Dev/Code/Hack

The Dream Of Life by Alan Watts

March 27, 2026, midnight

What follows is one of my favorite (and what I consider to be most profound) ideas from Alan Watts. It suggests, to me, the truth of our life in the simulation, and the recursive loop of existence which we find ourselves in.

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If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself - not as a stranger in the world - not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived by fluke - but you can begin to feel you own existence as absolutely fundamental.

I am not trying to sell you on this idea, in the sense of converting you to it. I want you to play with it. I want you to think of it's possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.

So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream for 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would naturally, as you begin on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you can concieve. And after several nights of seventy five years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream that’s not under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would do that and would come out of that and you would say "Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it"? Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further-in and further-out gambles to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living a life that you are actually living today.

That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally
the ultimate reality, not God in a political kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic, whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending that you are not.

Fiverr is Busted, Maybe It Needs More AI

May 9, 2025, midnight

The Fiverr CEO recently made a hilarious statement regarding how AI is COMING FOR ALL OF US LOL. Here's what he said:

So the AI doom and gloom train continues. But one need to look no further than Fiverr itself to realize what a crock of baloney this is. I'm currently dealing with what I believe is some kind of scammer who says I need to pay for extra. First, the seller sent me a request to modify the order, which I promptly accepted.

Upon accepting that, my order total did not update. So I opened a request with Fiverr customer support. They were of no use and basically said I need to purchase gig extras, so I did that, despite having to pay even more fees. After doing so, the seller kept requesting for more money, and so that's where I figured it's a scam. No problem right? I can first go ask the seller to cancel the order, right?... Right? No. Wrong. That part of the system doesn't work. So I tried 3 different browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Safari) with all ad blockers disabled.

Also, the seller kept requesting more money, so I figured I'd report some abuse. That's reasonable right? WRONG. THAT DOESN'T WORK EITHER.

At this point I'll just wait for the order time to pass and then hope I can cancel it that way. But the point of all this is that someone needs to either tell the Fiverr CEO to vibe code harder or maybe scale back his AI doomsday rhetoric, at least until his own damn site works. What a joke.

Startup Money (and how much?)

Feb. 20, 2017, midnight

Alright, did you get an offer to join a startup? Or maybe you are looking for a new career path. Are you fed up with years of wage slavery at huge corporations? Maybe you just graduated, looking for the first dent you'll make in the world. Perhaps you and a few friends are about to embark on a new voyage to discover a trove of digital treasures. So you're wondering if you should take that ever sought after leap of faith and join a startup? Maybe start your own?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, one of the top concerns is the experience you'll have, and the things you will learn. But after that, the next thing you might think about is how much money you'll be making. And that's what we'll be talking about today.

Startup Lifecycle

Let's talk about the various phases of a startup. These phases will be very relevant to the total compensation you get from your startup endeavors. Startups go through lots of phases during their total lifecycle. Let's define a startup lifecycle as the following steps:

Phase	# of People	Funding
Idea	You + couple founders	$0-50,000
Seed	Founders + couple employees	$100,000+
Series A, B	Founding team + early staff	$2-15 million
Series C-E	Early staff + Mid sized team	$20-300 million
Series G and beyond	Veteran staff + thousands of others	$500 million+
IPO/Acquisition	Thousands	Unpredictable

Your compensation will vary wildly depending on when you join, and when you leave through out the lifecycle. And of course, your role when you join the organization.

There are many entry and exit points. The most ideal timing is you starting the company, growing it to a massive size, and then IPO'ing or selling it. If you can achieve this extremely rare feat, you will receive all the monetary gifts our society can offer. But this applies to less than 1% of the population. So let's look at how it plays out for most people.

Early Staff (Series A, B)

Most people who join a startup will enter during the Series A or B phase. They are probably the first few engineers, first product person, first designer, first marketing professional, key sales or business developers, or other required professionals to help take over critical portions of the business. These people are usually filling the role a founder previously used to do.

The typical compensation package for early staff members is a relatively normal salary (maybe a bit less), and a hefty stock options package. The stock options will also have a very desirable strike price. The only problem is that the options value is highly volatile at this time. They could shoot through the roof, or fizzle out after years of hard work.

