RailsThemes is a project that I’m working on with Eliza Brock and Luke Flener. It is like WordPress themes, but for Ruby on Rails applications. Basically you purchase a theme on our website, and then you can install it on the command-line and have a site that is easy on the eyes in a matter of minutes. Traditionally, you would have to spend a lot of time and money to get a good looking theme.

What day of the week is it again?

Eliza lives in Nashville. I live in Indianapolis. Yet we were able to spend about two weeks together in the same location working on the project over the course of a couple of months due to some creative scheduling.

The benefits of working in close physical proximity are fairly well documented (see Peopleware). For me it is speed of getting feedback, better design sessions, and general morale boosts.

When the project first started, we talked on the phone and I said that I needed to find a weekend to come down there so we could work together. Eliza reminded me that I can work whenever I want to, so I could come down for a few days in the middle of the week and that would work. I said that made sense, and then five minutes later, said, “OK, well I’ll find a weekend that works and then I’ll come down,” and then immediately re-realized that I could come down on a weekday. Old habits die hard I guess.

So I picked a Monday through Wednesday trip and drove down and back while listening to audio books (a good use of the dead time.) Later iterations of the “work weekend” as we came to call them had me riding on the Megabus to free up time to work on things or read or relax. We would get a lot of work done during those periods, so it was worth the cost of traveling. I went down to TN, she came up here for a week or so, we met in the middle in a Kentucky state park and used a MiFi to get internet, and I went down there again right before RailsConf to finish up some things. So overall, a pretty productive way to get things done. We could also work on things outside of these blocks, but they were very effective in staying on task and ensuring that the time was used well. The opportunity cost of traveling made it really unappealing to waste time.

Scheduling things like this does take its toll. At some point in the last month, I tried to order the Wednesday lunch special and after a puzzled look by the waitress, was informed that it was Friday…

The installer

The installer is what I’ve most been working on for this project. I also worked heavily on the payment gateway and backend tools to help us create and manage themes. We came up with the idea of a command-line installer to allow devs to quickly get up and running with installing a new theme (full source and history here). The idea is that the installer does most of the heavy lifting of looking at your project and determining what files you want, and then asks the server for the right set of files and installs them correctly.

I researched how to make a gem, and used Bundler to generate the scaffolding. Then went through and developed it using (mostly) test-first development. Sometimes there were issues that were easier to track down by running the installer on my machine, and then I could make the appropriate changes to the tests afterward. I think this is a good example of “spike and stabilize”.

One cool thing that I ended up using was fakefs. This allows you to stub out file system calls and thereby test things without needing to actually touch the file system. This makes for more repeatable tests, reduces the need for cleanup, and possibly speeds up the specs as well. Before using it, I had functions that I was invoking that would operate on the filesystem, and then would mock those calls. However, fakefs works by setting up a fake filesystem (hence the name!) that you can run your tests on and then make assertions about the state of the filesystem. Overall a much cleaner solution.

Progress update: Early-access beta

We still have a few kinks to work out, but we have themes and people are starting to help us test them out. If you work with Rails projects and you haven’t signed up yet, check out RailsThemes and we’ll let you know when things are rolling.

We are planning on coming out with a new theme every month, and some extensions like themes for emails that you end up sending out through your app.

General thoughts

It’s too early to say whether RailsThemes will be a financial success or not. I think the next couple of months will shed some light on this. However, I’m glad that I worked on it so far. I had been wanting to work with Eliza on a side project of some sort for a few years. I think we made an ambitious but achievable schedule and really executed on it. My confidence to be able to do projects has gone up. I better understand how hard it can be to make something.

I think regardless that we are creating value, and that good Rails themes is something that I wanted to have in the world. If things don’t work out, I also think it will be a good data point for me to refine future business ideas.

Original article: What I’ve Learned From RailsThemes So Far

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks (well you can, but it’s hard)

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s way of reprogramming itself based on what it does. Your brain actually changes structure with new experiences. Brains also change based on what you think about. So giving energy to the kinds of thoughts you want to have, makes them form more easily the next time. This is one of the advantages of writing (it’s a form of caching thoughts).

Someone who starts playing piano for one year at age seven will likely be much better than someone who starts playing piano at age seventy for one year. Generally, The younger someone is, the less hard-wired and the more open to change their brain is. The seventy-year-old might have a better strategy for learning or more discipline, but learning is going to be harder. Neurons die every day, and they are the things gray matter is made of.

