmers work at night. After writing I was certain it wasn’t that interesting, sure it might be HN frontpage worthy – it never got there – but other than that I felt it wasn’t a very informative post, just musings of a hacker who has always loved the night-time.

The internets had other plans. Some guy posted it on reddit about half an hour after I published and for the next 30 or so hours it was at the top of /r/programming. Even showing up on the main frontpage briefly according to people on Twitter, I wouldn’t know, my reddit karma is 4.

As is the trend when extraordinary traffic happens on a personal site, I will now brag about share the stats.

Analytics for the last four days:

• 167,939 visits
• 157,707 uniques
• 188,707 pageviews

The peak day was Friday and saw just over 89k visitors. Because gAnalytics offers that real-time thingy, I can also say that the peak traffic I saw was about 600 concurrent visitors and for the first five or so hours it was up on reddit, the mean was something like 400 concurrent users.

30 day analytics

If you’re so awesome this doesn’t sound like a lot – my usual monthly traffic is around 30k visitors. We are talking about four days here.

There was also a lot of social madness:

• 1,714 points on reddit (2,866 upvotes,  1,152 downvotes)
• 40 upvotes on HN, no frontpage, just people submitting the article over the four days
• 627 G+
• 2,877 tweets
• 550+ tweets mentioning me next to the link (hard to measure since search API only returns up to 1500 results)
• 288 new followers on twitter … I should probably take the time to follow some back
• unknown amount of facebook likes, because I never quite got around to setting up the widget or Insights properly
• 475 comments on reddit
• 173 comments on my blog
• some emails directly to me
• three or four people looking for a freelancer
• somebody even translated the post to Russian

How all of this happened? I honestly haven’t a clue, there are tens if not hundreds of posts on this blog more deserving of such infamy, but I guess people like a good pat on the back and an easy “Yeah totally. I can totally agree with that!”.

The best bit of feedback came not from programmers, all of them were just “Yeah me too!” or “You’re an idiot!”, nope, the best were their wives and people who have to live with programmers claiming that now they can finally understand their werewolf programmer and how it thinks. Makes me feel I accomplished something with the post

Oh and the most surprising thing here? The post was 900 words long! Should be a death sentence on the intarwebs, but I guess I made good enough points early on so people still wanted to share. My fancy mixpanel analytics says about 42%of readers made it through all the twenty-two paragraphs.

Paragraph funnel

Broken down for referrers:

• 46% people from G+ finished reading (plus.url.google.com)
• 45% people from twitter (t.co)
• 43% people from mobile facebook (m.facebook.com)
• 41% people from facebook (www.facebook.com)
• 39% people from reddit (www.reddit.com)

An interesting note here, this list is ordered in exactly the inverse of amount of people referred. Reddit drove the most traffic, but it also drove the shittiest traffic, while G+ brought the least, but the most people finished reading.

Although I think the days of that analytic might be numbered, mixpanel will get fed up with me and I won’t be able to afford the service

Mixpanel datapoints

Edit: fixed the facebook widget, it reports 7k likes.

Related articles

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• A Web Marketer’s Guide to Reddit (distilled.net)
• Linking a user’s reddit account with my site with out storing their reddit password (stackoverflow.com)
• Reddit did 1.8 BILLION page views in the last 30 days, with 28m unique visitors (thenextweb.com)
• Top 10 Tips to Tweet your way to 1000′s of Followers (socialmaximizer.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Productivity is a big thing in my part of the universe. Everyone thinks they’ve cracked the secret for turning time into gold. Modern day alchemists, the lot of us.

This gives us a pervasive culture of 20-somethings busting their backs to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their day. Sleep, sex, health and culture be damned! If you condense your whole working life into five years of a startup you’ll be rich didn’t you know? Then everything will be alright!

I have this deeply seated hunch that it won’t be alright. You’ll never be a 20-something again. Ever seen a top athlete when they hit 35? They can barely walk, if they’re lucky they get to train a bunch of 20-somethings, but more often than not they just sort of wither away and nobody hears of them again.

You’re doing that to your brain.

But with mental tasks productivity doesn’t increase linearly with time worked. Every hour spent working hard is a tax on the next hour you want to spend working hard. And so on until you can spend hours, even days, working without achieving.

Remember the quote “You speak a lot, but you don’t say much”? Same goes for working a lot.

A couple weeks ago an article titled If you’re busy, you’re doing something wrong floated around the internets. It was about a study comparing the crème de la crème of violinists at an elite school in Germany with those that are just the crème.

Think of it like comparing Senna and Schumacher. Newton and Feyman. Even Turing and Torvalds.

Image via Wikipedia

The study found that despite putting in the same amount of measurable work (hours spent) those at the very top report being significantly less busy than those who are merely near the top. They also report having heaps of free time and generally having a rather easygoing lifestyle.

And yet, they significantly outperform those who are constantly busy and under pressure.

With this in mind I started looking for ways of fighting being busy. The first thing I noticed was that under crunch time Itend to do a little bit of everything every day. Two hours on this project, three hours of school and so on.

Makes me feel super productive! Moving forward on every project every day. How much better than that can you get?

But the reality is that context switching presented significant overhead and while I felt productive, I was actually just wearing myself out and producing ever worse amounts of crap.

So for the past few weeks I’ve only been working on a single project every day. Some days are reserved for school, some are reserved for freelancing and so on. This way I can go about my weeks in a pretty relaxed manner, even managing to have a decent social life, while still getting everything done!

It’s amazing. I heartily suggest you try it.

But this is all just talk. I don’t have anything other than anecdotal evidence to support my findings, so next week I am starting a four week one-man study trying to find the link between mental agility and being busy. I want cold hard numbers supporting this hypothesis.

If you want to help with the study to get a better sample, I’m all ears for volunteers

Related articles

• How long does it take us to context switch? (rsastories.wordpress.com)
• Higgs under fire for questioning welfare rates (cbc.ca)
• Here’s How Much Your Dingy Office Is Hurting Productivity (businessinsider.com)
• Are any alchemist still alive (wiki.answers.com)

My cat

I mean, I’ve seen her avoid eating for several days simply to extort getting tastier food.

This time though it was serious – we took her to a vet. Turns out she nearly died and even now we won’t know if she’s going to pull through until Friday (tomorrow).

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to compare what it’s like visiting a veterinary with a sick pet and what it’s like for a sick human to visit a regular doctor.

A tale of two doctors

The vet was very busy. They had an emergency surgery going on, there was a dog that needed a long procedure done and we ended up waiting for half an hour before the vet could give the kitty a proper examination.

When we got in, through profuse apologies over our half an hour wait, he immediately started explaining possible reasons for the cat’s weight loss and explained in detail which tests will be performed. The cat was then sedated, blood was taken and he immediately took it to another room to perform bloodwork.

Something about checking kidney, liver and pancreas function. While we were waiting he took on some other pets, but kept coming to check back on us every five minutes or so while the bloodwork was being done – presumably by a machine.

The whole thing took about twenty minutes and showed a pretty grim picture. There was a fair chance Kitty had aids because her white cell count was practically zero and it looked like her liver might be completely fried. We were shown graphs and carefully explained what they meant.

After the aids test came back negative an assistant shaved the cat’s tummy and the vet performed ultrasound. I got to see my cat’s innards and even though I couldn’t really tell what was going on the vet explained it pretty well – not only giving me an aloof explanation and symptoms, but carefully explained the reasoning behind everything he said.

Save for picking apart words, I couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but the fact he explained everything was very reassuring. Made it look like he wasn’t just pulling things out of his arse.

Cat has some sort of bacterial infection of the liver and now we have to take her back every day for shots, feed her a carefully selected diet and tomorrow we’ll know if she’s making a recovery and will be able to eat her meds as pills.