If these people stay with the startup through the whole lifecycle, they can get nicely rewarded. In best case scenario, the early staff is with the company through a big IPO or acquisition. In average case scenario, the startup will get acquired somewhere in in Series C-E. The financial rewards will breakdown like this

Best case: $1M to $100M+

Average case: $100K to $1M+

Worse case: Get a salary, maybe some stock compensation from an acquiring company

Mid Sized Team (Series C - E)

Many people will join a company during its growth phase. This usually means the company has already moved past the Series A or B round, has raised a few millions dollars, has really proven product market fit, and is well on its way. At this point, the company is usually hiring pretty aggressively, and is equally aggressive about its impact in the marketplace. Many people of various skills will be brought in during this time. However the certainty of success is still unknown, and the value of the stock options is not as great as it once was. The options strike price will be higher, and you will be exposed to less upside.

The typical compensation package for someone who joins during this phase is a nice, market-rate salary, and a decent stock options package but nothing like early staff.

Best case: $1M+

Average case: $10K to $100K in stock, plus salary

Worst case: Salary

Employee #1000 (Series G and beyond)

So you're getting aboard the hype train. The startup you are joining has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Or, hell, maybe even a billion dollars. This company is being talked about everywhere you look. Everyone wants to join. Everyone will be rich. It's the next Google! But you are one in a sea of many. It doesn't really feel like a startup, but everyone around you keeps calling it one. You're getting paid a great salary, but you don't really understand your stock options. The recruiter keeps saying it's worth a lot of money, and it'll be worth more in the future.

The typical compensation for this role is a market-rate salary (maybe a little below), and stock options with a high strike price or RSUs (restricted stock units). If you decide to join a company at this stage, you need to be mentally prepared for a lot of unknowns. You may go into this thinking it's a sure thing, but it is not. The company can still fail at this stage, or the value of the company could be massively reduced. Your options will have a huge strike price, and will create a large tax liability if you choose to early exercise them. Overall it is going to be a very complicated situation. You should only join this if you really understand what you're getting into, or if you are ok with simply receiving the salary offered.

Best case: $1M+

Average case: $10K-$1M

Worst case: Salary

Employee #1

The scenarios we just covered are the most common scenarios. When you join a startup, it's most likely you are going to fall in one of those categories. Now we will cover two more scenarios, both of which are very rare, and can yield enormous results, or catastrophic failure. Let's start with employee #1.

So maybe you have a couple of friends who decided to startup. They've put in their own money, or maybe they have a small amount of seed funding from an angel investor. You decide to join at this phase because you can tolerate the risk, and you are really excited about what the startup is doing. This can play out in lots of ways.

First thing to keep in mind is that you will do an enormous amount of work, just as much work as the founders, but you will see less upside, and less risk, than the founders. However it can still be very lucrative. You will most likely get a small salary (the founders probably are not getting any salary), and if you lose your appetite for the startup, you can still walk away.

In the extremely rare chance that the startup becomes a huge corporation, you should expect your role to change a LOT. You will probably get a lot of bosses over the years, and you may not agree with all the business decisions that will be made. But as long as you are treated fairly, and the company is very successful, you will be set for life. But the compensation will vary wildly, and at this stage, it is anyones guess what will happen. You will be in for a very long journey, and it won't be easy.

Best case: Enough money to never work again

Good case: The company is acquired and you get a job with a decent stock package

Average case: You have a decent job for a couple of years and the startup fails

Worst case: You receive little salary for many years, you grind it out really hard, and the startup fails.

Founder

Ok, So you decide to start a startup. You have dreams of being the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. You're going to make it big, you're going to change the world. This is the mindset most founders have, and that's good. As a founder you will need to be extremely optimistic, because the road ahead is extremely rocky, and will be filled with extreme uncertainty. If you make it, you will be world famous, you will have wealth for generations, you will change the world. But 99% of founders end up with nothing but good experience, and maybe a network of connections.

Typical founder compensation is zero salary for a few years, and dumping your whole life savings into the startup. You will grind hard for funding from angels and VCs, and you will always be worried about making payroll. A lucky few founders will take their startup to Series A or B, but most founders will fail within the first couple of years. The extremely rare, chosen few, will take their startup all the way to Valhalla, and never have to do anything else ever again.

