Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Silicon Valley is the banal cliche where ideas come to life. Everything you can think of there is an app for that. The common saying is that ideas don't matter, only execution can bring them to life.
My Alarm rang at 4am, I usually set it 30 minutes before the time I have to get up from bed. But on this day, I only had 2 hours of sleep. I never manage to have a good night sleep on my first day on the job. But at 4 am, my body felt light, the bed felt exceptionally comfortable, I had to spend at least another 5 minutes enjoying this moment before facing the day. So I fell asleep.
When I first started to work on the web, I had no way to track how users interacted with my websites. I created HTML websites and the only way I could think of to know how many people visited was to use those all too familiar page counters. Fast forward a few years, there are so many analytical tools available. But just like page counters, we use analytics mainly for page views.
That kid in the back was right. Nothing in Math made any sense. The vectors, the matrices, the limits, or, for God sake, cotangent! None of it made any sense. When are we ever going to use these in the real world? The teacher argued that it was necessary to learn without giving us any tangible thing to grasp. The only immediate reward that justified learning this organized gibberish was getting a good grade.
A few years ago, I discovered Alain de Botton, a sort of modern philosopher that took an interesting approach on the way we approach the events of our lives. He focused particularly on pessimism and how we react to it. His work is based on the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who dedicated a large part of his work on the problem of Anger.
My overall experience with facebook has been negative. Like many people these days, I decided it is best to not have a facebook profile. Well technically I do have one. OK, I have two of them, and both are deactivated. One is my regular account and the other is my developer account that I reactivate every time I need to perform dev work with their API.
What would you do if you could keep your wages. The exact same wages you make at your current job, but you have only 2 hours of work to do a day. You already took a two months long vacation where you traveled to all the places you wished you could and had the time of your life.
With the internet at our finger tips, it is easy to access any sort of information instantly. Long gone are the days where you memorize all the important dates or names in history. With a few key strokes, Wikipedia presents you with more information than you care to know.
When I see great content on the web, the first thing I do is click on that about us page. I am almost always disappointed. I can tell there is just one guy running the show, but he keeps referring to himself as We.
Everyday is an opportunity to learn. But sometimes, it is hard to find something new to learn. When I stumbled upon PHP, I spent day and night trying to follow tutorials and build stuff. At some point I didn't know what else I could experiment with it. It's not that I knew everything about it, but I simply couldn't go beyond what I didn't know I didn't know.
