As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine!Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.Think about the biggest websites you visit or use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, or even Google for that matter -- all of them were created by developers who created something from little more than an idea in their head. Was it easy for them? Heck no. But it could only have been done in today's day and...

Experts often end up where they started as beginners.If you’ve never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it.Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see.Beginning computer science students think that computer science is all about programming. Then they learn that computer science is...

Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research.I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me?I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this ambiguity is indicative of the issues).Most of my mindless time-sinks involve at least a credit card number and are often a conveniently packaged identity-theft kit.So that was part of it, and the other part was that I had to d...

If you are anything like me, you've started more things than you have finished. We're innately curious about the things around us and inspired when we come across people who have mastered their trade. We see people create cool and beautiful things and think, "Man, that looks easy, if I put in a little time I can do that in no time." What follows is a few days or weeks of focused and dedicated learning. During this time we make some progress, but not much. In fact, the progress that we do make only gets us to a point where we can truly begin to understand the complexities of the task we ar...

Some years ago, one of my managers used to repeat this "Accenture truism" (or so he designated it): to fix or improve something, first you need the right people, then you need the right processes to help those people work together, then finally you need the right tools to support those processes. People, processes, and tools - in that order.This is even more true for tech startups than for corporations. As geeks, whenever we face a problem, we often start by looking for a tool to fix it. "Our team isn't communicating properly - let's set up Campfire." "But I don't like Campfire, why don't we u...

I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death.  It brought out deep emotions.  I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I've ever attended, this one was the most honest; people talked about the death of family, the death of friends, what they thought about their own deaths.  People really listened to each other.  I wish I knew how to reproduce those conditions reliably.I was the only transhumanist present, and I was extremely careful not to be obnoxious about it.  ("A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change t...

Chances are good that, at some time in your life, you've taken a time-management class, read about it in books, and tried to use an electronic or paper-based day planner to organize, prioritize and schedule your day. "Why, with this knowledge and these gadgets," you may ask, "do I still feel like I can't get everything done I need to?"The answer is simple. Everything you ever learned about managing time is a complete waste of time because it doesn't work.Before you can even begin to manage time, you must learn what time is. A dictionary defines time as "the point or period at which things occu...

This is — by far — my favorite aspect of working at GitHub. Everything isasynchronous.ChatGitHub didn’t have an office for the first two years. Chat rooms (in our case,Campfire) is where things got done. Today we’ve moved into oursecond office, and Campfire is still where we get things done. There’s areason for that: chat is asynchronous.Asynchronous communication means I can take a step out for lunch and catch upon transcripts when I get back. Asynchronous communication means I can ask mycoworker a question in-chat and not worry about bothering her since she...