Best case: The next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg

Average case: Fail within the first couple of years

Worst case: Grind it out for years, miss payroll for your employees, lose all your savings, alienate your friends and family, maybe get a divorce, and fall into a deep depression

Conclusion

So there you have it. Those are the typical routes most startup employees take, and the typical exits. There are many combinations of entry and exit points for a startup, and your experience will not be the same as anyone else. Being part of a startup can get you an incredible learning experience that money can't buy. It can get you wealth like no other. It can setup you up for incredible success, or incredible failure. But many people would not have it any other way.

Which JavaScript Framework Should You Learn To Make Money

May 27, 2015, 11:14 p.m.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post called Which Programming Language Should You Learn To Make Money, and at the time, the post was fairly relevant. In fact, it still is today, with one exception. JavaScript. JavaScript has really started to come into its own lately. There are multitudes of frameworks, patterns, architectures, microlibraries, testing tools, build tooling, and more. It actually boggles the mind to contemplate how many different frameworks you can use to architect and build your JavaScript app. With Node, you now have isomorphic apps, utilizing your favorite event-driven, asynchronous goodies on the backend.

Hiring for JavaScript engineers is booming. It used to be that all you needed to know was some jQuery to get by, but since then there has been a cambrian-esque explosion of JavaScript libraries, and there are great jobs available for a few of them. You still need solid HTML and CSS skills to get these jobs, but for now we will just cover JavaScript libraries. Look for a future post about CSS skills and the different preprocessors available.

Let's dive into the two most popular frameworks.

React

React is the new kid on the block, but gaining traction fast. React, developed at Facebook, came out in 2013, but had its first stable release in 2014, and it picked up steam quick. Developers love the 'separation of concerns' approach. React provides a 'component' architecture, that enables you to write your frontend in chunks or components. Components have handy lifecycle methods that allow you to load data, respond to or create events, and hook into other useful lifecycles of the component. Components also utilize JSX, which is JavaScript that looks like HTML, and is utilized as the component template.

Check out Flux along with React, the 'mvc' architecture that can be utilized with React. Flux provides an 'action/dispatch/store' model, where a component triggers an action, an event is dispatched, and data is updated in the store. Additionally a change in the store can trigger a change in the component. Flux is an optional part of React, but many people use it. Be on the lookout for Relay, Flux's replacement.

Angular

Still more popular than React, Angular was developed at Google, and released in 2009. Angular brings the power of JavaScript, directly into your markup using custom tags. These tags can be used to bind input to models or handle output to the page. Angular calls these tags directives, and they can be used specify and control all kinds of functionality in your web app. Perhaps Angular's most notable feature is its two way data binding. Templates are rendered according to a specified model. When changes come from the server to the model, the template is updated. When the template receives new input, likewise the model is updated, and the server can be updated as well.

Version 2.0 came up recently, introducing some re-architecture of the popular library. It received mixed reviews from the community, nevertheless, Angular continues to grow in popularity.

Angular Vs React (Google Trends, 2015)

The Long Tail

While React and Angular are getting very popular and widely used, they hardly comprise all the employable JavaScript frameworks. Don't forget about these awesome, and widely regarded frameworks:

Backbone.js - Bringing the classic MVC pattern to JavaScript. Backbone has been in use by numerous companies and individuals before both Angular and React. Though support for it is dwindling, you will still find it running in many respectable code bases.
Ember - Another popular MVC framework, it utilizes the popular Handlebars templating system.
Knockout - Providing the lesser known, but still popular, MVVM framework, Knockout provides data binding, auto UI refresh, dependency tracking, and a custom templating system.
jQuery - You can still write a very serviceable webapp using jQuery. However you will need something like Browserify, RequireJS or CommonJS to handle importing/exporting modules.

The JavaScript landscape is changing rapidly, but if you are interested in JS, don't let the rapid pace scare you off. Dive into one of these frameworks and build something for fun. There are hundreds of great tutorials to get you started, just pick one and go!

Philip K Dick Predicts The Matrix In 1977

May 11, 2015, midnight

Back before The Matrix, back before Simulacra and Simulation, and even back before Star Wars, Philip K Dick predicted that we are living in a computer simulation, and he cited his knowledge of this as the source of his novels. He even went so far as to describe a girl in black hair who shows up at his door and tells him his world is a delusion. While we may not want to believe PKD, we cannot deny his absolute prolificness, and that even today his work shows up all over our media. And the scary thing is, the closer we get to the future, the more accurate his predictions appear.

Here's the video where he made the speech, and full transcription beneath it.

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist, therefore I am free to say everything or nothing.