Looks good so far, she’s started eating pretty well. That’s a good sign I think.

Oh and the special diet, the medicine we have to give her – all provided by the vet, he even lent us a kitty box so we can transport her to and fro easier since we’ve lent ours to my gran. The whole visit was over with in about two hours.

And the vet spent another five minutes at the end to profusely apologize about the half an hour wait.

Compare that to my last brush with healthcare.

A few years ago I got really sick. The kind of sick where a proud doctor-disliking 20-something crawls out of his bedroom one day and asks his mother to take him to the doctor.

Geeky cat

When we got there it wasn’t particularly busy, but we were first reprimanded that we dared come when my personal doctor wasn’t working and are forcing somebody else to work. Imagine that! And we didn’t even have an appointment or anything, how dare we!?

I had such a high fever I wasn’t really processing everything, but the doctor said it looks like I might have something weird so I should probably get some bloodwork done.

They sent me to a whole other part of the building, where I had to wait in another waiting room until somebody could draw my blood. While waiting I got really lightheaded and nearly collapsed into the blood letting chair. I think a couple of nurses actually jumped up and caught me so I didn’t fall to the ground.

Eventually I made my way back down to the original doctor and waited in the waiting room.

When it was finally my turn again i was told that I have some sort of viral angina, which is odd since angina’s are usually bacterial infections. But whatever.

I was told not to leave home for at least a month since one of the symptoms is swelling of internal organs and any physical exertion could rupture my spleen … I think with a ruptured spleen you bleed out in a couple of minutes?

Nevertheless, I was given antibiotics, because maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a viral angina after all, or it might be both types of angina at once.

What?

This meant a trip to the pharmacy before going home as well …

The whole thing lasted something like four hours, I visited several different doctors – luckily in the same general building – and was eventually told that the simple act of walking around could kill me.

Public vs. private?

But that’s public medicine for you.

This probably isn’t really a comparison between vets and human doctors, but a comparison between private and public medicine, which really makes me wish I could afford private medicine and that if I do in fact start affording private medicine, that doesn’t mean I have to keep giving god knows how much money to public medicine.

Related articles

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• I’ve been sick…. But now I’m all better! (lillij.wordpress.com)
• One third of pets may be overweight, say vets (money.marksandspencer.com)

Image via Wikipedia

In fact, a couple of hours passed since you started working. You didn’t notice. The code is beyond any level you think yourself capable of achieving and when you try to understand how it works … it doesn’t really  make sense. But it works, passes all the tests, is beautiful and elegant. Feeding yourself might be a good idea as well.

The Zone happened to me a lot more when I was younger. There’s something about being 12 years old and creating what you believe to be an operating system that destroys any and all distractions. They simply don’t exist. In those days a comet could have landed on my head and although dead, I wouldn’t have been distracted.

Now I have the internet, a bunch of stuff on my mind and nobody to remind me I should eat and sleep – getting in The Zone is harder. And when I was little I thought two weeks of coding was a sprint, now anything more than a single night feels like a marathon … because I get more done, I think.

For the past couple of months I’ve done a lot to figure out how I can get in The Zone better and I think music is a big part of it. Choosing just the perfect music for the perfect time is hard, but doable.

Another important bit is that when I find it very very difficult to focus, I must go somewhere where there are a lot of distractions. Counter-intuitive, I know, but it works. I either blast three songs at once, or go to a coffee shop.

Coffee shops are awesome. Something about everyone walking around, having conversations, music blasting out of the speakers and a nice cup of tea combined with a comfy chair really works wonders for my concentration. Maybe because my brain is so taxed that it simply has to focus just to function?

The interesting bit is that my taste of music when coding changes a lot more than normally. It’s also very different from the music I usually listen to in that same day.

Lately my favourite has been Mozart and, of all things, Tchaikovsky … how the Nutcracker makes for good coding music is incomprehensible, but there you go, it does. Beethoven is also a good choice, especially the more dramatic pumping symphonies.

At other times I prefer something witha  bit more bass. Skrillex has worked particularly well for a while, then there’s a Tetris remix playlist I made on Spotify that does wonders for my productivity. About a hundred versions of the same freaking song and it’s just awesome.

All things considered, the only thing that really matters for getting in the zone is that my environment not be silent and distraction free. My brain simply can’t handle that …

What kind of music do you listen to when working? Spotify gives me this unlimited jukebox, but I need to know what to look for.

Related articles

• Music Review: New York Philharmonic With Jeffrey Kahane – Review (nytimes.com)
• Facebook’s Music Partners Spotify, Rdio, Mog hit Music HTML Code (ziggytek.com)
• Spotify Playlists: Reliving My Past (solitaryhorizons.com)

Stephen King (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Yesterday someone mentioned on twitter that it’s amazing how I write a blogpost every day, especially considering the quality of my posts. Leaving aside for a moment considerations that this might have been an epic case of sarcasm … writing a post every day isn’t that difficult anyway.

When you think about it, everyone probably writes a blogpost’s worth of words every day.

1. Many people tweet about 20 times a day – that’s roughly 140 words right there. Enough for a daily tumblr blogpost thing
2. Those using facebook probably write about  5 status updates a day – 50 words right there?
3. And you probably write email as well. This gives you at least 300 words a day.
4. Hang out on skype or IRC? Doubtlessly at least 200 words a day right there as well.

Considering those numbers, it’s safe to say the average internet citizen writes 500 to 1000 or even 1500 words every single day. In my experience the sweet spot for blogs is ~600 words.

This means that each and every one of you writes a blog post or two every day. Why aren’t you publishing this anywhere?

Statistics aside, writing is mostly about practice. I would love nothing more than claim writing is an inherent talent and make myself feel super special – but I can’t. It’s just practice, practice and when you think you’re just about done, some more practice.

The part that isn’t practice is the discipline to plomp your arse down and write be it rain or snow, sunshine or a cat begging to be fed. Staring at a blank page is always a little daunting, but once you actually get going your mind will usually take care of the rest and keep you going.

It helps if you can type too … knowledge of at least one human language doesn’t hurt either.

Doing the daily 750 words has helped me immensely with the part of plomping my arse down and writing. My problem has always been that I’m sort of good with keeping a train of thought going – much to the surprise of anyone who’s ever talked to me in person – and delivering in a digestible sometimes even entertaining form. I’m lucky that my writing rarely makes people vomit.

After 750words gave me an incentive to write roughly three pages of text every day, and assured me that it really really doesn’t matter what I write – silencing my inner critic so to say – everything got much simpler. Combined with the daily blogpost my baseline for writing every day is probably around 1400 words every single day. And that’s before all the twitter and email!

Writing incentives!

Quite a bit of words

Actually, now that I think about it … why am I writing so much and not working on the next big novel, like I’ve wanted to since I was 10? There’s a whole competition going on right now (NaNoWriMo) about getting people to write 1666 words every day to produce a novel in a month. Looks like I’m producing a novel-length wall of text every month and a half …

But anyway, if you want to start writing something every day, and I heartily suggest that you do, there are two easy steps to take: write and write. It’s that simple.

If you want also to show anyone what you’ve written, I suggest giving On Writing, by Stephen King a read. Awesome book that will fix up your style in no time. Really helped iron out all the “look at me, I’m a writer and this is significant” bullshit out of the way I write.

Related articles

• Things That Changed in November for NaNoWriMo (chyrondave.wordpress.com)
• How NaNoWriMo Could Change Your Writing Life: A Success Story by Lexus Luke (eulana.com)
• Things You Only Hear During NaNoWriMo (chyrondave.wordpress.com)

Driving a car over the internets

Twitter is kind of cool like that, you ask if there’s any way to sneak into a sold out event happening the next day, somebody says they don’t need their ticket and then does everything needed to get the organizer to change the ticket. Thanks @freeeky for being awesome like that!