Useful versus true beliefs

There are several kinds of beliefs:

• those that are true and useful,
• those that are true and not useful
• those that are false and not useful
• those that are false but actually still useful

I think the first and last are particularly interesting. My standard contrast is the following:

A belief that is true and useful is someone telling you: “Look both ways before crossing the street or you might get hit by a car.” An example of a belief that is false but still useful is someone telling you: “Look both ways before crossing the street or a demon will steal your soul.” The latter is clearly not true, but may be useful in the sense that while the underlying premise is not valid, the effects of looking both ways might be enough to get someone to have enough awareness to avoid getting hit by a car. All things considered, I’d take the true and useful belief over the false and useful, but at least the latter is still useful. Really most ideas are somewhere on the spectrum, and a belief that is useful or true at one level of thinking or experience might be not useful or true at another.

Back to the topic at hand

The belief that “today is the best day to learn something” is useful even if it’s not true.

There are several components to why this is the case. First, and probably most importantly, it promotes acting the only time it matters: right now. It inspires action, and often after learning something, I realize that it wasn’t all that hard to begin with. It gets the ball rolling when I might have never done it at all. It’s a really optimistic view to hold.

Second, I save time. What took me four years to learn in college might have taken me five years when I as twice as old. If I want to start surfing, today is the very best day to get out on the board, because every minute I spend flailing in the water is perhaps 1.1 minutes in a couple of years. This is because the body and mind tend toward stasis, and getting them out of that takes energy.

Next, I think it leads to a more interesting life. If I see the current day as being the best day I will ever have to learn, it’s likely that I will want to explore more interesting opportunities. Why wait until later when it will be harder to do something? It’s a major opportunity cost to lose the best day ever. I think that people who want to do software should start as young as possible to get their brains wired up in a way that promotes future analytical thinking. I think most of the really good developers that I know started messing around on their own, many times in high school or before.

Another nice thing is that it makes me better going forward. If I put off learning something useful for a couple of years, that is a couple of years that I don’t get to leverage whatever it is that I put off learning. At some point, people give up learning new things because the time and energy needed to change seem too high relative to the benefit. Why learn to use a computer, I’ve gotten along just fine and I only have an uncertain number of years left. Holding the belief that today is the best day to learn something might overcome that pattern.

Last, I find that I worry less about what other people have accomplished or what skills they have when I remember this. I can still get better at whatever it is that I want to get better at, and today is the very best time to do this. No need to compare.

Caveats

Don’t get hung up on the fact that last week was a better day to learn than today. Why cry over spilled milk? It’s pretty clear that I will not be an NBA player, because I haven’t been playing basketball enough and from an early enough age. Even if I set out today with the intention to join the league, it would probably take too long to get good enough before my playing days were over. Just remember that today is going to be a better day than tomorrow, so don’t waste it.

The technicality police have been thinking things like: “well what if you’re sick or you have something ‘important’ to do?” Fine, you’re right (in a sense.) But in general, I think it’s useful in the long run. Obviously this whole idea isn’t a knock against older people. They should have a lot of useful experience by now.

Your thoughts

What do you think about this idea? True, useful, neither? Are there any equations you know for the amount of time it takes someone later in life to learn something new? Leave a comment below!

Original article: Why Today Is Scientifically The Best Day to Learn Something

Current projects and interests:

• RailsThemes.com (new project!)
• consulting/contracting
• Awesome Controller
• Desperately Seeking Validation
• office hours
• Hamming Lunches

RailsThemes.com

A new project!

I had been putting together various websites using purchasable themes from sites like ThemeForest, and it took at least a couple of hours each to translate the HTML and CSS to a format that Rails is happy with that looks like the theme is intended to look. I explained my solution idea to Eliza—basically a themes site for Rails apps—and she started running full speed with it. She called me up the next day and was like, “so I figured out the launch schedule for this.” I was like, “whoa, whoa, I don’t remember signing up for this officially.”

Anyway, I drove to Tennessee Tuesday and we worked until noon on Thursday on ramping up the project. We have a great designer, Luke Flener, for the initial templates and site design, I’m working on the development back-end side of things, and Eliza is heading up the marketing and user-facing development. There’s still quite a bit of work to do before our launch in April. Over the course of the last couple of days, we worked on

If you’re interested in project updates or to eventually purchase a design for your Rails project, check out RailsThemes.com. Also, if you are interested in contributing designs, we are interested in talking with you about it. Thanks!

