Making something interesting from something mundane has been vital for us humans. Our tools, art, literature, fashion, food, and many digital creations today share this common theme.

But, while some people find satisfaction in carving stones, some people find pleasure in throwing stones on others.

For makers, problems worth solving are like stones. Hard, everywhere around us, indistinctive at times. A maker would pick many stones by the river, but only carve on a chosen one. Carving something surreal, like fabric wrinkles on a stone, is a solution to curiosity. Giving shape to an idea is a manifestation of one's opinion, many times serving a practical purpose.

Painstaking, long work with the chisel on a stone gives way to an artifact. It becomes a body of work, with a legacy, and a big one too if it resonates with many other beings.

But, what is an artifact really?

(noun) an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest.

Any human creation, however mundane or magnificent, is an artifact. It's an artifact for its maker first, and then it may go on to touch other like-minded admirers.

There are thousands if not millions of poems about love, writings about ambition, films about coming-of-age, songs about heart-break, and everything else about everything that's possible or imaginable. Each one is unique, because it reflects its makers heart & mind.

With an abundance of artifacts, should we stop making new ones? Should we curb our creative or intellectual instincts, just because it may not be unique enough or as popular as we expect it to become?

Not many people may know or remember _why. He was a prolific coder in the Ruby programming community, unusual writer, cartoonist, and an inspiring maker of things.

_why disappeared over a decade ago, but left behind artifacts of his work.

He once said:

When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create.

When I hear armchair opinionists in tech, politics, economics or social spheres, with strong views on things they have no hands-on experience with, and no intention to take any constructive action either, I just hope they mold their opinions with some artifacts of their own.

Creating an artifact of your own, in your own space, in your own time, is by far the most therapeutic activity capable of compounding results. Done often, it's a door to self-actualization. Done good, it's a treasure of esteem and wealth.

It doesn't need to be perfect, grand, or aim for popularity. The real value is in the process of creating something, which itself is liberating.

And it's not that creating something is hard. Much of what looks hard is laziness.

That's the essence of procrastination. It's a fear of no immediate reward. I feel the breakthrough to overcome this is to keep the scope small and make the reward intrinsic, which is in our control more than external stimuli.

I'm proud to be an indie maker. I have great respect for makers of things, be it something small or big, obscure or popular.

For others on the fence, I will suggest making an artifact, anything.

Start, do as much, and then finish it. Show and tell. Rinse and repeat.

Create, to shape your mind.

At times, making a decision is hard. Making good decisions, although subjective, is harder.

There have been days when I’ve stood gazing for minutes in the cereal isle, contemplating which one to buy. This “analysis paralysis” had started to silently spread to bigger, more important, personal and professional decisions.

I had to mend it.

After much reading and practising over the past few months, I’ve gained a bit more insight as to why some decisions seem difficult to make, and how we can make better decisions without complicating things or making matters worse.

Excluding impulse, almost all important decisions are made based on willpower or critical thinking, or a mix of both. Interestingly, research has found that willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources.

Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank; deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is empty.

So now I try to conserve and better manage my tank of resources for what really matters, ignoring situations and decisions which don’t offer deserving results. For every decision (action), there should be an equal, or greater, outcome (reaction).

Walking through the jungle of everyday dilemmas, I learnt two simple yet profound ways that help me make quicker and effective decisions:

1. Make reversible or recurring decisions early and quick.

As much as possible, plan recurring actions in advance; trivial things like clothes to wear, meals for next day/week, monthly expenses, travel routes etc. One less decision to make goes a long way.

There is one thing in common between (late) Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg – they all wear the same thing every day [for a reason].

Similarly, if a decision seems reversible, then be swift. For example, if you find yourself constantly thinking about an interesting paid event, but not yet sure about attending it, then just book it. If you don’t feel like going later, then you can always ask for a refund. It’s reversible.

2. Make small decisions quicker than bigger ones.

Don’t fret about the small things. Bigger ones being those that will impact you even after a year, for example: choice of car/refrigerator/laptop to buy, place to live, organisation to work for etc. Making these bigger decisions effectively needs practice and a little discipline; a simple framework of sorts:

• Identify only 2-3 criteria or goals, meeting which will be sufficient for a sound decision, and move on as soon as they’re met.
• Set a hard time limit for the decision. Not only will it stop from delays and procrastination, but a deadline’s confinement will stimulate the mind to yield better results.
• What does your gut feeling say? What does your past experience tell you? What does your knowledge convey (or that of others, for a different perspective)? Sometimes the best decisions are as easy as listening to your inner voice. Intuitive decisioning is a quality that elevates great entrepreneurs, CEOs and leaders.