I manage to get into the event and two things happened – I couldn’t for the life of me connect to the wi-fi, and I was seated in the back back row so was mostly looking at the cameraman’s head.

Nontheless, it was a kickass event! Really happy I managed to attend.

I mostly remember the brilliant talk by Jure Aleksejev – he was the only person there without something specific to show. He had only a message and the flawless rhetoric delivery of someone who is really really good at rhetoric. You can see about five minutes of his talk in my bootleg crappy video, but it should give you some idea of how cool he was to listen to.

The message was basically that Slovenia is a country doing stupid things. We think we’ll be able to fix our economy and become awesome by emulating the large western empires, except we forget we aren’t actually a large country and should therefore pay attention to creating wealth instead of simply shuffling it around.

Another brilliant talk was by Luka Manjolovič, if for naught else than he drove a car over the internets. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, a live demo right there on stage. Through the internets! That’s guts right there. Oh and it worked too.

All the other talks were pretty awesome as well.

Jure Brečko deserves a special shout out for being epic enough to give us a candid charming presentation full of natural charm. You can’t fake something like that. Plus he invented a cheap and effective way to do some important farm stuff I won’t even pretend to understand, a full five hours before deadline! Score!

I hate to be a sourpuss, but one presentation stuck out for being … simply bad. I don’t know if it was nerves, or she didn’t prepare well, but that was not TED-level presenting there. Not going to name names, just going to say that it made me giggle when she said with special pride that against what her childhood friend said, she did not end up a garbage collector, nope, she’s a graduate sociologist!

Yep.

On a more positive note. Burekwood was a brilliant cartoon. Kudos to all the 12 year olds for making it, charming story. The perfect way to finish off the TED talks. Can’t find the video of burekwood right now, but hopefully the official videos will be available in no time.

PS: I wish I had some good pics to show, but I don’t

Related articles

• TEDx 2011: Embracing Risk (Live-Blog) (midd-blog.com)
• TEDxYouth : Play, Learn, Build, Share. (willsmath.wordpress.com)
• tedx youth (chaikadai.wordpress.com)
• I’m In Love With Ljubljana (wanderingearl.com)

Image by konishiroku_ via Flickr

This is why I only work with startups.

Yes, I’ve worked with nonstartups before, I no longer want to; enough of that nonsense. Nonstartups are just inherently annoying and horrible to work with, rather than filling me with a sense of pride those projects always make me feel feel like I just sold my body to the ugliest hairyest guy on the block (not that I’ve done this before, I’m guessing)

So what are the top few reasons I love working with startups?

1. Working directly with calling-the-shots people

Having a direct contact to people calling the shots is very important for me. It allows me to get a sense for what they actually want, rather than just what words are coming out of their mouth. This way I can focus my efforst on what really matters when it matters – sometimes it’s just better to Get It Working than doing it right.

In a big corporation orders trickle down through a chain, getting reimagined and reinterpreted on every step and when they finally get to you, there’s only a sense of what you were told to do and all sense of what matters is lost.

2. Impact

Directly tied to the sense of context, is having an impact in the company. When somebody is just starting out with their product, you’re helping to shape their vision, you can give good feedback and make use of your experience – in a sense you’re helping somebody achieve their dream and that’s a Great Feeling ™.

Working as an emotionless engineer, a faceless cog who just gets his part done in the big machine … well I’m sure you can imagine how that doesn’t even begin to compare.

3. The fast pace

Image by aginorz via Flickr

A great thing of a small team is the fast pace everything moves at. Since you’re talking directly to those in charge and everyone shares the vision at least a bit (otherwise why work for this startup?) everything moves quickly. An idea is pushed into the system and a couple of days later it can be implemented and tested.

Conversely when working with an established organization, somebody gets an idea, there is a meeting for those responsible of the creative vision shaping, then a meeting between a representative of the leader class and a representative of the implementation class. Then the implementation class has a meeting of their own. By the time you start working on something months might have passed and even the original idea-giver has probably already lost passion.

4. Interesting work

Image via Wikipedia

The work at startups is usually more interesting as well. Might be because I enjoy working with new technologies and startups are likelier to take a risk with new technology. Or maybe it’s just because I like working on products helping actual people rather than faceless hypothetical entities.

A pain point working for established companies is that you often edn up working on internal tools aimed at internal tools aimed at internal people for internal purposes. Sometimes they never even get pushed into production because some boss up high was fired and the new one must assert his rule.

5. No politics

I haven’t personally had to deal with a lot of politics, but I’ve talked to people working in government all their lives – some times it feels like the sole reason they even go to work is to deal with the other people working there.

You know, instead of doing their job.

6. Self-organization

What I love about small teams comes directly from the fact there are no people whose sole purpose in life is looking after you. Because everyone in a small team is a focused professional a sense of trust is built; people no longer feel like they have to check up on everythign everyone does, you can just give the team some loosely defined orders and they’ll figure it out.

Image via Wikipedia

Startups in general care more about results than how you actually do something. If you can make a good case for why you chose to do something they way you chose to do it, and if it works, nobody really cares.

In a corporation with many layers of management it becomes much more important for managers to feel useful and so they get int he way. This is also a self-fullfiling prophecy since all the good people leave and in the end you actually _need_ tiger management.

7. Simpler money on clearer terms

Wasn’t sure if I should include this at first, but it’s kind of important.

When it comes to money, big organizations and government-like entities are always convoluted, take forever to pay up and it never goes smoothly. Probably stems from the fact that everyone involved has their cushy job, gets paid a fixed amount of money on the same date every month and they simply have no empathy for the poor freelancer trying to make a living client to client.

I mean, obviously, why should it be a problem to deliver a project quickly and then wait a month to get paid? And what do you mean you’re annoyed when it takes us two weeks to process the paperwork because that one guy is on vacation?

Almost no matter how much you charge these people it always feels like you aren’t being paid enough to deal with their bullshit.

In a startup there’s none of that. Everyone involved is much more down to earth and respects the feeling of urgency when it comes to money. I like that.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, working for startups is more enjoyable and personal, more interesting on a technical level and generally free of that feeling like you’re trying to run with an open parachute strapped to your back.

Anyone working with big corps care to disagree?

Related articles

• How to keep your startup employees (holykaw.alltop.com)
• 4 Questions to Ask Startups Before Pitching (freelanceswitch.com)
• When Good People Work on Bad Startups (davidcummings.org)
• “Build something people want” is not enough (avichal.wordpress.com)
• Looking To Hire Top Talent For Your Startup? Here Are Five Things You Should Know. (techcrunch.com)
• How to know when to leave your startup (venturebeat.com)

Image by simply.jessi via Flickr

Of course, the last time I was there I was in high school and somebody, probably mum, simply told me when and where to go and that was that. I may even have been on some sort of reoccuring pattern and the dentist told me when to come next time or something. Don’t really remember.

Since I’m now a bit older this means an appropriate dentist isn’t even in the same building anymore. Luckily the new building is across the street.

So I go there and immediately have to make a decision. This thing is like a huge repository of stuff … think of it like github. You are greeted with a big sign essentially saying “Some interesting projects this way. There are some that other way as well. Oh and some are upstairs”

Picked the Dentist project and walked through a door.

The project consisted of roughly two modules. There was a big Waiting Room module, which I think doubles as a homegrown community forum, an RTG module – might be just a single executable. There was also a module looking more like a collection of executables, called Dentists.