Consulting/Contracting

I got pretty lucky meeting Jared Brown in person at the April 2011 Indy Startup Weekend, and he reached out to me to work on some very steady billable work. By having that, I have some stability as far as income goes, and I am in a position to pursue more speculative projects or ask for a higher rate for other projects. I’ve worked on a couple of other billable projects since last summer, working with Eliza Brock and some other badasses.

Soapbox: I think there is a fine line between consulting and contracting. I think that consulting is people paying you for your advice and/or experience, preferably by a function of the value provided, not a time-based rate. Contracting is saying, I get paid based on how much I work on the project. See Weiss’s Value-Based Fees for an excellent explanation of this. I was planning on making this point a whole post at some point, so I’ll leave the expansion out. I think consulting is slightly preferable, for reasons that I’ll state then.

Based on my current project lineup, I’d say I’ve been in the contracting side of things. Not many people are using lean and lean startup principles in Indianapolis and the value seems high, so this seems like a good area to be in going forward. Sure, a development firm can help you get your v1.0 out the door, but what then? Who are your customers, how have you been learning while you have been heads-down developing for six months? So I think this is an interesting area.

Awesome Controller

Awesome Controller is a product that takes your old game systems and enables you use your modern wireless controllers to operate them. Awesome Controller has been steadily progressing since winning Indy’s Startup Weekend in the middle of November. We have been working on it a couple of days per month, with a solid three day hack session around the holidays. We currently have the NES, SNES, and N64 basically working with wired PS3 controllers and Wii controllers. Next steps include better wireless hardware support, multiplayer, and business things like taking pre-orders.

We’re aiming to take pre-orders for Arduino shields (a shield is basically a chip that we create whose pins connect to an existing Arduino board, kind of like Legos). We also want to create some pre-assembled units. We recently filed for an LLC and EIN, mostly so we can get a bank account, and thereby take pre-orders. At this point, there has been a fair amount of interest. We applied to Kickstarter, and they said that it looks like the project is a legitimate project. Will need to figure out how this fits into the grand plan, might be a viable way to increase our visability. We’ve done little to no marketing at this point, just having Adwords as a way of getting people to find the site and sign up for our exclusive mailing list.

Overall I’ve learned a lot and have enjoyed working with (in no particular order) Wes Winham, Kyle Shipley, Alex Toumey, and Kail Keusch on this project.

Desperately Seeking Validation

This is the group that a few of us started to practice lean startup techniques. I would say that it has been very helpful in understanding the process of taking ideas and getting some initial validation. I think we’ve done a bit more introspection than true [in]validation the last couple of meetings, so hoping to get out of the building a little more going forward. It seems like we definitely have enough ideas at this point, just need to get them going through the pipeline. If you’re in Indianapolis and this seems interesting, you should check out what we’ve done and contact one of us to get on the mailing list for doing something with your weekends.

Office Hours

I announced how to sign up for my office hours a few months ago, and they have been pretty useful so far. I met people that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and reconnected with some former coworkers as well. Overall, I think this is a very high value use of my time. I took a break for the holidays, and things haven’t gone quite as well since then. I attribute this somewhat to my marketing/positioning of the “product”. I think that I need to more clearly define what people will get out of meeting, and what I want to get out of it as well. Thanks to everyone who attended so far!

Hamming lunches

About every other Friday, a few of us get together and talk about the answers to these questions

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. What are you working on?
3. If you’re not working on these problems, why not?

It’s inspired by the lunches that Richard Hamming talked about in his speech “You And Your Research”, so we call them Hamming Lunches. We’ve mostly focused on business, technology, science, and economic/political problems. I’ve found it pretty useful in ensuring that I don’t get stuck solving too small of problems. We’ve talked about neuroscience, transparency in business, the future of countries, space travel, transhumanism, and the like. I like that it’s not all theoretical though, as we ask, “how can we implement this?” or “why aren’t we currently working on this?” to most of the topics.

Wrapping up

Alright, well that was a long update post, but a lot has changed in the past eight months. Some of these updates could be posts of their own, and others gave me some ideas for things that I need to write up. Thanks for reading, looking forward to rocking out the next few months!