If still undecided, then going out for a walk (endorphins to the rescue), sleeping over it (sleep clears our mind, literally), or “doing the opposite” can help, and if all else fails — try the “coin flip” trick.

At the end of the day, an “ok” (adequate) quick decision is better than a perfect (optimal) yet slow one. Essentially, there’s no such thing as ‘the best’ decision.

What are you?

What do you mean, what am I?

You are beer. And this bottle, is your company. You think, you’ll get into that glass. You’ll have fun. Isn’t it? But look at this [trying to pour the capped bottle in the glass]. Can you see? You actually don’t want to leave the bottle. For the beer to get into the glass, it needs to leave the bottle first. Once you’re out of the bottle, then you can get into any glass you want. In this glass, if you want. Or you can get into this glass. Even in this glass..

It’s a wine glass.

How the hell do you know that? You are beer.

This conversation opens the cap to the protagonist’s entrepreneurial flow in Pitchers, a web series aptly named as a frisky notion of friends drinking pitchers of beer while discussing their startup pitches.

Despite my absence from blog writing due to the slothful comfort-zone of ‘sound bite sized’ tweets and a disgraceful decline in long-form effort, I’m hoping to find time and reclaim my desire for musings and rants, partly thanks to my sister who recommended that I watch Tripling, another web series from the same outfit about siblings on a road trip.

What nudged me, and resonated with me about these web series’ created by the team at a digital media startup — The Viral Fever (TVF), is not just the content, but also the creator. They’re real, honest and funny. At a time when original content from the likes of Netflix is disrupting digital media as well as the appetite of a binging audience, TVF is creating interestingly fresh content and building a monetizable platform in the form of TVF Play for other creators to leverage.

TVF is an interesting venture in itself. Its founder, Arunabh, an IIT alumnus, had worked on a drone image processing project for the US Air Force, before realizing that probably he is ‘beer’, capable of a different sort of envisioning. In a chat on the Founding Fuel channel, he had some interesting views to share on entrepreneurship:

The desire [of starting-up] was stronger to prove myself right, than prove others wrong.

I have a very counter-intuitive opinion [on your office being a workplace or a fun place].. I don’t think offices have become fun or become cooler because of colorful beanbags, that’s the worst thing that Google did.. everybody thinks that it’s a great culture.. it’s not. Culture is not defined by beanbags in any office.. in-fact our office is a great balance of formal and informal environment, and if you take any of that out, it will fall like a pack of cards. We don’t believe that if we’ll be having fun and we’ll be smoking up, we’ll be getting great ideas.. the ways of working have been misconstrued and defined very wrongly. When somebody walked into this office and said that writing is my passion, then dude I don’t really need to make my place fun to make you passionate about your passion.. in-fact the litmus test would be that I should be throwing you into one cave and still you’d be writing because it’s your passion.. so we would rather have people who anyway know what’s fun for them is doing the work that they love, then that’s it, we don’t need to have colorful beanbags.

I read somewhere.. the only three things certain in life are death, taxes and competition. I feel that competition is a good thing.. competition always keeps you on your toes.. competition shows that you’re not the only guy playing the game. The big guys aspire.. and have our name in their PPT’s, so I think that’s a great thing to be proud of. So there are two ways to live life, there’s an abundance mentality and there’s a scarcity mentality. Scarcity would be that there are only so many brand, so let’s try do something, otherwise there’s competition, what will happen. And then there’s an abundance mentality that humanity could have survived without Apple devices, and Apple is the most valuable company in this world. Humanity didn’t need Apple devices, but the guy believed in it, and the company believed in it, and then the entire team thought that let’s make something awesome that everybody would want to own it.. so I think when you come with that abundance mentality, then there’s so much of money and so many opportunities to have that the universe is waiting for you to give it something, so that it will give you that sort of wealth.. so I never consider competition.

We need to keep disrupting ourselves. I wrote some 5-7 rules, when I started.. one of the rules was that we should be doing one scary thing every three months, and if we’re not doing it, then we’re not really moving in that direction. When expectations increase.. you become cautious, and experiments fail and succeed, but you get unpredictable result only when you experiment. I feel that if we’re able to imbibe disruption as a habit, then that’s something which will sail us through.