Naturally there was no documentation. Well, I’m lying, of course there was some documentaiton. A document listed all the executables in this project and there was a document suggesting I should have a running OS before I attempt to use an executable … something about things being pricey if I don’t.

You look at these executables and nothing makes sense.

Every executable is described only by its name. Other than that the only information was one executable advertising itself as just having moved to a different location, presumably within the same project, and another saying I should not under any circumstances try to execute it first.

Image by &TheBitGoesOn via Flickr

In a sense this was the worst open source project I ever attempted to use. There was no indication of a project owner or anyone I could contact in case I had any questions. The community forum also looked particularly dead … there was one member online but I think he was idling and probably wouldn’t answer my questions even if I asked.

There were some more executables around the corner, but nothing that could really explain what’s going on here or what the entry point for the project is. Where to start picking it apart and figuring out how to use this thing.

Oh and I also found some random piece of documentation that said all executables have a latency of roughly a month or two. Although I’m not certain how this is useful if you can’t even run them in the first place … maybe they run as a server and you have to somehow issue a request?

All in all a really baffling and confusing experience. In the end I just left. Think I need to find someone with experience using this project or some sort of tutorial …

Image via Wikipedia

He ties the advice with his experience of picking up cute women in public situations. The basic premise is just do it. But I think he’s wrong about girls.

The rest of this post is completely my personal experience as a geek and a nerd who finds public situations to be draining and just plain difficult, but does it anyway. Your mileage may vary.

Donald  says his revelation came when he suddenly realized that his “game” of standing around at bars, waiting for women to start talking to him wasn’t working at all. Here’s the thing though, if you go to a bar and just sort of stand around … girls will come talk to you. In fact this will happen more than once a night.

Especially if you look like you’re having fun on your own and are totally content with yourself. I think it irks them that there is this guy who isn’t paying attention to their “come talk to me” vibes. So they come talk to you instead.

Further on Donald lists three traits guys think they need to get girls:

Be a great dancer (tech corollary: slick demo/pitch)

Surround yourself with a coterie of other attractive women (tech corollary: a coterie of other investors or “cool kids”)

Have charm like Hugh Grant, with a face like Jude Law (tech corollary: Have charm like Hugh Grant, with a face like Jude Law)

Honestly, you don’t need to know how to dance. If you just go out there and dance like nobody’s watching. Girls will come dance with you. Tried and proven. You don’t even have to know what you’re doing, you just have to be comfortable with yourself.

Surrounding yourself with girls, unfortunately, does not work at all. I’m often out with a group of female friends and, without fault, on those nights not a single girl comes talk to me. They usually just assume I’m taken or otherwise reserved for the night.

Don’t do that.

Being charming like Hugh Grant or sexy like Jude Law definitely helps with being a heart-throb, but girls look for average (evolution etc.). You know how hotties look intimidating to you and like you could never get them since they’re way out of your league? Yeah, that’s how girls feel about Jude Law.

Not a good strategy at all. Just be charming enough not to step on too many toes and remember to smile. It works wonders … especially once you cross a line or ten. Smiling and being nice about it smooths everything over.

Donald also says that getting girls’ numbers is apparently Hard Business ™:

I didn’t get the first phone number I asked for, nor the second. In fact, the first number probably came somewhere between tries five and ten. But with each rejection, beliefs #1 and #2 became less false. I also become much more comfortable at getting a conversation rolling. Mastery through repetition.

I don’t know about you, but I have so far gotten every single phone number I actually asked for. Turns out people find it really really difficult to turn down polite requests. If you ask for something nicely, you will get it almost without fault.

Just be nice, don’t look creepy and never ask for a number right off the cuff. Chances are the girl won’t think twice about giving it to you. Why would she? Here’s a nice guy making a polite request, she has no reason to turn you down. Especially if you promise to call her about something friendly … had a cool conversation about something she’s good at? Get her number in case you ever need an expert on hand.

Works every time.

But it’s very very important that you actually ask. Being a geek and a nerd I usually forget this part. Hell, I’ve had people chasing after me because I will just wander off in the middle of a cool conversation without asking for a phone number. It’s unfortunate when that happens with a hottie (and it does happen, except they don’t chase after you but stand there baffled and confused).

Mostly the whole thing is really easy. Relax, talk like you’re talking to a long lost friend, give them a way to help you, be nice and avoid being generic like it’s the plague.

PS: before you think I’m super successful with the ladies, I’m not, I usually end up friendzoning them because I forget that they might like me. There were even occasions where I had a girl in my room and the thought she might like me never even crossed my mind.

PPS: the standing around minding your own business play works so well girls will sometimes ask you for your number.

Related articles

• What being hopelessly single taught me about pitching tech Celebs (geekwire.com)
• Being Wrong (katiebman.wordpress.com)
• The Best Pickup Line Ever. (tbseblog.com)

Puts you to bed nicely

Waging war with sleep is very tiring business and I’ve been doing it pretty much as long as I can remember. My daily 750words are littered with battle reports, my twitter stream gets constantly barraged with updates from the war effort and I think it’s pretty safe to say that I may have tried more different things than most people to stave off the foe.

Some things I’ve tried so far:

• drinking tea like it was water
• eating caffeine pills before going to bed
• drinking energy drinks by the gallon
• phone alarms
• computer alarms that force me to get out of bed to turn them off
• cluster alarms – even five in 20 minute intervals
• meditation (polyphasic sleep of sorts?)
• going to bed early

Nothing works.

No matter how hard I try to sync my circadian rhythms with something even remotely appropriate by society’s standards I will eventually always slip back into my habit of going to bed at 3am and waking up at 9am at the earliest.

Sometimes it drifts even farther and it becomes practically impossible to wake up before 11am … and no, going to bed early doesn’t help; I just don’t fall asleep and why waste the time just lying in bed like that?

Shiny graphs and analytics

But! I think I may finally have found a solution – an iPhone app that’s a bit smart about handling sleep.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep Cycle is the best alarm clock I have ever used. Not only do I get to snuggle with my iphone when I’m sleeping, it also tracks my movements over night to figure out when is the best time to give waking me up a shot.

Plus there are statistics of how I’m sleeping. Scoar!

And it actually works even for heavy sleeprs living in their own timezone like myself. Even going to bed at 5am and trying to be up by 6am works. Ever tried waking up after an hour of sleep? It’s practically impossible.

Some might think it a bit strange to sleep with an iphone in their bed, but I’ve been doing that forever anyway – otherwise there’s no chance of hearing the alarm.

But not all is perfect.

Super polite when it wakes you up

What often ends up happening is that I will wake up when the alarm sounds (it’s a veyr polite alarm too, all it takes to snooze is smacking it a bit), then be unable to crawl out of bed and eventually I just fall back asleep for another hour or two.

But I’m sure I’ll figure that one out eventually … trying really really hard to actually go to bed at sensible hours might work. Of course there is a website for that called sleepyti.me.

That is, if  I can get myself to even fall asleep before 2am.

Related articles

• Bedtime Calculator (presurfer.blogspot.com)
• Choosing the right sleep schedule to maximize time and keep you healthy (lemikegao.com)
• Be Smart About Sleep (everydayhealth.com)
• Sleep Stages (everydayhealth.com)

First postcard

Since then not much has changed, the stock image postcards appeared in1848 as part of some sort of advertising. The modern postcard was born around 1870 when Camp Conlie started offering stock postcards with photos of the place to send home as a memory.

tl;dr -> postme.me is making postcards cool again

And that pretty much cemented the fate of the postcard. For the past 140 years they have mostly been seen as a way to send a picture of where you were for vacation back home to family or friends. The most variance happens in the form of holiday greeting cards, sometimes you’ll see a postcard with a cheesy joke as well … I think I’ve seen all 10 already. And they’re the kind of joke your dad finds funny.