Original article: What Large Amounts of Caffeine Can Accomplish

The talk

You have a reasonably well founded position, you almost certainly have enough to write about. You have arguments and counterarguments for the major things people are going to say. You have experiences that no one else has. So just write them out. Who can argue with what you have experienced? You’ve already done the hard work of thinking about this problem, why not get the benefits of writing it out? If anything, this will help clarify the thoughts that you have.

The specific phrases don’t matter, as long as you are getting out the main thoughts. You can always refine it over time—the great is the enemy of the good here. That’s what the edit functionality is for. I know you would love to include a beautiful graph or venn diagram to illustrate something, but just say it now and add it later if you must.

There is this nagging thought that says, “what if someone on the internet thinks I’m WRONG??“. That’s a vestigial fear coming out, like being worried about tigers or alpha male chimpanzees. The more rational concern, and the one you should focus on, is “does anyone even know that I exist?” The only way to solve this is to write.

You’re worried about being controversial? That is a good problem to have, it means someone cares enough to write a reply. And if you are wrong? Well, you learned a lot quicker than you would have if you kept it to yourself. Seems like a good deal.

Just ship it.

Just ship. Other people might want to read it. That publish button is scary? Just schedule it for two days from now or next week and keep on writing in the meantime. You’ll have forgotten all about it when it publishes and be surprised when someone asks you about the new post. “Which post?”

Writing might be the single best way of spreading knowledge that you have. It just makes everyone better off, including you. Instead of rehashing the same stories and thought patterns in your mind and with others, just write about it and refer them to the article.

Don’t have much time to write? Put down a nugget of inspiration for later. Just put the minimum intelligible sentence, and maybe instinct will take over. Just write it up real quick while you are thinking about it. You can surely find thirty minutes to just write what you’ve been thinking about or reading about. Could it be considered productive work if you are publishing something that will help your business grow?

Lastly, it might help someone else out a lot. It doesn’t take all that much time and you will feel better having done it. When you look back on this year, the posts that you have written are going to stand out in your mind as a high note. You will get better at writing and the next post will be even easier.

Wrap-up

Meta-reservation: I was worried about publishing this post. Then I scheduled it for a week and a half away.

Phew, that was quite a pep talk.

If you ever want something to write about, let me know and I’ll try to help out!

Original article: How to Write Without Reservations

• hearing about something
• reading a book about it
• knowing a similar technology
• writing a Hello World program
• doing a small project in an area
• having years of experience doing something

I think there could also be a weighting as to how much the person feels like they know a particular area. Maybe they “read” a book but didn’t feel like it really sunk in. Perhaps they don’t know a particular technology, but have two good friends who are well versed in that technology and can help in a pinch or introduce them to people in that space. In this way, an overall view of what a person has done and may be capable of can be more easily assessed. Take for instance someone has not done much C# but has done a lot of Java development. By understanding that these technologies are similar, someone outside of the development field can understand that this person has a higher capability for C# than in, say, embedded development.

The model might best be represented by a visualization. It could be shown as graph sized by relative experience. A large bubble means more experience, and smaller bubbles represent less experience. I could see using software to make this visualization dynamic to visualize progress over time and enable different views and drilldowns. There could be a weakening aspect for experiences that were a long time ago to show knowledge decay or obsolescence. Imagine that you could see what someone’s knowledge in a subject has been for the past five years. If I have knowledge years ago in a technology that is moving super-fast, it might not be all that useful. However, many years of experience in a slow-moving environment is a good thing to know about. I feel like some sweet images would be really helpful to illustrate this, but I’m going to punt for now.

Seems like there should be something out there like this, but I haven’t seen much. I have seen nice views of resumes (mostly by designers) but nothing for the average person. Perhaps this is a tangent, but I think it would be cool.

This portfolio model helps people see what they should strategically target to move to where they want to be. When someone notices a difference between the experience they have and what they would like to do, they can choose to bone up in the space that they want to be more active in and more actively try to pursue projects in that area. Seeing a disconnect promotes a mindset change. Also, it helps people view their own competence objectively, and leverage that knowledge going forward. Hence, this model and accompanying visualization has value whether it is show in private or public. It could just be a strategic planning tool, but could also be a new way to understand what people are good at and trying to do.

It could be useful for consulting/contracting organizations to get a feel for what their levels of expertise are and how to most actively manage them. If more competence in an area is desired, specific steps can be taken to increase that area.

Could you see using something like this for your resume or for evaluating working with others?