What do you do to make a community.. you just make great product. I think there’s no shortcut to that.. and you just have fun with it.. and that will resonate. If ever I could write a thesis on the whole definition of “cool”, coolness is nothing but anything that has shocked, and given shock & awe to people, and that when starts to get accepted, becomes cool. When it becomes slightly mainstream, it stops being cool.. so there’s a very fine line between the birth of something cool and the death of something cool. A very good line comes to my mind, from Dark Knight, which says, `either you die and become a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.’

Last month, Professor Andrei Linde, who’s said to be the father of the theory of cosmic inflation, was surprised by his assistant with the ‘smoking gun’ evidence of the origins of the universe. After having waited over 30 years, the new proof (of gravitational waves from the Big Bang) supports his idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly after it was born.

Celebrating the breakthrough, Professor Linde made an interesting remark:

If this is true, this is a moment of understanding of nature, of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms, and let’s see, let just hope that is not a trick. I always live with this feeling, what if I’m tricked. What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful. It is helpful to have events like that. It’s really really helpful.

His comment resonates with me more due to my continuing thought about the importance of ‘measuring before perceiving‘. How will a theory ever become a discovery if we don’t measure the cause and effect? Without measuring, it will all be a hypothesis, an assumption.

For most people, it’s easy to fall into the trap of justifying their ideas, beliefs and decisions if they’re based on external influences (viz. mostly Herd mentality), or even instinct. While gut instincts may work at times, they don’t always entail the complete picture, or even the real picture, mostly because our brain is playing tricks and blinding us with cognitive biases more often than we realize.

If we don’t measure the past performance and current state, we can’t ascertain a baseline for comparison (which is an important motivational benchmark), and we can’t gather enough heuristics to make an informed decision about the future actions for improvement.

Most people want to make more money, but how often do they start that process by measuring their spending?

People who are busy (or think they are) want to save time and be more productive, but do they first assess their daily activities?

Everyone wants to lose weight, but do we regularly evaluate our body (weight, waist, BMI etc.), monitor exercise intensity or maintain a food diary?

This form of measurement, also known as personal analytics or self-tracking, is the first and most important step in understanding the reasons behind most pitfalls, whether they are personal, interpersonal, professional or even social. It may sound prophetic, even illuminating with a slight spiritual connotation, but data can talk and help see the bigger picture, only if we’re prepared to tune-in and observe the ordinarily hidden sentiments.

A recurring phenomenon I’ve noticed, common to most desires of change (be it in terms of wealth, time management, weight loss or something else), that adversely affects our ability to improve, is the concept of instant gratification. In simple terms, it’s the tendency for people to want an immediate pay-off rather than a larger gain later on. Most people would rather take $100 now than $200 in a month. Likewise, most people would rather buy something fancy and expensive now than something affordable on a special occasion, or, eat a chocolate cake now than on the weekend after a week of exercise and healthy diet. A general argument against it is that life is short, we work hard and we should enjoy the ‘small things’ now than wait; but growing levels of debt, obesity and lost productivity in today’s world indicates otherwise. The fact is that urban societies are becoming growingly and impulsively self-indulgent, without completely considering the long-term ramifications. ‘High life’ is becoming the new Pied Piper for many.

In his counter-intuitive and insightful book, ‘Wait: The Art and Science of Delay’, author Frank Partnoy weaves together findings from hundreds of scientific studies and interviews with wide-ranging experts to craft a picture of effective decision-making that runs counter to our brutally fast-paced and complex world.

Even as technology exerts new pressures to speed up our lives, it turns out that the choices we make –– unconsciously and consciously, in time frames varying from milliseconds to years –– benefit profoundly from delay. Taking control of time and slowing down our responses yields better results in almost every arena of life … even when time seems to be of the essence.

Having said that, if we constantly delay a pleasure, we miss the entire point of delayed gratification.

Footnote: During the past few months, I’ve been self-tracking various aspects of my life and work. It may be too early to call it a breakthrough, but it has resulted in better understanding, resultant changes and some clear signs of improvement. I’ve started using a few unobtrusive, yet insightful, analytical tools in areas like time tracking (with RescueTime), personal finance (with Pocketbook) and cash flow/financial forecasting (with an Excel spreadsheet based on ZetaBee Cash Flow). I’ve also been looking for a simple and intuitive daily goals & mood tracker mobile app (something like Habit List or Strides, but for Android, so drop a message if you know one. Updated 24 August: using Trackthisforme and also found Habit Domino).

