15 2 / 2012
2 Inspirational Links
14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic
06 2 / 2011
For ordinary people with extraordinary dreams
Watch this video. For some reason the embed isn’t working :/
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20 10 / 2010
What do you want to learn?
This morning, I had a moment of inspiration while watching the Startup School videos. I’m going to start cranking on this idea 110% and get a working site out the door.
But I have one question for readers (please leave your answers in the comments):
What do you want to learn?
HTML? CSS? JQuery?
More details over the coming days…
04 10 / 2010
Rock-solid Fundamentals
Over the weekend, I saw The Social Network and read this article, The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook, from Hacker News. The impact on me was the importance of ‘rock-solid fundamentals.’
The last few months were frustrating, rewarding, and even community building. With other readers, I learned the basics of Django, GAE, and now have the ability to patch together websites. However in the mad dash to learn ASAP, I did not build a solid comp sci foundation.
Like anything in life, if it is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. I have learned how to code, but when my roommate asked me, “So you can define a class?” I couldn’t. I know that there is a class within my models & views files, but I can’t answer why.
””“
After some pleasantries the discussion of technology started and of course a few questions here and there. What is load exactly? What does it mean? Discussions on threads and processes. How can two processes communicate with one another? What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale. I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental.
””“
Those few sentences from the Facebook interview piece resonated with me. In TheSocialNetwork, guys were hacking away like coding Ferraris- while taking shots. To become an engineer at Facebook or Google, you MUST know the basics, they understand the why. That is what I need, and what I recommend to other readers.
Gain the fundamentals to understand why.
Resources:
MIT OpenCourseWare: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
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23 9 / 2010
Dings to Your Pride
This is an email I sent to a friend today that seemed like a great post for the blog. Enjoy!
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during junior year at UNC, i came up with the idea for knowble, a facebook for researchers. basically i decided i had to go for it regardless of what happened or it would drive me crazy. so stopped rowing, and went head first into it. tons of meetings with the university, and ultimately got about $30k from the university to work on it.
partnered with a well-known business guy and things looked great. was featured in fortune small business & got invited to speak at DEMOfall, a huge startup conference. basically i was riding high…except i realized knowble did not have a revenue model. ultimately had to part ways with biz partner. he had millions so this didn’t do a thing to him, but it did put a serious dent in my pride.
right now, you are in a tough spot. you will learn from this whole process to emerge much more knowledgable/experienced than others who haven’t been here. regardless of the companies that turn you down, these are just dings to your pride.
its the dings, scratches, and scars along the way that make someone stronger- not the fact they had a smooth ride from A to B. because at some point everyone hits a road bump. i’d rather be tested early so i know how to react to those situations, than face them for the first time when i’m further along in my career & have more to lose.
the smooth sailors will react just like you are doing now, and that wont be pretty…you’ll take the hit and just keep on ticking!