That’s it. That is a five billion dollar industry. Or so I’ve heard … either way, something as lame as that is big business.

How nobody has gone and poked in this hive before is beyond belief.

Then suddenly, in early 2011, disruptors start popping up. Suddenly everyone thinks you should be able to send postcards electronically and easily. Just take a photo with your iphone or something, click a few buttons, and voila, some hapless victim gets a nice postcard.

Now you can go on vacation and send back home what you actually see. A beautiful picture, filtered to the 70′s, and everybody is happy. Sincerely even got a 3 million dollar investment last week for doing just that – letting people send boring postcards more easily. There’s also picplum, which lets people mail gorgeously printed photos and was funded by YC this summer.

Boring.

A huge 140 year old industry and the best disruption we can come up with is making it marginally easier to use? What the hell is wrong with everyone!?

There is a whole generation of people coming out of college and into the working world right now who have grown up with the internet. A generation of people who don’t really care about holiday greetings or sending memories of their travels to family.

But we share so many pictures every freaking day. Imgur is booming right now, it’s the 4chan for the everyman and it is absolutely brimming with silly pictures … often seasonal and very meaningful pictures.

When my friend had a birthday two weeks ago she didn’t get a single greeting card. She got ten silly pictures on facebook and somebody even made her a custom rage comic. That’s right, a rage comic just to wish her a happy birthday.

But that comic will be gone in the millions of other pictures within months. Or maybe she downloaded it and it will be gone in 5 years when her hard drive fails. Perhaps 10 years if she’s really careful with backups. (not to mention the thousands other pictures vying for the same sliver of attention on that hard drive)

What  if instead she got that rage comic as a postcard, delivered to her address in all its glory, ready to be pinned on a wall?

I think it would be much awesomer.

What about Christmas? I haven’t gotten or sent a christmas card in so long I can hardly remember the tradition existing. But every year I see hundreds of funny pictures on the topic of Christmas donning the internets.

I think it would be superb if some of those made it onto postcards to my friends.

When I started postme.me I didn’t have a vision, I just wanted to make something fun. But I think there is an underlying reason why everyone likes the idea so much, young people don’t care about boring, we want fun postcards.

Related articles

• Postcards From The Edge (firstchoice.co.uk)
• Postcard Posers – February (blogs.ancestry.com)
• I sent the “man with a restless spirit” a postcard (gemakarolina.wordpress.com)
• Create & Send A Real Postcard With Your Phone Using Postcard On The Run (makeuseof.com)
• Vintage Halloween: Haunted Postcards from the 1910s (brainpickings.org)

Image by libraryman via Flickr

A quick note for everyone who can grow a beard or at least a little bit of fluff on their face … if you’re a girl please oh please disregard this post even if you can grow something … it’s a note that Beardvember is starting and today is the last day you have to shave!

Then you have a valid excuse not to shave for a whole month!

Nagging girlfriends and wives be damned, Beardvember is a time for us dudes to celebrate how awesome we are!

For anyone not familiar with the beardvember/noshember movement, here is a choice quote explaining it in detail:

It is our mission to unify and beautify men through the common objective of obtaining a full beard throughout the month of November.

For one month, we shall let our facial hair grow as it was intended to. It is not a contest, but a celebration of the privilege we have received. A membership to this brotherhood of men is a commitment to excellence in the field of beard growing.

On October 31st, we engage in the sacred Shaveabration ritual. For the month after that, no razors will touch our faces, only our magnificent hairs.

Modern society tries to neuter us with a constant barrage of images of shaved, womanly men. For one month, real men shall band together in defiance of the unnatural social obligation of routine shaving. Some females, brainwashed by anti-male mass media, will tell you they do not like beards. These are not real women. There are only two types of women: women who love men with beards and lesbians. Never succumb to devious female tactics to make you shave. We are here to support you. Our strength lies in our solidarity.

So what can you do to further the cause? Most importantly, wear your beard proudly. Tell all of your friends. Put up posters around your city or campus. Share this site or give it a Digg up. Join the Facebook group. Tell your dad. Tell your sons. Together, we shall overcome beardlessness.

No Shave, No Vember.

Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. – Leviticus 19:27

Some of you might have heard of a fake movement called Movember. Do not heed that movement! They are heathens and are trying to convince you to shave in november  and keep a moustache. A well kept, well groomed moustache!

That is not what Beardvember is for! Celebrate your masculinity dude! (also you probably look ridiculous with a ‘stache)

And a note for all of us who can’t grow a really good beard

Remember, shaving is manual labor.

Related articles

• Why does God love beards? (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• Jake Gyllenhall Debuts an Even Bigger Beard – Sorta Sexy or Shave It Now? (popsugar.com)
• Canada rugby’s Adam Kleeberger fundraises for Chch (3news.co.nz)
• Man wins weird beard gong for Pirates of the Caribbean Davy Jones tribute (mirror.co.uk)
• How To Shave Your Pubic Area For Men (mademan.com)

It was a simple deal: Swizec would make a cake for me and I would make a cake for him. After many many not so subtle hints I got exactly what I wanted.

He wanted this in a cake form –>

this: a möbius gear

Ignoring the gears I was eager to make the complicated cake, how hard could it be?

I’ve heard of möbius architecture so it wasn’t like I was the first person making a 3D mobius strip able to stand on its own. A quick google search and there it was: a nice picture of a 3D model. Yay, I could actually do this!

Möbius arhitecture

It looked simple enough at first, just cut a hole in cake dough, then cut it in half and bend it a little – voila done! But then I started thinking and soon realised you can’t just bend a cake. The cake dough is not a bendy material; it is actually very brittle and sensitive and not cooperative at all! And what would happen tho the fill if the layers were vertical and not horizontal and how the heck do you cut a cake like that? Nope, the layers have to be horizontal. And there was my first big problem – the cake layers were not simple shapes anymore.

First sketch

3D modeling to the rescue!

Just looking at the pretty picture of möbius arhitecture didn’t tell me how to cut. I had to figure that bit out on my own. Since I’m too lazy to do things by hand I did it on a computer.

After some trial and error and a lot of clumsy modeling things started making sense. It turns out a 3D möbius structure is just two möbius strips intertwined or a square making half a rotation along a circular path.

One of the two strips making the cake

Rotated squares

A fat cake

All I needed to do now was to cut the virtual cake in layers.

And the layers look weiiiiird ... like deformed toilet seats

Now that I knew what the layers would look like all I could think was “I wish I could 3d print cake!”

The cakeday

I was making a yummy chocolate cake with sour cherries in the middle! So even if it turned out horribly deformed it would still be tasty, just look at the ingredients!

The tasty ingredients

It all started pretty normal: heating, mixing, cooling, etc. and then came the time to cut the bisquit, the moment I did not look forward to. With the help of a ruler, a compass and colorful pencils I soon had a cutting template.

This is not normal, but on math it is

And there I was: a sharp knife in my right and a paper template in my left, ready to make a mess.

That was easy!

And it got messy fast, the bisquit is very crumbly. Not my favourite material at all!

First layer

It was during the process of cutting the first layer when I had the what-the-hell-am-i-even-doing moment. The first layer looked like a giant crooked eye and it almost fell apart when i moved it. And it wasn’t getting any better.

Am I making a giant nut cake?

Nearly gave up at this stage

The chocolate fill was almost liquid, the cherries decided it was time to run away, the cake did not look like a mobius cake at all! I opened the windows to make the whole kitchen a giant cooler and hoped for the best.

Then I just kept adding a metric fuckton of chocolate.