A tweet this morning pointed to an article titled “Stop talking about your brilliant startup idea!“, in which a fellow Melbournian writes (in summary):

Nobody cares about your idea.

Stop talking to your friends about your ideas.

Stop talking to customers about your ideas.

Stop telling me your ideas.

As harsh as that may sound, there is a better reason to “stop talking.” There’s plenty of scientific evidence on the notion of secrecy, which shows that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Derek Sivers wrote about it a few years back:

Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

You have “identity symbols” in your brain that make your self-image. Since both actions and talk create symbols in your brain, talking satisfies the brain enough that it “neglects the pursuit of further symbols.”

Having said that, I also think that “nourishment” of ideas has merit. Talking about ideas early-on, yet informally, is a form of “rubber ducking” that forces one to explain their thoughts to others. It not only helps in garnering feedback and involving like-minded collaborators, but it also helps in refining the concept in one direction or another. Such informal discussion, starting at 17th century coffee houses in particular, has been playing an important role in the cultural, social and intellectual advancements since The Renaissance.

The Ottoman empire expanded throughout Europe in the 17th century. From Vienna came the idea of a place where men could meet and discuss various topics over coffee or tea (Viennese coffee house culture). Adapted to Western culture, the Turkish “coffee cafes” became the place where friends met for a drink. The tradition of the Agora was moved from the public square to the center city cafe. Philosophers, poets, writers, and intellectuals of all types made these places their new meeting places. (source: Predecessors of Café Philosophique)

The coffee shops, taverns and pubs back then were a place where people could gather and share ideas. It was the “conjugal bed” where ideas could have sex, as Matt Ridley would say (his TED Talk). Shakespeare and many other laureates hung out at these places to discuss their ideas, encourage and critique each other, learn, and most importantly — listen. Without the listening part, it would all have been a huge echo chamber.

Today, new environments like Internet forums, online or offline social networking, co-working spaces etc. are filling the shoes. So don’t stop talking about your ideas. But listen more.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on attaining more discipline in my professional life as a startup founder. It had become apparent to me that I needed to step up and make it happen. Striving for it has raised an interesting question in my mind — could positive thinking be delusional at times, and consequently counter-productive?

You see, a positive mindset can often lead to a mirage, a state of daydreaming that fools us into believing that we are self-aware and in complete control. Most people have to confront sloth, as I did too, due to the comfort zone nested by immoderate hopefulness.

For centuries cognition has tricked on humans into believing their actions are completely thought-out and preplanned. Modern psychology says otherwise. Much of human behaviour is still rooted and influenced by our “old brain,” the part of our mind controlling the survival instincts that kept our ancestors alive. This subconscious stimulus (optimism bias, updated 9 Oct) keeps us going, but the downside is that hopefulness can very easily make us less determined. Laziness can give way to lack of focus and procrastination, and before we realize it our positive thoughts would silently slide plans into dormancy.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times also reflected on this phenomenon:

What if all this positivity is part of the problem? What if we’re trying too hard to think positive and might do better to reconsider our relationship to “negative” emotions and situations?

..visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it.

Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty. The Stoics recommended “the premeditation of evils,” or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope. Besides, they noted, imagining that you might lose the relationships and possessions you currently enjoy increases your gratitude for having them now. Positive thinking, by contrast, always leans into the future, ignoring present pleasures.

Positive affirmation should be more like an expression of joy and less like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity, the article expresses rightfully. It’s a valid measure, which should apply to our work (workplaces) as much as it applies to our lives. Many businesses, particularly the bigger ones, ruthlessly reinforce optimism with beliefs like “stay upbeat at all times” or “quick wins for big growth”, more so at times of a slow-down or recession. The prevailing financial crisis in many ways is an outcome of such over-optimism, as one other article speculates:

No one was psychologically prepared for hard times when they hit, because, according to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring it on.

A common pitfall occurs when people automatically connect positive thinking with happiness, writes a people-management thinker:

And so it is in the workplace, where positive employees are lauded and the negative are derided. Positive employees are seen as team players but negative workers are condemned as outcasts. The consequence is that realistic and rational people, usually the negative thinkers, remain unheard.

You see this happening in the way Human Resources departments reframe language to make it sound more positive. ‘Negative feedback’ has become ‘areas for improvement’. A ‘demotion’ has become ‘a new opportunity’. ‘Problems’ have become ‘challenges’.

