Category Archives: Featured Articles

Someday, Everyone Will Be a Programmer

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Over the past few decades, Computer programming has ignited gallons of technological innovation, disrupting one industry after the other. For as long, programming has been a skilled task, a niche profession, art of sorts too. It has also made good programmers a rare breed. But I’ve started to imagine that in the coming years everyone will be able to program.

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.”

Most people already program their devices as end-users to a tiny extent, be it an iPhone or the heating thermostat. But a more diverse level of programming will reach the masses, sooner than one might think. It won’t be the same as one would perceive writing complex computer code. It will be more intuitive.

At the moment, the majority of programming is profit or research oriented. The mass programming that I anticipate will primarily be self-serve. Want your refrigerator to automatically order a watermelon and some cold beverages for home delivery based on periodic weather forecast checks? Just program it through your tablet. Want to replace a broken part in your juicer mixer? Just program the 3D printer to make a new one right at home. Want the carpet vacuumed before the in-laws arrive in the evening? Just program the personal robot at home to do so while you are at work.

This emergence is already being made possible due to:

1. Open hardware initiatives, that make device integration and prototyping easier than ever, like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, SparkFun, Seeed Studio, GTA04, Pandora Handheld, and its all going to be huge.

2. Global ‘Learn to Code’ initiatives, that encourage programming as a fun activity for all, like Code Year 2012 (where 333,628 people have already enrolled at the time of writing this post), the UK government introducing programming lessons into British schools, and ‘The Academy for Software Engineering‘ – New York City’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software, and even the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project will reach out to kids in under-developed nations.

3. Visual programming tools, that enable a simplified approach to developing applications, will also help accelerate the adoption of the self-serve programming culture, a bit like ifttt I suppose. But their UI/UX will take a few more years to achieve mass appeal.

4. Community support – Years ago I read somewhere that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” I believe programmers and hackers are not such institutions. We like to share, teach and learn in the process. The sheer volume of open source projects out in the wild is an evidence of this. The existing programming community will help thrive the Long Tail of mass programming.

Computer Science may remain to be for the elite, but someday, soon, self-serve programming is going to become a common man’s Swiss Army Knife.

3 Things I Learnt After High School About Selling

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In between high school and university, I sold my first commercial software, a billing application I wrote back then in Pascal for a banquet organizer in the neighbourhood. Those were probably the most satisfying $10 I had earned. It taught the programmer in me some simple yet invaluable lessons in selling.

1. Know your customers – Before I approached the banquet organizer, I came to know from a nearby shop owner that they were having trouble with the taxman because of improper bookkeeping. I sold the software to them on the very premise that it will relatively improve their billing and reporting capability, and it did.

Here’s a story: A disappointed salesman of a cola company returns from his Middle East assignment. A friend asked, “Why weren’t you successful with the Arabs?” The salesman explained, “When I got posted in the Middle East, I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch as cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem. I didn’t know the Arabic language. So, I planned to convey the message visually through a poster with three pictures..

First picture: A man lying in the hot desert sand, totally exhausted and fainting.

Second picture: The man is drinking our cola.

Third picture: Our man is now totally refreshed.

And this poster was pasted all over the place. “Then that should have worked!” said the friend. “The hell it should have!?”, said the salesman. “I didn’t realize that Arabs read from right to left.”

2. Price it high – In hindsight, I think I should have priced my billing software higher, much higher. $10 barely covered the development costs, but I didn’t pay much attention to this critical component at age 18. Now I know, it’s easier to lower the price if you’re too high than higher if you are too low. Everyone wants a deal so when you have high prices it’s easy to discount. A high price communicates value. It also helps sustain a higher quality of service.

Here’s a story: We went into Triple A, CSAA in San Francisco. It was going to be our first multi-million dollar customer. I went in with Gina. They loved our stuff, it really was going to do them a world of good. They said, how much is it?

And I was about to go, “$75,000…” And Gina goes, “Shut up I’m the salesperson.” She said, “A million dollars.”

And I went “…” Gina’s going, “Shut up. I’m the salesperson.”

And the guy looks at Gina and said, “Gina you’re out of your mind. We don’t pay more than $675,000.”

And Gina said, “All right. We’ll let you have it for $675,000.”

So, here was this software. I was about to let it go for $75,000, my first professional software salesperson had just gotten $675,000 and she did the same thing. And she said, instead of per year, she said, “But that’s for the base module. What other ones would you like?”

By the time we walked out, we got an enterprise software order for about $1.2 million. The point about pricing is, particularly if you are an engineer, it’s very easy to under price your product. Because you tend to value it on cost or need or competitive or whatever.