I, in my stories and novels, often write about counterfeit worlds. Some are real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person. While mean time, the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout, or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones.

This theme occurs in the corpus of my 27 years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo worlds. But now I think I understand.

What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities, lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one. The one which the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.

Later that day, back home again, but still deeply under the influence of the sodium pentathol, I had a short acute flash of recovered memory. Then in mid march, month later, the total body of memories, in tact, and entire, began to return.

You are free to believe me, or to disbelieve, but please take my word on it that I am not joking, this is very serious, a matter of importance. At that time I had no idea what I was seeing. It resembled nothing that I had ever heard described. It resembled plasmic energy, it had colors, it moved fast, it collected and then dispersed. But what it was, what he was, I am not sure even now.

In other words, it's a common theme in my writing that a dark haired girl shows up at the door of the protagonist, and tells him that his world is delusional, that there is something false about it. Well, this did finally happen to me. I even knew that her hair would be black. I had an actual, complete sense of what she would look like, and what she would say. She did appear, she was a total stranger, and she did inform me of this fact. That some of my fictional works were, in a literal sense, true.

I wrote out these dreams in novel after novel, story after story. To name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly I cite: The Man in the High Castle, and my 1974 novel about the US as a police state called Flow My Tears the Police Man Said.

I'm going to be very candid with you, I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of such a horrid slave state world. People claim to remember past lives, I claim to remember a different, very different present life. I know of no one who has ever made this claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique. What perhaps is unique is that I am willing to talk about.

We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we are reliving the present, deja vu. Perhaps in precisely the same way, hearing the same words, saying the same words; I submit that these impressions are valid and significant. And I will even say this, such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed, reprogrammed as it were, and that because of this an alternative world branched off.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Feb. 1, 2014, 4 p.m.

Full disclosure: I run a growth hacking service called Followme.io.

I hear it a lot, I see it everywhere. Growth hack your userbase! Growth hacks for more followers! Growth hack your way to success! But is it real, and does it work? The short answer is yes, it works. But the how and why may not be palapable to everyone.

Growth hacking can be used by anyone from a teen on tumblr to your Series D funded startup with $200M in the bank. Growth hacking refers to getting more users in a cheap manner. More users to follow you on Twitter or Tumblr, more likes on your Facebook page, or more paying customers. It is not always about monetary gain but, for some, more users do lead to more paying customers. But the most popular growth hacks, and perhaps the Age of Growth Hacking, are centered around getting more Likes or more Followers, usually as cheaply as possible.

While the buzzword, 'growth hack', is new, the concept is not. People have been using hacks to get more users since the pre-SEO days. And gray and black hat individuals always try to remain one step ahead of the curve to exploit popular systems to get more users. But in 2010, Sean Ellis coined the term on his blog, and a trend was born. Wikipedia cites mega startups like Dropbox, Twitter and Airbnb as employing growth hacks, and offers these examples of growth hacks: An early example of "growth hacking" was Hotmail's inclusion of "PS I Love You" with a link for others to get the free online mail service. Or Dropbox offering more storage to users who referred their friends. The former a clever marketing gimmick and the latter a solid referral plan, neither of these could be called a hack.

Jon Yoongfook offers a much more actionable plan for growth hacking. In it, he suggests submitting to news aggregators, maintaing blog content, making your content accessible, working with partners and affiliates, and a few other helpful ideas. While this is excellent advice, I would call this marketing and not a growth hack.

The 'hack' portion of growth hacking refers to your methodolgy being a step above the obvious, outside the ordinary. It isn't part of a Web Marketing 101 course, and odds are, it won't be available forever. Hacks get shutdown very quickly, and new routes and methods often need to be found. As was the case when Google released the Penguin update in 2012.

You might be thinking, "what is real growth hacking and how can I do it?" First start with a goal. Your strategy for growth hacking on Tumblr will not be the same as growth hacking on Facebook or Twitter. You will need to consider each network as a unique problem, and create unique solutions. For our examples, we will work with Twitter.

Let's take Sally, who runs a fashion blog. Whenever she posts a link to her blog on Twitter, she gets a lot of views, and this makes Sally happy. Sally has a couple hundred followers on Twitter, and so far her follower base has been growing slowly and steadily. But now she wants to get serious with her blog. She wants to build a fashion community, and she wants to get the word out on Twitter. She wants to produce more content, and she wants to attract more followers. But Sally is only blogging on the side, and has a very limited budget for marketing. Sally searches 'get more twitter followers'.