Original article: Formal Skill Modeling

It’s useful to note that all of the following stages are generally in play at any given time. If you focus only on the future, you might starve. If you focus only on the present, you might become short-sighted and hurt long term results. The idea is that one should have:

• a list of skills that have general value today,
• a list of skills that are becoming obsolete, and
• a list of skills that just might become very useful in the near future.

Essentially, it’s skill diversification, much like people diversify stock holdings.

The Cash Cow

This is something that you are very good at and is currently in hot demand. It differs from a core competency because this is something that you can make money doing for the near foreseeable future. This is web programming (and others) in the late 1990s. This is probably Ruby (and others) today. It might be something else tomorrow. Hopefully you will have learned enough about tomorrow’s cash cow in the second phase (small bets) to be good at it when it changes.

There are different kinds of cows. It could be that COBOL programming is the thing you are best at and can easily find a variety of work for. This would fit the criteria that I laid out. You might have some that are solid, and some that are getting to be less profitable.

If you follow this general process, you will eventually have multiple focused competencies that can be used in the future. This helps ensure losses in one area can be absorbed in another. For example, if for some reason the technology that you are working in suddenly comes into huge legal problems, you are alright because you have other skills that are useful.

It helps to have some competencies be similar so that you can leverage what you know, but it also helps to diversify. In either case, being able to quickly shift what you know and learn something new is going to be a benefit. If dinosaurs could adapt to changing climates, they would have been in much better shape.

Small bets for the future

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
- Damon Runyon

It’s hard to predict the future. If you had a time machine, it would be pretty easy to beat the stock market (see Back to the Future: Part II.) What people commonly do today is to spread their investments out with the expectation that while any one of them might not do well, when all of the investments are taken into account they will be better off than if they held the investment money under their mattress. They also take on less risk than putting all of their money into one investment.

Likewise, the point of this phase is to place small bets on skills that you think will be big at least in the next few years. This satisfies the need to explore and contribute to new initiatives, while limiting the downside that new things may bring. For example, putting all of your investment in learning a proprietary technology and doing projects with it might be a good choice if it takes off. However, if it doesn’t take off, you might be out of a lot of time invested. Generally I’d rather invest than not invest because you end up learning something you can use later, but there is an opportunity cost to consider. Maybe you could have gotten a little better at something that would be more useful.

Later, when the future is clearer, you can double-down on the things that worked well. You gain information due to being an early adopter, and win out by having more experience in a given area. This could be working with Rails in 2006, or maybe some HTML5 + Coffeescript experimentation today.

Investors might be successful if they just diversify, but some do analysis as well to try to pick better stocks. With limited capital (time, attention, energy), it pays to think about what technologies might gain wide adoption in the future. Also, there is the added consideration of: “what skills do I want to have?” If mobile development does not appeal to you, it makes less sense to learn more about it than another hot technology.

A good example of some analysis in this regard is the Thoughtworks technology radar. They give an in-depth look at what technology choices to stick with, adopt, and move away from. You might agree or disagree with their choices, but if you are at least aware that a choice exists, you can potentially make an investment.

The earlier you invest in a technology the more likely that that investment will pay out over time. Instead of four good years, you might get six. Although on the flip side, you get more information as the technology gains adoption. However, as I previously wrote, being first in the mind is enough benefit to risk trying a few technologies publicly, even if they fail. Some of the time things don’t pan out, but the rest of the time it looks like you can predict the future.

Branching out

At the same time, it is possible to learn more about surrounding fields and seemingly completely tangential ones. This is the longest view possible and also has larger potential gains. It takes a long time to become an expert in one field, and it’s helpful to understand other fields to try to be at least oriented in a certain field. Again, this branching out takes into consideration that short term and medium term needs also need to be fulfilled for success.

If I am a specialist in software development, it helps to branch out to related fields, like project management and gaining experience with running a business. These are clear wins. If I am interested in using some newer software techniques, I might want to learn more about bioinformatics to make the most of the tools that already exist, or more about the hard sciences to see what the open problems are so I can contribute to them. Basically wherever it makes sense to steal concepts or work with a certain industry.

These are likely long-term studies. One does not become better at them without sustained effort. But half an hour a day for five years adds up (about 900 hours if you take some holidays off.) For some, this might be continued formal education, for others, self study. Regardless, it adds up to more interesting work and increased options.