I did it!

And i did it!

It was not pretty, it was not elegant, not even slightly symetric, but it was a möbius cake!

And I still had a lot of leftover material, so I made a tiny surprise gear cake

It's not a möbius gear cake, but a mobius + gear cake

Note from Swizec: It was fucking delicious!

Related articles

• Möbius Cake (neatorama.com)
• an epic cake disaster (cathweber.blogspot.com)
• “MOBIUS,” a Stop-Motion Sculpture by ENESS (core77.com)
• Moebius Noodles Photo Game (letsplaymath.net)

Notebook

Ever since I was a wee lad I thought I might one day write an epic book that at least two people will read. I realize now it’s difficult to write a book when you’re coding all the time.

The internet doesn’t help either.

However something good did come out of this obsession with writing – at some point in high school I realized it would be incredibly useful to always keep a notebook on hand to jot down any idea that might pop up  at an unexpected time.

And so the notebook fetishism began.

My first pocket notebook looked more like a collection of post-it notes inside a cardboard case thing. Of course it proved unwieldy to keep in my pocket and needless to say it eventually broke down so much it seems I’ve thrown it out … can’t find it anywhere.

Here’s all the notebooks that survived through the years, ordered roughly in chronologically. The right-most three I’m using right now (the big one and two under it) … ok, actually the totally rightmost one is still waiting to begin its career. There’s also a fake moleskine in there; that first black notebook from the left.

Notebooks! About 4 missing due to utter death

It’s taken me years to discover the wonder that is Moleskine. Now sure, some might say it’s an overpriced notebook designed to take money away from hapless hipsters.

But I think Moleskine is really the Apple of notebooks, which again will say to most people that it’s an overpriced piece of kit designed to take money away from hapless hipsters. Their latest PR blunder aside, I have to say I really love these things – probably won’t be buying any other brand in the foreseeable future.

At least not for the ones I like to keep in my pocket. That big moleskine right there? Yeah, that was kind of stupid, sure I love it to bits, but 17 euro for a notebook with ~200 pages that for some reason isn’t even hardcover? O.o

Moleskine just seems to care more about details than most other notebooks I’ve tried. Where else does each notebook come with a tracking number and a note that should there be anything funky, you should just report that particular notebook and the particular quality assurance person in charge of that particular notebook will be thwapped over the nose?

I’m sure the marketing story coming with each notebook is bullshit, but it feels nice that they even care enough to include it.

However, the ultimate test came when I started using the ultra skinny ones. You know, the one you can actually keep in your backpocket at all times so you literally never find yourself without a notebook as long as you aren’t naked.

Two months in the backpocket

Kept it there, nice and cosy next to my arse, for two months every day. Sat on it, sweated on it when it was hot and I was in a hurry, did unspeakably horrible things to it … nothing happened. Sure it looks battered and the covers are bent and crinkley. But not a single paper fell out, the stitching is still perfect … the cover didn’t even start layering!

Any other notebook I’ve had felt like it was about to die after a week of staying in my pocket … papers starting to fall out, the back breaking … things like that.

Anyone else a fan of notebooks that just work?

Related articles

• Notably Cute Notebooks (fabsugar.com)
• Mini Review: Rhodia 5×5 Grid Pad No. 10 (nopenintended.wordpress.com)
• A Little House Notebook (practicalpages.wordpress.com)
• Moleskine Alternatives For GTD Hacking (newcommbiz.com)
• Notes on notebooks (guardian.co.uk)

postme.me 2nd batch

I know it was exactly a year ago because I remember saying something like “Oh I’m 23 … wait, I’m 23 TODAY!” when he asked how old I was.

About a year before I set out on a voyage that would cement my decision to do startups. With the help of some ultra early investorvisers (adviser+investor) I founded my first company and plunged off the deep end; fully expecting to build the plane before my head smashed into the jagged rocks below.

I’d been working practically full time on Twitulater beforehand, but this was different, this evolved out of that original nugget and I remember thinking to myself “Shit just got real brah!”

And it did, it did get real! I was ready to face anything anyone would throw at me. People were saying it’s not all fun and games, that startup life is more like a roller coaster. Sure, it was difficult, there were hard times building a product, getting our first government grant … rebuilding the product again from scratch over that summer because the iPad came out and completely changed the landscape …

Those two weeks last October – looking for funding in the US, mingling with the YC crowd, going to awesome conferences … I felt like I was on top of the world! “Everything I touch turns into gold!”, I thought. Hell, out of all the seasoned veterans in that first Brezmejnik batch we got the furthest with investors. Us, the young grasshoppers who but a month earlier looked like they wouldn’t even have anything to pitch, we got to a verbal “yes” to participate in a round if we can pull it together.

A lot has changed since then …

We did not, in fact, manage to pull together a round. The fact I hadn’t been making any money (full time startup plus a full time student, yeah, it doesn’t work) eventually caught up with me. Around December the first rat fled the ship. Just up and stopped responding to emails.

Image via Wikipedia

Then the fighting between cofounders started. It wouldn’t even be that bad if there was actual fighting. It was one of those quiet disputes that smack you when you aren’t looking.

At some point we stopped talking for three weeks.

“The product will save us!”, I thought, “I need to make the fucking product! I’ll finish it myself if I have to!”

And I did try, for that month, month and a half, I was doing all the frontend and backend programming and trying to figure out where we could muster some money. Instead, I should be acting like a CEO and hiring people. Actually finding money. Realising the product cannot be finished before our negative runway becomes more than @skatey can keep up with doing consulting.

Around February Skatey and our investorvisers decided that the shit has gone far enough. Swizec is an idiot, he can’t code for shit, he sucks at getting money, why do we even need him? Plus he isn’t paying off that debt arising from company expenses he owed to Skatey.

How could I? I was pulling 80+ hour workweeks trying to keep up with all the coding and the exam season was upon me. I had that pesky school to finish!

They kicked me out.

I was able to negotiate the nullification of my debt to Skatey, but this still left me about 2000 euro in debt.

2000 euro may not sound like a lot, but out of all the work the previous year I think about 800 euro made it into my pocket – I bought a phone and some clothes. Everything else went into the startup either directly or by keeping me from dying of starvation.

What’s more, the debt was due in four months … I was practically bankrupt. If it wasn’t for the pasta investment from my parents I’d be forced to live on the street.

Here I was, 23, bankrupt, startup up in flames, the shredded remains of a guy who once thought he could take on the world and win.

I was fed up with my life and myself. I was just about ready to pretty much check out … if not literally then at least figuratively, kill this blog, kill my twitter account, everything, just get away from the world. I did the next best thing and broke up with my girlfriend of three years. In fact I cheated on her and then broke up with her.

Not the proudest moment of my life.

It got better

Around that time I also launched HipsterVision … a fun little project to put me in a better mood. It even got a decent amount of traffic and if I remember correctly at some point got picked up by the BBC on a show about hot new tools online.

But I had no energy to sustain growth. No ideas on how to get more traffic. No brainpower left to even contemplate making anything serious out of that project. Most of all, I simply couldn’t afford to work on anything other than quickly getting some job that will enable me to pay off my debts by June, the deadline.

It was April.

Image by Matt Niemi via Flickr

I did in fact manage to find such a job. But I was miserable, there was nothing about Slovenia that could cheer me up, I had to get away somehow, anyhow, whatever way possible. I wanted to go to the US over the summer, if push comes to shove, I’ll go there without money and find a freelancing gig.

A month later the offer from DoubleRecall came that I can join them in Palo Alto during their YC experience.

I ditched my job. Just stopped responding to emails.

Another not very proud moment in my life. It was a soul sucking lucrative job with a bad culture fit. But ditching them like that wasn’t a very nice thing to do.