Growth Hack #1

Sally finds a site offering to sell her 1000 followers for $100. She figures that isn't a ton of money for 1000 new readers of her blog, and gives it a shot. She pays the company and within two days she has received hundreds of followers. By the end of the week she has over 1000 new followers. At first she is happy. But then she notices her blog traffic never picks up, none of the new followers are going to her blog. She decides to look at her new 'followers'. All the accounts are fake. Most of them have already been suspended by Twitter, and the ones which are still active have phony photos or no photos at all.

So while it looks like Sally has over 1000 new followers, she really won't benefit directly from them. Other people might see her 1000+ followers and think she has more influence though.

Hack grade: D-

Growth Hack #2

Sally finds another site, offering to get her more followers. This one says they have a 'secret technique' to acquire more followers, and comes with a free trial. Sally joins the service, and it requires her to connect her Twitter account. Sally has no idea what is going on, but within a couple of days she starts getting more followers. She is delighted, until she logs on to Twitter one day and it turns out her account is suspended. Sally freaks out and emails Twitter. Within a few hours they unblock her account, and tell her she violated Aggressive Following practices. It turns out the service Sally signed up for makes Sally's Twitter account follow a bunch of other Twitter accounts. But then it makes Sally go and unfollow all the accounts. This effectively spams all those Twitter members with an email saying 'Sally followed you!' And sometimes they will go and follow Sally back. However, Follow/Unfollow is prohibited by Twitter. Sally got some followers for a short while, but then had a run in with Twitter staff, and had to halt the practice.

Hack grade: C

Growth Hack #3

Sally decides to give it one more shot. She finds another site. This one promises more followers too, and also comes with a free trial. Sally is suspicious because it sounds a lot like hack #2, but her friend insists it works. This new site works by favoriting, not following. And this time, Sally has to enter terms related to her content. Sally enters some terms into the service: fashion, nyc fashion, fashion blog. And within days she starts getting more followers.

This time it's different. She looks at the followers. They are real people, they are already engaging with her over Twitter. She takes a look at her favorites, and the site is favoriting tweets related to her blog. All of a sudden she is getting legitimate followers who are interested in her blog. Sally does feel a little bad because a website is favoriting tweets for her, and people think she is doing the favoriting herself. They thank her for favoriting their tweets, but she has a machine doing it. But Sally responds to everyone who talks to her. And soon she finds she is building meaningful, lasting connections with her readers.

At the time of this writing, favoriting is not against Twitters terms of service. However, it is up to Twitter how long this hack can continue.

Hack grade: B+

And that is just for Twitter. If you wanted to growth hack Tumblr, or Instagram, you could use similar principles, but you would need to build your logic to be specific to those networks.

Growth hacking is more than just posting on Reddit and having search engine optimized blogs. It is a real inspection of how these social networks work, and then an intelligent, if questionable, exploit of their internals for your benefit. Like all hacking, it's ethicality remains in question. It's effectiveness, however, cannot be questioned. Growth hacking is becoming more and more popular everyday, and we are just beginning to see the tip of this massive grey hat industry.

The Cloud Sucks And Here's Why

Oct. 5, 2013, 2 p.m.

Wow, the cloud sure does suck. But that doesn't seem fair. Your Digital Ocean account is fine. Your Dropbox you use to share your family photos is the greatest thing since sliced bread! In fact your mom has never been happier. So why does it suck?

1) Arbitrary restrictions and limits

Your client asks to upload their forms to a server. Your boss tells you Google App Engine is amazing for this. You can manage your stack from the cloud, and you can support all the greatest languages! Once you get onto the cloud, you realize that servers will shut down whenever they feel like. Well actually, they will shutdown when Google tells them to shutdown. And if you don't want your server to shutdown, you can pay Google more money by upgrading to a B8 or some nonsense.

Google will also tell you how big your file size can be. Do you want to upload a 50mB payload? You are out of luck my friend, because the Google App Engine will tell you 32mB is all you need.

Do you think it would be useful for your database to write more than 16mB to a row? Well I hope you don't. Because Google Cloud Sql doesn't allow that. In fact, their cloud sql support is so limited that nobody is around to raise that restriction.