So if optimism is as myopic and hazardous for us as pessimism and if neither is superior, then what could be a more effective mindset?

Maybe realism is one such alternative — the ability to be prepared for the worst, but still believe for the best to occur. Just like many successful businesses, people can rationally get it right by setting practically high goals, putting contingency plans in place and having gratitude for everything that creates (a sense of) abundance in their life & work.

Even my 4 year old daughter is wise to learn that “you get what you get, you don’t get upset.” As for her wishful thinking to feast on dessert each night, she is learning to be thankful for having that privilege and also to stay prepared for not receiving it each night.

When 1 in 3 humans are affected by a disease, it needs attention and help from all corners. There are many types of cancers, so it’s hard to say if we’ll ever be able to completely cure cancer. But prevention, early detection and proper care are crucial in cancer diagnosis and its treatment.

As David Agus, a cancer doctor, would like to say:

In health care today, we spend most of the dollars — in terms of treating disease — in the last two years of a person’s life.

I pondered on it one evening and thought I’d find out about some “programmable” possibilities related to cancer research for hackers from the non-scientific community, besides the obvious means of help like donations (both charity and research), awareness drives and volunteering.

I got in touch with Jon Kiddy, a software engineer who works at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Jon kindly shared his views and pointed out that the current state of cancer research can be summed up in one of Daniel Markham’s excellent posts. After having read the book on the subject called “The Emperor of All Maladies”, Daniel went on to state the general problem with cancer research is that the US healthcare isn’t setup to support individualized care and treatment, which is currently undergoing the most intensive scrutiny. A commentor on Hacker News responded to Daniel’s post with this inspiring message:

You want to fix cancer, don’t wait for the scientists. They are hobbled by regulation. Be an engineer: get out there and make one of the viable solutions work, and make it work outside the US.

What started as modest self-education, has led me to several impactful ways in helping with cancer research:

1. Distributed Computing Projects – In 2003, with grid computing, in less than three months scientists identified 44 potential treatments to fight the deadly smallpox disease. Without the grid, the work would have taken more than one year to complete. Participating in a distributed computing project is the easiest way to get involved with cancer research.

You can donate your unused computer resources to research projects like Help Conquer Cancer, Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Rosetta@home, Folding@home.

Grid computing works by splitting complex computations into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously on individual public nodes, there-by reducing research time and making the technology infrastructure cost-effective.

2. Build on “Big Data” – Massive amounts of raw data is available for analysis in cancer research. As Jon wrote back to me:

The problem comes when there is such a large amount of data to process in a field where each individual’s treatment is usually uniquely suited only to them. Hadoop/Hbase is in use by The Cancer Genome Atlas to make some of this process more bearable. Their datasets are invaluable.

The combination of Apache Hadoop (for distributed computing), HBase (distributed database), MapReduce (for distributed computing on large datasets on clusters of computers), R Project (for statistical computing), and Gephi (for visualization and exploration) changes the way we think about analysis of Big Data.

Data analysis, data visualization and even Web crawler technology are all important in cancer research, for processing highly distributable problems across huge datasets using a large number of computers.

Last year, the Cloudera Data Science Team wrote about some of their work with Hadoop:

Instead of focusing on a handful of outcomes, we can process all of the events in the data set at the same time. We can try out hundreds of different strategies for cleaning records, stratifying observations into clusters, and scoring drug-reaction tuples, run everything in parallel, and analyze the data at a fraction of the cost of a traditional supercomputer. We can render the results of our analyses using visualization tools that can be used by domain experts to explore relationships within our data that they might never have thought to look for. By dramatically reducing the costs of exploration and experimentation, we foster an environment that enables innovation and discovery.

3. Apps and Tools – Personal profiling and monitoring could be another area of focus for developers interested in cancer research or general health-related diagnosis.

• Whether it’s an app to protect against or detect (early) skin cancer,
• a wearable computing device to track Adverse Drug Events (ADE),
• a crowdsourced game to solve scientific puzzles,
• a prediction model based on social trends,
• or a Web-based tool (similar to mappiness or TrackYourHappiness) to monitor a persons diet (it’s been widely discussed that smoking, ingestion of sugar and excessive red meat may set the stage for rise in cancer occurrences).

There are lots of possibilities for personal solutions that aid in collective science.