But I paid off my debt by June. Nobody would come knocking at the door to take my socks!

It is now October.

I’m not quite at the same heights I was a year ago. The exam fiasco that was September didn’t do much for my mood, but at least I’m not in too much shit financially. Two weeks ago I launched Postme.me, which has so far brought in infinitely more profits straight from users than all my previous projects combined. The Startup included.

Actually I think I’m doing pretty great right now.

Postme.me is doing well and getting better, this blog is getting increasingly more traffic, I have two freelancing offers from cool startups in San Francisco on my plate (gonna have to pick), and I’m well set to graduate by next September and free myself geographically.

Definitely the hardest year of my life, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Related articles

• I couldn’t get into YC so I joined a startup that did (swizec.com)
• There are so many options now for fledgling startups now for seed investment and advice – YCombinators, Tech Stars, 500 Startups, etc. Should one pursue them all? Is one better than the rest? Does geography of where one is matter? Thanks in advance for (bijansabet.com)
• The Previously Strong Startup Employee That Is No Longer Effective (davidcummings.org)
• Doing a startup taught me the value of staying in school (swizec.com)

Freedom Box

Or … well … a bunch of geeks who had nothing better to do on a Saturday.

There were a bunch of great talks by some marvelous people and I especially liked that there were once more lightning talks to finish the day off. Can’t remember when was the last time we managed to have those … actually, I think the last time might have been the original two Barcamps that set off the meme of unconferences in Ljubljana.

If I can say that it’s a meme since to my knowledge they’re organized by the one and only @gandalfar. That guy  could make 20 people show up to watch paint dry!

There were two talks that really stuck in my mind. @jamesvasile talking about Freedom Box and @andraz talking about … something. I think the point of his talk was mostly that nontechnical founders [of anything] should prove themselves before pestering technical people to do the heavy lifting and conversely that technical people should be much much more averse to doing heavy lifting and should try their best to reuse whatever crap they can find online.

Really I think he was just talking about what everybody is talking these days, but wrapping it up in shiny pictures and his cool way of presenting stuff.

The Freedom Box by @jamesvasile was a much more groundbreaking concept. It’s this box thingy that hooks up between your internets provider and the main router for the hosue and automagically makes sure all the data oozing out of your every port is encrypted and somewhat secure.

Angry Birds reception desk

An even more interesting concept is that of making self signed certificates trustworthy by embedding a public key that can be looked up and your identity confirmed … then there was something about splitting up your key between a lot of friends so each individual doesn’t have enough info to attack you, but together they can still stage an intervention … didn’t quite understand that bit.

Oh and apparently there’s this new python CMS called Plone that isn’t in fact new, but does happen to be used by a lot of the big players that need high security and awesomeness. Can’t remember the twitter handle of whomever was presenting this, sorry.

I also want to say that as far as my end is concerned, my talk about Tools that get you laid (express.js, backbone.js, underscore.js and ejs and ejs) went quite well. For some reason all the seats in the room were full … I think people expected something far more interesting to happen than me talking about the technical crap I use to build pet projects.

If anyone’s interested, here are the hastily assembled super boring slides with no pictures from my talk:

See you all next time!

First batch

It worked out! I launched a product in 3 days and when I woke up on Tuesday there were four “Notification of payment received” emails in my inbox.

The idea behind postme.me is pretty simple – postcards are cool! Let’s have a service to send cool postcards all over the world for cheap.

Actually the idea didn’t pop up 3 days before launch. It was brewing for a while … the beginnings can be traced back to a silly evening at the DoubleRecall headquarters in Palo Alto. We were messing about and somebody said “Fuck man, you’re not making it better!”.

Five minutes later I bought notmakingitbetter.com … we raced even, I clicked the fastest.

The following day I started thinking about what I could possibly do with this domain. Heading for a night of partying in San Francisco that evening, an idea to send “4chan cookies” to people popped up. Basically, you choose something from 4chan, we put it in a fortune cookie and send it anywhere.

And that was that. My mind went and got occupied by other things.

Until two weeks ago when I was going through a notebook and saw the idea jotted down – always carry a notebook guys – surprisingly I still liked it. It got through the first test of worthiness!

But fortune cookies? That’s not really viable, how the hell do you make those? Are there people who provide them? Would I bake them in my mum’s kitchen?

A few evenings later it clicked – POSTCARDS! Postcards are perfect for sending silly pictures to friends!

I had no idea how postcards are made, but it seemed viable. Asked a designer friend if he can recommend a print shop – he recommended two. Sent out emails and one of the shops was kind enough to provide a price estimate without my knowing what the fuck it is that I even want.

Next day I checked the local post office’s prices and set the price of sending a postcard at $2. It’s cheap enough for people to click without thinking much about it, and it covers my costs plus enough overhead to cover anything I didn’t think of.

That evening I forced myself to bed.

Next morning I woke up and about 25 hours of coding and designing later, the website was born.

Posted it to HackerNews and collapsed into bed.

“It’s just an experiment. The site sucks. No point investing too much effort, if people won’t click the magic button”, I kept telling myself. But really I was excited out of my mind. This was the first time in my life I wasn’t giving a product away for free. This was edgy balls to the wall stuff for me – asking people for money? On the internet!? Madness!

Next morning the website was full of naked pictures. But I did make some sales!

Sweet!

A couple of days later I convinced the print shop to let me do ultra small runs of prints. As little as 9 at a time, at almost the same price per card as doing 200. The post office also didn’t bat an eyelid at my interesting postcards and dutifully sent them on their way.

Two weeks since the idea originally crystalized in my head, the site still hasn’t made enough sales for a full print run. But it has made enough sales to cover the costs of that first print of 9 cards. Even though most were sent to random people from my postcard escapade back in August.

The great thing about this whole project is that I know exactly where to fish for people. I know perfectly which sites I need to advertise on to reach my target customers and I know that even though there are many postcard services around, none seems to be targeting this niche for some reason.

The only problem I have is that I can’t afford the advertising.

But projects without problems are boring.

Related articles

• Four-color postcards? (ask.metafilter.com)
• Create & Send A Real Postcard With Your Phone Using Postcard On The Run (makeuseof.com)
• From Pixels to Postcards (pixiq.com)
• Postagram has change my life! …and my blog. (kenleydarling.wordpress.com)
• Postcards: A Thing of the Past – Not Likely (printsunnysideup.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Lately I’ve been looking for work of the python and javascript programming variety  - turns out getting caffeine, energy drinks and food is difficult without money. And since it doesn’t seem people are looking for programming freelancers these days, or I suck at finding such offers, I end up being interviewed a lot.

A good interview with a team you know is pretty cool can actually be quite enjoyable.

But a particular question really sticks out as a sore point for me. It shows up in interviews without fail, hell, I’ve asked it almost every single time I ever interviewed someone.

What are you proud of?

It looks like  an innocent question. A friendly opportunity to let you talk about something cool

I used to love answering this question. It could get me talking for hours … well, 30 minutes at least … there was always something I could tout my own horn with.

But then, projects started piling up, I no longer had a single thing I was proud of. Nothing I did seemed like a colossal success anymore. Not like when I was just starting out working on my own projects, back then I was proud of every little turd I squeezed out of my arse.

Nowadays it doesn’t feel like any project I’ve done really sticks out as something to be horribly proud of. Certainly not enough to pop to mind off the cup in the heat of the moment. I have to weigh my answer, pick one of perhaps ten or even twenty projects … or god knows how many more I should be proud of but have gone out of my immediate memory.

Furthermore, the question feels a bit lazy.