The only Google cloud service I would recommend is their Apps for (small) Business, GMail, Drive, etc for your work. That is pretty decent. Their cloud services stink.

2) New providers = weakness

Dropbox, Box, Drive, Evernote, EC2, S3, Linode, Digital Ocean, bunch of Google crap, and so many more cloud services who will kill for your business. The cloud is definitely the future of technology infrastructure, but in these early phases there is much chaff to be split. It is important to realize that when you sign up for a cloud service, you are agreeing to the weakness of someone elses' technology. Your customer cannot bring more performance requirements than Dropbox can handle, otherwise you are shit out of luck.

For many projects, it is easy to predict the performance needs, and it is safe to say Linode or DO will be adequate for your work. But there are many projects where the scale is not yet known. But there are even more projects with people who don't understand what a software project needs.

There are thousands of software project managers out there who don't realize their customer needs to upload 100mB data, and then tells developers to 'get it on the cloud', as if that edict will make everything perfect. Then the developer comes back and says 'Google doesn't allow us to upload 100mB' and the project manager acts like the developer is lying, and it is uncomfortable for everyone involved.

This is insanely successful marketing by cloud companies, and it results in big money for them. Unfortunately it turns into a huge problem for developers who are stuck with this weakness.

3) Shitty Documentation

Your boss tells you to start developing with this new cloud host. You check out the API documentation and try out some examples. None of them work. You spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out if it is your computer, or if there is something wrong in your code, or maybe the parameters aren't being passed correctly.

At the end of the day you send an email to customer service. The next day they tell you the API endpoint has changed, and they let you know they are very sorry. Sorry indeed.

When you deal with such a new product, it is easy to hit stale documentation. And newer products are also lacking in community support.

4) You can't send an email

Back in the early days of hosting, you could send your email from your own host. Sure you had to worry about Postfix and Sendmail and Dovecot and Exim and port 25, 587 and TLS and SSL and 100 other things, but at least your mail would send. Today your cloud host is probably blacklisted by GMail and Yahoo! Mail and and every other major mail service.

It is easy to send spam from cloud hosts and people often do. This results in IP addresses getting blacklisted by major mail providers. Cloud hosts often recycle their IP addresses to their numerous instances that are always going up and coming down. That cloud slice you just put up? Who knows what the last owner was doing with the IP address.

Conclusion

The cloud is great because it makes things cheaper for hosting providers and it makes things cheaper for customers. We don't pay for what we don't need. And hosts can allocate expensive resources to people who need it. But cloud hosting is still a brave new world, despite how quickly it's grown up. When we commit our apps to a cloud hosted world, we should understand the limitations of the host, and be prepared to work within those constraints.

As a software project owner you should be acutely aware of the limitations of the cloud. Never attempt to do more in the cloud than can be expected by your host. Make sure you understand the restrctions and tiered pricing plans your cloud provider imposes.

As a developer, you should be clear and direct about the limitations in the cloud to your software project manager. It is important for developers to speak up against these issues because if we do not, cloud hosts will never fix these problems. Maybe with patience and communication we can fix these issues for good.

How Much Money Do You Make Programming?

Aug. 18, 2013, noon

I'll get right to the point.

About $100,000 a year. That's the answer if you have been programming for 4+ years and work in a major tech hub like the Bay area or NYC. Of course your mileage WILL vary. Your salary is dependent on your skill level, your experience and your negotiating power.

Most programmers will make between $40,000 and $120,000.
Junior prgrammers, or people starting out in smaller cities can expect to make around $30,000-$50,000.
Most average programmers are bringing in around $60,000-$85,000 a year.
Senior programmers will typically reach $100,000.
And highly valued senior programmers can easily make $120,000-$150,000+.

Some programmers are even granted stock options or stock units in the company they work for. The first engineering hire for a startup can get up to 5% of the company, and if the startup does well that can turn into millions.

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Programming can make you some solid dough, that is for sure. But not every programmer is making six figures, and I don't personally know any programmers who have made millions. In small towns even good programmers might not make six figures. The salaries can vary wildly depending on what city you are in. But I have worked in Austin, TX, New York City and the Bay area, and I can tell you salaries in those three places are very similar. And from what you can see on websites like Glassdoor, most mid-level programmers are netting between 60k-100k.