3. Personality of the product – My billing app only had 2-3 screens but it did what it was supposed to do. It was quick, it validated all data entry and it had decent exception handling. But it lacked a personalilty. Just like us humans, a product cannot make everyone happy, so it’s important for it to have an opinion and take a side. None of it mattered then, because I was just selling to one customer. But it matters with products now, because there are a few thousand of any sort in the market trying to get the customers attention. So, how do you get the customers attention? Underdo your competitionand make the choice insanely simple for the customers. (Update 26 Oct 2011: Jason Shen has written a nice article about How to Give Your Product Personality.)

Here’s a story: “Professor” Sheridan Simove has “produced” a 200 page book entitled “What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex”. This Worldwide Best-Seller is currently sold out online on Amazon. “Author” Sheridan Simove said, “This book is the result of 39 years of painstaking research and practical study into the subject. I left nothing to chance and really threw myself into my work.” The twist — all 200 pages of the paperback book are blank.

The Anti-Social Network

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“Do feelings of deprivation drive entrepreneurs and economies?,” asks Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School. After watching ‘The Social Network‘ one evening this week, I was left with feelings of inspiration and speculation, much to do with the same question.

Speaking at Startup School, Mark Zuckerberg got a laugh out of how accurately his wardrobe was represented in the movie. “It’s interesting what stuff they focused on getting right,” Zuckerberg reflected. More importantly, Zuckerberg took a stab at Hollywood, “They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” I think that’s the key aspect of the discussion. Feelings of deprivation do drive entrepreneurs and economies. Most entrepreneurs build what they need and this dogfooding leads to bigger things. Evidently, economies innovate the most during recessions. Scarcity and necessity are the catalysts of invention. When Michael Arrington asked in his essay, “Are you a Pirate?,” and wrote about the “risk aversion algorithm,” it gave me goosebumps for the same reason. Some of us want to be in the game, not just watching it.

The other aspect of the film that I found intriguing was the palette of Zuckerberg’s character. He doesn’t come across as a likeable person, yet he has friends (albeit few), enemies, a life and some ideas. While Zuck’s character has been shown as cocky, cunning and deceitful (what would you expect, he’s the CEO b**ch), he is also shown to be calm, focused and optimistic. In a way, the Zuck in the movie and the Zuck in real-life, both understand the trap of “cognitive afterimage”, because one of the fascinating things about “building things” is that it lets you see beyond that trap. Entrepreneurship can be a dope and an anti-depressant, at the very same time. It can make you dreamy, sometimes overly optimistic and sometimes deeply stressed. But it all literally spirals into a larger psychological mind-set.

In a study conducted at Harvard Medical School, 27 students were paid to play Tetris (the video game where shapes fall from the top of the screen while the player rotates them to create as many unbroken lines as possible). For days after the experiment, the students couldn’t stop “seeing” and even dreaming about shapes falling from the sky.

“This stems from a very normal physical process that repeated playing triggers in brains,” explained researcher Shawn Achor. The students became stuck in something called a “cognitive afterimage,” where seeing something for an extended period of time actually clouds your vision because this image has (temporarily, anyway) changed the wiring in your brain. “This explains why unhappy people get stuck in negative thinking patterns, both personally and professionally — their brains are searching for more reasons to fail and be miserable.”

“Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full,” stated Achor. “It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective and successful at work and in life.”

Like attracts like. Some refer to it as the Law of Attraction, as did the documentary ‘The Secret‘ that I saw sometime back on the recommendation of my sister. Time and again, personally and externally, I’ve found that the anticipation and the process of “building things” is so engrossing and fullfilling that it lets you see beyond the negative thought patterns. Creativity helps in avoiding negativity by means of innate expression, and it helps attracting simplicity and prosperity by means of realistic optimism.

Feelings of deprivation can be constructive or destructive. Some individuals try to focus on the former and some focus on the latter. But in the end, we all belong to the same social network.

[from the film]
Mark Zuckerberg: Your date looks so familiar to me.
Sean Parker: She looks familiar to a lot of people.
Mark Zuckerberg: What do you mean?
Sean Parker: A Stanford MBA named Roy Raymond wants to buy his wife some lingerie but he’s too embarrassed to shop for it at a department store. He comes up with an idea for a high end place that doesn’t make you feel like a pervert. He gets a $40,000 bank loan, borrows another $40,000 from his in-laws, opens a store, and calls it Victoria’s Secret. Makes a half million dollars his first year. He starts a catalog, opens three more stores and after five years he sells the company to Leslie Wexner and the Limited for four million dollars. Happy ending, right? Except two years later, the company’s worth 500 million dollars and Roy Raymond jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. Poor guy just wanted to buy his wife a pair of thigh highs.