I always send my github profile together with every first contact mail for coding work. And my blog.  If you spent even ten minutes preparing to talk to me, you could ask about a specific project that seemed interesting to you. They’re all out there somewhere anyway.

Hell, you could just order my github profile by follower/fork count and ask me about whatever comes up on top. Chances are it’s a project I will enjoy talking about since it’s popular and it grounds the discussion. My option space is much narrower and thus easier to define.

More importantly, when you ask me about a specific project, you’ve shown an interest in one of many fields of my work. I know what you will find interesting.

Otherwise I might as well start explaining how proud I am of that one jQuery library for buttons I made a couple of years ago, where you’re actually more interested in me because you know I once got Readibility to run on a server and scraped about a million web articles in horribly little time.

But what do I know, maybe it’s just that ever since I’ve heard of the Dunning-Krueger effect everything I’ve ever created feels a bit bland and unexciting since I can’t decide if it actually is technically exciting or not. Or maybe I’ve just gotten to know too many awesome people and I feel a bit uninteresting in comparison.

Anyway here are ten things I’m proud of in no particular order to help me answering such questions in the future:

1. My jQuery buttons plugin is 5th hit on google for “jquery buttons” 2 years after being made
2. I nearly got a startup in cahoots with VC’s
3. At one point I made the first instagram node.js library
4. Ran Readability on a server to scrape articles back before it was cool
5. My best academic year was also my best entreprenurial year
6. I have a blog that gets about 15k visitors a month
7. Fred Wilson once referenced me by name in his blog
8. I’m 23 and I have  more than 6 years of professional dev experience
9. I have never screwed up college so hard I’d have to cheat to get all the legal student perks
10. I used to spend 2+ hours a day doing stupid stuff with a bike and never broke a bone … I did almost kill my balls though

Is it just me? Do others find it easier to talk about what they’re proud of?

Related articles

• I LOVE ME , Proud of ME, Proud of US!!! (diablotintelevision.wordpress.com)
• Breathe Life into Web-pages with Packt’s New jQuery Book and eBook (prweb.com)
• Five questions to ask during a job interview ()
• What you learnt on job, that you didn’t learn in school (reddit.com)
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Just over a month ago I went on an internet diet that would practically cut me off the world as I know it. The deal was no internet except for an hour every evening, or when it was absolutely necessary for reasons of work or school.

A week ago that diet ended.

It is no coincidence that it’s taken me a week to put myself together enough to write this post. Partially an insane month of exams is to blame, partially just that I could once more frolick on the wide internets like a madman and in part it’s simply due to the fact I had to remember what life online was like so I could make a comparison at all.

A month is a long long time.

How it went

The most surprising discovery was that going almost without the internet for a month was surprisingly easy. At first I was really draconian to myself, but towards the end I have to admit everything started slipping a bit, mostly when I discovered I needed the IRC channel with my classmates to study effectively.

Sure, at first not being able to mindlessly wander the wastelands whenever I had a moment of free time felt like I was missing an arm, a leg and half an eyeball. Eventually though the compulsive need to open a browser with a useless website I didn’t really care about went away and I discovered something surprising.

The internet is a really boring place.

Once you’re not online all the freaking time there’s really not much to do. I would let myself do anything I wanted for an hour every evening and most of the time I was done in half an hour. There was simply nothing more to look at.

There wasn’t enough time to give every news item a thorough read, and there was no news item interesting enough to sacrifice a part of my precious hour to. Just wasn’t. So after I was done with reading my comics, responding to email, twitter and facebook, checking out my favourite forum … I was at a loss about doing anything more.

So I just didn’t. Sometimes my hour online would end in 20 minutes. It very rarely managed to captivate my attention for a whole hour.

The annoying part was how as soon as I was back home from the US, all my little pomodoro breaks that I used to fill with the internet, started getting filled with television. Which is arguably even worse than my old habit of mindlessly wasting time. This leads me to believe that my brain needs a certain level of mindless entertainment … for what purpose, I don’t know.

A really big issue was the lack of my ability to communicate with anyone since I haven’t had a phone for almost a year. I know for a fact I was seriously annoying to some people because they couldn’t share lulzy stuff with me anymore (because they blatantly told me so). Taking a day to respond to certain things was simply too much and I did eventually start making exceptions on twitter for when I was meeting someone for coffee or whatever and arrangements had to be made.

The “good habits”

Of course as soon as the diet ended it didn’t take long for me to start mindless refreshing email clients, facebook, twitter, hackernews … it’s a really stupid habit and apparently very easy to get into.

But it’s ultimately useless. The amount of time I spend mindlessly refreshing to hopefully catch a peek of something interesting in relation to how much time I actually spend reading anything or clicking links is insane. I probably spend ten times as long looking for that one thing to pique my interest than I do acting on content (sharing, reading, replying etc.).

In that regard the internet is seriously annoying. Pulls you in like a drug, wastes all your time and doesn’t give anything back in return. The internet does not love me as much as I do her.

Therefore I think it’s time to establish some new ground rules for my life online. It’s not a diet, but hopefully a set of rules I can live by in the long term.

1. 20 minutes to half an hour of The Internet in the morning to start my day
2. An hour of The Internet around lunchtime
3. An hour of The Internet in the evening

Everything else goes the same as in my diet month. This should give me enough daily timeslots to actually give some stuff a read instead of just looking for that one perfect news item I would dare spend time on. And it should also be enough timeslots to respond to any email or twitter communications in need of my attention.

Then again, some say even this new set of rules is too annoying for them, so maybe the point is just to avoid snacking the internet and go online whenever I have at least half an hour of free time. Make it a proper meal so to say.

Related articles

• Why an Internet diet and not cold turkey (swizec.com)
• Why Long-Term “Dieting” Doesn’t Work (thymelines.wordpress.com)
• My ideas are shitty so I’m going on an Internet diet (swizec.com)
• Surfing the Web Slows Down Dementia (fitsugar.com)

Geeks on water ... almost

A whole bunch of geeks and geekettes from Hekovnik got together to go kayaking on the river Krka. Most of us for the first time. We have @refaktor to thank for herding us all together and making it happen. Without him we’d probably still be trying to figure out if everyone has the time this year or would 2012 suit us better.

Herding geeks is like herding cats

I for one have to say I had a blast and I think everyone else had a blast as well.

The fun part was how we were put in wetsuits, given a paddle and a kayak and some basic instructions that the paddles are to be held by the handle and that they are used to both propel the boat forward and to steer it. And off we were for the first 800 meters.

Those things are impossible to steer! The kayak’s have a mind of their own and wherever they want to go they will go … until someone tells you that you’re supposed to feel the kayak. Anticipate its next move and act accordingly. Then, suddenly, you can go in an almost straight line! Quickly even!

Of course they only tell you this at an opportune spot 800 meters down the river …

Jumping over the dams was pretty fun too. The water was pretty low and our skills weren’t all that … existant … so we basically ran aground on top of every jump then got pushed off by the instructor. Most jumps went awesomely, but on one particular jump I could swear the instructor was throwing us over like potatoes! We were faceplanting into the water like a bunch of bosses!

But even falling out was fun!

The whole trip was packed with fun and I suggest everyone who likes getting wet, and who doesn’t?, to give kayaking a try. It’s simply awesome fun! Can’t say I’d survive going down a river alone in a kayak now, but at lest I can sort of go in a straight line.

Shame there’s no pics of geeks on the water – stupid water hating electronics.

Related articles

• The Difference Between Geeks & Nerds (itssamuraijosh.wordpress.com)
• This geek’s off to Paris and needs suggestions (carolinebeavon.com)
• Kayaker Jesse Coombs Plunges Down 96ft Waterfall (Video) (dailypicksandflicks.com)