Of course it's not just about how well you code, it's about what language you are using. To maintain market salary, it is important to stay up to date with programming languages. Languages change fast, and in our industry you will go through 5-10 languages in your career. If you do not keep up with it, someone new will come in to fill your shoes.

Story time. In high school I had a computer science teacher named Mr. Evans, and he would always tell us stories about 'being in the industry'. Mr. Evans said that they will hire you for Fortran, keep you around till you are 40, then fire you. He said Fortran was the greatest language invented and everything that came after it sucked. But when we'd get home from school we would play with C++ and Visual Basic, two of the most popular languages at that time. If Mr. Evans would have learned C++ or VB, he probably could have gotten a better job, but instead he was stuck teaching high school kids. Poor Mr. Evans was definitely not making 100k.

So you see, there is good money you can make programming. It can be challenging to learn how to program, but once you do it is very rewarding. You won't get paid like a doctor, lawyer or banker, but you (usually) won't be expected to work insane hours, defend murderers or swindle people for money. And sometimes there is even free lunch!

Check out my #1 post: Which Programming Language Should You Learn To Make Money?

This Is The Revolution

Aug. 18, 2013, noon

"What can I do about it?" This is the most asked question when it comes to the declining state of the globe. Politicians and law enforcement are spying on all of us, bankers are taking advantage of uninformed people, our rights are disappearing, and dystopia is coming. We feel helpless. We tried to vote for 'Change', we tried protesting, we tried petitioning, we tried writing to our senators. There is only one thing left to do. Vote with our dollars.

Corporations buy our politicians, they profit from war, they control our food supply, they rule our medical industry. Politicians help these crooks by passing laws that support their greedy behavior. Politicians are profiting from this too. We can protest in the street but they will gas us, arrest us, and ignore us. We can write to our politicians, but they will ignore us. We can scream, we can shout, we can assemble. We'll get hosed, we'll get stifled, we'll get arrested.

This will be us

Photo by Sacramento Bee

The only thing we can do is vote with our dollars. We are the consumers who make this entire system possible. When we buy major brands, when we spend money on things we don't need, when we engage in consumer, middle-class behavior, the government and the corporations win. Their desire is a world of willing, obedient consumers, ready to spend their dollars on anything and everything. They will pass that money and power down to their children, and they will control our lives for generations.

The best thing we can do right now is to become informed about where to spend our money, then spend it wisely. The key is to buy food from local, organic sources. Have our own gardens and our own small, sustainable farms. Make some of our own clothes. Trade with our neighbors, help each other. Learn to build our own houses, plow our own land, and be together as a community. We don't have to give up all the progress we've made, we just need to learn how to use it for ourselves.

Our new lives

We can't be pawns of greedy businessmen and politicians any longer. But we have to take back our hardships. We can't expect government and corporations to provide every little thing. We need to depend on each other. This is the revolution.

Apple Is The Hottest Girl In School

July 9, 2013, 6:30 a.m.

Apple is rich, powerful, and everyone is staring at its products all day. So how come the stock has been languishing, and despite their piles of cash, they haven't innovated since Steve Jobs' iPhone? How come some people even have the audacity to call Apple boring? I still get pleasure from using my iPhone, and I adore my MacBook Pro retina and Cinema Display. I still cannot imagine what other display or laptop I would want to have. Except maybe a Macbook Air.

Apple has become predictable. We know what Apple's next move will be: iPhone upgrade? We could smell the iPhone 5C a mile away. More crappy Xcode updates? Of course. Make even lighter, faster laptops? Got it, got it. We all know Apples' cadence and their beautiful, high-tech, glossy pitter patter. And we love them because their products still delight us. But we aren't chasing after them with the delightful glee we did when we first saw them. Now everytime we pass by an Apple store or feel the sleek aluminum case of the iPhone we're just like 'Oh sweet, it's Apple'. Apple just doesn't do it for us anymore. We know Apple could give us so, so much, but Apple will never give us the goods.

In short, Apple is the hottest girl in school. And even though Apple is a babe, we have definitely turned our attention elsewhere. Oculus Rift anyone?

Friday Quotes

May 3, 2013, midnight

I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club.
— Michael Arrington

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
— Stephen King

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.
— Bruce Lee

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
— Nikola Tesla

Stay hungry, stay healthy, ba a gentleman, believe strongly in yourself and go beyond limitations.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger

Stay hungry, stay foolish.
— Steve Jobs

Bill Watterson's Commencement Speech to Kenyon College Class of 1990

April 22, 2013, midnight

I really love this commencement speech. It's not about technology, it's not about business, it's not even about success or making money. It's simply a very real, honest examination of what life is like out here in the 'real world.' It seems like the thing that every commencing college student should hear, but none will understand (until it's too late.)