The nice thing about studying something mostly new is that the return on investment is significantly higher than learning a little more about something you’re already an expert at. If a professional programmer spends twenty hours reading a programming book, will she even move the needle on their professional skills? However, if this same hypothetical and clearly stereotyped-as-introverted programmer reads about how to interact better with others, this has a potentially huge benefit.

Synthesis

I’ve been trying to work the career calculus link in all post, but failed thus far. Now I feel better. This one is all about learning every day.

I think the overall goal is to maximize long-term value creation and ensure cash flow stays at an adequate level. I think opportunities should be evaluated for their lifetime value and short term impact. Value could come in terms of financial compensation, contacts, experience, work environment, and more. If someone wants a Fortran programmer and I’d like to move away from that technology, the other aspects of the project had better be good enough to justify having more knowledge about Fortran and not being able to do something else.

I’ll have more to say on formal skill models on Thursday.

How do you think about opportunities and skill acquisition? What did I miss or overgeneralize? Thank you for reading and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Original article: How to Look Like You Can Accurately Predict the Future of Technology

Here are some indicators that there is work that you need to do that is not captured in your current project management system. They should work well with almost any agile project management system. It’s a good way of finding and capturing latent stories for people on the project to see.

Patterns to watch for

“We need to revisit this in October.” or “We should probably do this at some point.”

Create a story for this item. Regardless of when you revisit the item, it’s nice to visualize the work that you believe you should do at some point. This can be effectively prioritized against the other work. You capture that you have something to do and can plan around it. This is useful in capturing work expansion as it happens.

“This isn’t perfect, but it works for now.”

Add a task to refine whatever the item is. I’m a big fan of progressive enhancement for stories. Get the basic thing done, and then you can add polish later.

“Hmm, that’s a bug, but I don’t want to fix it right now since I’m trying to finish something else.”

You can quickly add this. Put a quick description of where you were, what you did, what you saw and what you expected to see instead. If you want, speculate on what might have caused the problem. Then you can move on knowing it will be taken care of soon.

“I have this crazy idea that I haven’t discussed with the team”

Don’t add this as a story, yet. You’re only cluttering up the backlog, making it less valuable. First discuss it with the team, and if it is something that you plan on getting to soon, you can add it.

A long discussion in the group chat room or an important email

If there are things that pertain to the story that you are working on or will be working on, copy and paste the direct text or a public link to the text that is relevant. If there are other documents or relevant images, link these as well. Especially with the chat room, you are already having these conversations and making decisions, so you might as well put these somewhere so that everyone will see the conversation when in the right context. No need to have the same conversation twice or need to hunt through a long series of emails to get to the relevant information.

Other thoughts

I think that this technique should be coupled with good backlog management to ensure that the highest priority items are being done and obsolete stories are being culled. If your backlog is too big, you will waste time and energy just managing it. Consider trimming it aggressively. Any truly important things will keep coming back.

I find that cultivating this practice ensures that the team communicates well and everyone knows about how much important work remains to be done. There’s much less “oh yeah, I forgot to include you on that conversation.” It makes the ephemeral more concrete, and leads to people trusting that what is in the system is very close to what actually needs to be done.

When do you add something to your list of things to do? When do you wait to add something?

Original article: Spotting Hidden Stories

My thoughts

The key consideration in my mind is something along the lines of BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement.) This concept applies to many business situations. In order to effectively negotiate with someone, you need to realize your next best alternative to negotiating. Perhaps your company is in good shape, and the deal would only be slightly beneficial. This puts you in a better negotiating position because you know that you can walk away from the deal without worrying. If your best alternative is your company going under, you are more likely to try to make the deal, even if it is at a slight disadvantage to you.

How does this apply to technical cofounders? Simple. They have a lot of alternatives to joining your early-stage company. They could do lucrative consulting or contracting. They could be working for better equity stakes at other companies. They might want to start their own company instead. Hmm, 5% equity at your company or 100% equity at their own company? Why would they work for a split of equity when they could be bringing down cash money for contracting, regardless of the success of the eventual product?

The meaning of this is that the company that an entrepreneurially minded developer joins needs to be pretty darn good. If you’re looking to recruit/enlist others to an idea with no product or no traction, it starts with you. Learn how to do as much as possible, and show that you can hustle. Learn how to code to throw a prototype together, and if you don’t do that, learn how to do some wireframes or at least talk with engineers. There are many tools out there that will get you most of the way, and you should gain experience using them so you can bust them out whenever necessary to get your startup moving along. You should know that people who know how to code Ruby on Rails probably have done some database work—be active in the local entrepreneur circles as well as the local tech circles to start getting your bearings.