“In lieu of spending a decade in training to become an oncologist, I have been able to put my skills to practical use.”, Jon says about the impact he’s making.

I really wish for many more technology enthusiasts to devote their time, skills and efforts in the fight against cancer. In what other ways can we help? Do share your comments and views.

Ever insightful, Paul Graham, recently wrote about Schlep Blindness, a phenomenon related to overlooking hard and unpleasant problems:

Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the [difficult] idea of fixing payments [that Stripe is doing].

I completely agree with Paul. However, I also tend to think that there’s a reverse schlep blindness at play in a lot of cases. Some startup founders often subconsciously ignore or avoid problems that seem too simple to solve. They would rather work on complex problems, requiring complicated architectures, plethora of ‘cool’ technologies and ‘beautifully’ intricate code, all of which few care much about and no one will pay for. Maybe it’s another form of schlep, a cognitive bias after all.

Yet another mobile website builder? Too simple to be “ground breaking”. Yet another Web form builder? Too easy, I’ll look naive. Yet another cloud platform for developers? A VPS is enough and there’s Heroku for everything else. Yet another blogging platform? Boring, most use WordPress anyways. A bingo card creator? Naaa.

‘Too simple to do’ doesn’t mean that it’s easy to build, easy to sell and unfeasible as a business because one might think there aren’t any paying customers for it. Such markets are often overlooked and eventually existing competition suffers a slow death due to lack of innovation and new ideas.

Hard problems are good, because both good and bad solutions to those tedious problems will result in learning, eventual innovation and disruption. Simple problems are good too, because their execution will require a radical (yet simple) solution, and that’s hard to do in itself.

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. (Updated 21 Feb 2014: checkout some fascinating screenshots of Visual Programming Languages)

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.

Italian-American jazz guitarist Joe Pass once said:

If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and its, almost lyrical, resemblence to life touched me. Any failure or setback in life can be overshadowed by what is done with the learning it leaves behind.

Starting this New Year on a philosophical note, wishing that it brings peace & good health to everyone.

Compulsive, disillusioned, aloof at times, hooked on to new ideas, craving for the next shot. In the dark depths of “The Valley”, they sniff on domain names. Despite suffering from a distortion in perceptions of time and space, there’s nothing quite like inhaling that volatile $9.99 stimulant from “Go Daddy”, the peddler. However, the psychoactive state through an intravenous injection or inhalation only lasts for a short while. And then, the withdrawal symptoms kick-in.

Most aspiring startup entrepreneurs are like drug addicts.

Drug addiction, or “substance dependence”, is dangerous. SUBSTANCE dependence. What has started bothering me lately is that many of my fellow dopey technologists are depending on something that has no substance at all, thereby feeling gloomy due to inaction and eventually it results in tragic cases of product abandonment and morale deprivation.

There are disturbing stories of intervention and rehab all over these days. One such testimony comes from “Sean” (name changed), who confesses:

I’m turning 30 and I’ve produced no amazing art.

Sean has ideas, lot’s of shimmering new ones. Incurably, he has procured domain names (over 300 now!), probably one (or more) for each one of them. But he feels he hasn’t done anything meaningful yet. This is a rather common psychedelic syndrome. Sean, and many others like him, are getting trapped by the thought, rather than the action. The realization is a good thing, because it can induce intervention.

A lot of these domain addictions occur due to, what we in the non-medical profession call, the first snort — viz. the recurring thought that the name is so important that it must come above & before all.

The name of your product is, and will always be, secondary to the product itself. The domain name is hugely overrated. It’s like naming your baby before you’ve even graduated from high-school. What it also does is that it creates a psychological barrier. Now that you’ve found a great name (great in your mind), you have to push yourself to build an equally great or even better application. Great, amazing, incredible, best, awesome, are all narcotic fences that restrict you (but look so good in keynotes by Apple Laboratories).

My fellow dopey technologists, The Crazy Ones, don’t get caught-up with the masturbation of your ideas. It’s pleasing, I know. But, don’t abuse your talent. Don’t take comfort in thoughts and imaginary applications. Find solace by finding customers, who will pay for a problem-solving product, not your idea or your domain name or that 3-page hypothesis you wrote about your new Spell Checker using Node.js and Haddop.

Say no to domain names until you can stand up on your feet with a simple working prototype or an MVP.

Say no to drugs.

—
P.S. Ironically, dope.com is a placeholder, that will probably sell for millions.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Steve Jobs
1955-2011

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.