Why should business cofounders in the technology industry understand tech well? Well, take it from Paul Graham:

In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn’t work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don’t know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can’t tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it’s roulette.
– Paul Graham, in 2005

The other main point is to demonstrate that you have some hustle. Do you have a record of being able to raise money? Do you have contacts in the industry you are interested in working in? Perhaps something else that the tech cofounder doesn’t already have or is not interested in. And so forth.

The posts

Andrew Chen’s post

Seth’s blog post about this

An IndyStartup post about this general topic

A good Hacker News post that a business-minded guy put out there. This is the example of how to do it right (hustle, knowledge, and social proof in the comments to boot.)

Interesting series on becoming your own tech cofounder

What if 1000 entrepreneurs learned to code just a little instead of lamenting the lack of engineers?

An interesting flowchart of tech cofounder equity. Potentially the most suited to the engineering mind.

Excellent piece on how to evaluate any company in its early stages, from a developer’s perspective generally. Get in their shoes!

Survey of actual developers. Again, this is pure gold if you want to understand what technical cofounders or early stage employees are thinking about and motivated by. How they look at potential companies and the “biz guys”.

Beating a dead horse by now, but another post about working for free and what developers look for in a business cofounder.

Last one!

What are your thoughts on this? Post a comment below, and thanks for reading!

Original article: “Finding A Technical Cofounder” Blog Roundup

Research

At the startup that I just worked at (RewardSnap), we decided to create a game to encourage people to do crowdsourcing of deal ratings. Instead of just crafting a game from scratch, I decided to do a bit of research into the mechanics of modern games. I figured there were companies like Zynga out there that were doing cutting-edge work on viral loops and making games engaging to people. Why not learn from others before setting off on a path that I had little knowledge about?

As I researched, I stumbled over Game-Based Marketing. It was an interesting look into the psychology and history of games for business purposes. Throughout history games and gimmicks have been used to sell merchandise and reward loyal customers. Everything from buy ten get one free, to loyalty cards, to frequent flier programs, to more modern alternatives like Foursquare. Frequent flier programs, in particular, are driven by status more than economic matters. People will literally go out of their way to take flights that earn them extra miles, in an effort to get a higher ranking in the program. If you’ve seen the movie Up In The Air with George Clooney, you might have an idea what this is like.

There was a discussion of Bartle’s player types (Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, Killer). Different people play games for different reasons. However, these archetypes are not evenly distributed in the general population. Many more people play games to socialize than to, say, kill others. In addition, people generally play games for status first, then access, then power, and lastly, stuff. It’s unfortunate this acronym is SAPS… So instead of motivating people by giving away a television, it would be far better to motivate them by giving them in-game, or real-life, power (and so forth). As a slight extrapolation, people want to be respected and able to have sex on demand more than they want more than getting material possessions.

Our Game

At RewardSnap, we set up a points-based game, where the maximum number of points for rating a deal was 100. There was a naive leaderboard that showed just the top ten overall, and all users were anonymous because we didn’t implement login until later on. We would just highlight your user id if you were on the leaderboard. To get on the leaderboard, some people scored tens of thousands of points, with a few people earning over hundreds of thousands of points. This means that people were rating thousands of deals for free to get on an anonymous leaderboard in a small game universe. Tweet

One person would rate a bunch of deals, and then the next day someone else would try to catch up and beat them. To me, the results were surprising. Rating a bunch of deals in a game was not something that I think I personally would have done. However, I’m sure there are a bunch of games that I played way too much for reason alone to make sense. It felt like we were hacking human motivation, and it was really strange to see the results. I think that there is a lot of deep behavioral psychology, intricate social , and motivational hacks at work in gamification. It felt spooky because we were playing with dark magics, things that we have yet to fully understand and that have great potential power.

One key takeaway was making sure that the incentives in the game correspond to the business purpose that you want to achieve. We got a lot more game action than I thought we would through just a simple leaderboard mechanism, although the incentives ended up being poorly aligned. The first rater of a deal would get a bunch of points regardless of their rating of a deal, and so their rating didn’t matter. They would just spam (in the gamer-speak sense) the “10″ rating since it was closest to the next deal button, and do this hundreds of times without looking at the deal at all. Future voters would get points based on the crowd average, so the first voter would skew the points rating all of the deals in one sitting. It ended up that the ratings on the deals were not really accurate, thus undermining the crowdsourcing of the deals and thwarting our business goals. However, this example was more of an implementation failure than a failure of gamification in general.

Extensions

While it’s a bit nefarious to use game motivations to get people to buy stuff, why not use the principles to try to get people to do things that are in their best interests? Cue the whole “with great power comes great responsibility” quote. Modern businesses like Health Month are trying approaches along these lines. Straightforward extensions include using games to motivate yourself to work on personal projects, clean the house, improve your community, and other useful activities.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s easier and more fun in the short term to play Farmville for an hour than it is to contribute meaningful significant work in an hour. Why work hard now when I can just slack off and play word games with friends online? But in the long run, it’s sad to see so much potential be wasted. Everyone needs downtime, but maybe we can do more with these motivational hacks. Why shouldn’t mind-numbing work be gamified to make it more interesting to those who are participating in it? Can we make seemingly difficult work like writing books or starting businesses be more like a game by providing smaller milestones and more effective feedback? Dan Pink in Drive has the workplace in mind when considering motivation. Interesting ideas to consider.

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Original article: Gamification Is Not Entirely Bullshit

Immediacy and Inspiration

It’s more useful to write about experiences at a recent conference right now instead of two months from now. The time delay not only dampens memory, it also weakens excitement. It definitely helps to write about things when I am first excited or think about them, because once the enthusiasm fades it feels more difficult.

Topics that I once thought were fascinating are no longer so after I have been exposed to them for awhile. Strike while you are inspired with learning, because after that energy passes, you are less likely to be interested in it because you have already internalized the concepts. It’s hard to get fired up about something that you see as obvious. Here is a great summary of this idea.

I internally model this as your brain being in roughly a steady state. Something comes around that shakes up your mental models, and the resultant attempt to put your brain back into equilibrium causes a great deal of energy to be put off. After this happens, it’s tough to recreate the level of energy that happened, and it’s also hard to difficult to remember what your brain state previously was.

This goes back to Steve Pavlina’s concept of writing within 48 hours of getting the idea:

I don’t maintain a list of article ideas, I don’t actively brainstorm ideas in advance, and I generally don’t ask for suggestions. I’ve done all of those things in the past, but they don’t work well for me in practice. At one point I had a list of about 200 new article ideas. When I scanned it for something to write about, I was usually bored by everything on it.

If I get a suggestion from someone for a new article, I’ll normally write about it that same day if it excites me. Otherwise I simply let it go. Ideas by themselves have no value to me. There’s an infinite supply of ideas. The present-moment inspired ideas are the ones worth exploring.

Inspirational energy has a half life of about 24 hours. If I act on an idea immediately (or at least within the first few hours), I feel optimally motivated, and I can surf that wave of energy all the way to clicking “Publish.” If I sit on an idea for one day, I feel only half as inspired by it, and I have to paddle a lot more to get it done. If I sit on it for 2 days, the inspiration level has dropped by 75%, and for all practical purposes, the idea is dead. If I try to write it at that point, it feels like pulling teeth. It’s much better for me to let it go and wait for a fresh wave. There will always be another wave, so there’s no need to chase the ones I missed.

Why Writing Backlogs Are Harmful

One problem with maintaining a backlog of things to write about is that the overhead of managing all of those ideas. There is too much work in process, and thinking about too many things causes thrashing. This reminds me of my post on limiting reading work in progress and books in progress.

Keeping a backlog of writing ideas becomes especially problematic when a long lead time between when the ideas are written down and when they are implemented occurs. Often I’ll forget what I was thinking about when I wrote a nugget for a post seed. Or I will read a book and have to re-read parts of it to get the context back. This process causes waste.

It’s certainly possible for cutting-edge ideas to become stale over time. This is also a form of waste.

Of course, it can be tough to get important things done while making time to write. Queueing by utilizing a backlog is one potential path, but a better solution seems to be more frequent and regular writing. By just sitting down and getting the ideas out there right after a new association is made, better writing can actually happen with less effort.

I think having less of a backlog contrasts a bit with the Fieldstone Method of Writing by one of my favorite authors, Jerry Weinberg. However, there seems to be some overlap, in that action with inspiration is easier than action without inspriation.

Do you find that you have too many ideas for posts, or too few? If too few, do you want some ideas?

Original article: The Case Against Writing Backlogs