It is a stark reminder that the syndicate's are in the business of bleeding each other dry, particularly at the mercy of creators and do'ers, often under the guise of promising happiness or satisfaction. Bill's account will bring us all back to reality and help us remember why we are in it, and what we should do about it. I've bolded some excerpts which I find quote worthy, and that I think thrust Watterson into the realm of the great philosophers of our time.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.

I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.

Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.

Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.
For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.

It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said,

"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.

What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.

With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.

Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.

I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.

Startup Story: A Cautionary Tale

April 3, 2013, midnight

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

There's nothing new on the internet, there never is. You get tired of wasting time and go back to working on your prototype, SocialBox. It's your newest project, a social memory box, and it is starting to get some attention from your friends. You've really enjoyed building it, and like every project, you've learned a lot along the way. "Carol has added 5 new photos", the notification pops-up on your screen. You click around the site with delight, reveling in all the glorious details, the sleek design, and the clean code. You know it's late, you have work tomorrow, but you stay up for a couple of hours chatting with friends, listening to music, and doing bug fixes for SocialBox.

You're groggy the next morning, and the routine stop at the coffee shop is quite essential. It seems to be a typical day, sitting in your cube, refreshing Reddit for the 500th time, chatting with friends about your latest project, all the while reading r/startups, Hacker News and TechCrunch. Your boss walks past your cube and you quickly switch to Emacs, your IDE of choice. Noah sees you tapping away in Emacs and makes some quip about how Eclipse is much better. You yell at him about macros and return to your slacking.

You get an email. It's from Chris Dixon and he is interested in SocialBox. Interested to the tune of a possible 100k angel investment. It's the last thing you ever expected to happen. You notice he is responding to an email you wrote, and then it rushes back to you. A couple of weeks ago you and Noah were sitting around drinking beers and talking shop. After some talk about your prototype, he convinced you to email some angel investors. You kept trying to explain what a waste of time that is, but he persisted. So just to shut him up, you emailed a handful of people. Chris invites you to meet him at The Standard.

You and Noah go out for drinks after work, where you tell him the news. His face shows a mix of excitement, jealousy, and disbelief. Later that night you see your girlfriend Carol. She is very happy for you, and tells you all your hard work is finally paying off. You can't sleep that night, all you can think about is what the future holds.

The next day you meet Chris. He loves your idea, and has some ideas of his own for SocialBox. You can tell he is summing you up, while trying to remain open to what you have to offer. You discuss potential business models for SocialBox, and happily find that you both have the same thing in mind. He asks you to implement the features needed to monetize, and also invites you to a small gathering of founders/investors later that night.

You ascend the steps of the Upper West Side brownstone and ring the buzzer. The door clicks open and you walk in to a fully wood furnished interior. A crudely drawn sign and balloon points you to the second floor, As you climb the wooden stairs and grip the oak banister, you can hear a mixture of conversation and laughter. That night you meet two other angel investors, and in the coming weeks you quit your job, and raise $240k to work on SocialBox full time.

You make two hires, Dylan, a senior engineer, and Isis, a highly technical 'sales engineer'. Together you start implementing the business model, which is charging users who have over 5gb in their memory box. Dylan takes over most of the coding, while you start spending more time building marketing campaigns and working on sales strategy. Isis ensnares critical success with a small interactive marketing page he built. He posts it to the usual social media channels. When the results appear positive, you approve a budget of $10k on advertising the page. The site starts to blow up.

You need to scale. Along with Isis and Dylan, you come up with a pretty decent growth plan. You need to hire more people and get better hardware. You speak with Chris and the other investors, and together you all agree that you need to raise more money.

After a grueling 5 month slog, you raise 2.5 million led by Union Square Ventures. You had your eye on Fred Wilson from the beginning, even before you ever raised a single dollar, and you had always dreamed of the day USV would invest in something of yours. You add several new smiling faces to the team. You get a new office with a beer fridge and a billiards table. You throw a launch party for SocialBox. A couple of your friends come, but it is mostly founders and investors, along with some press. People get super wasted. You find yourself back at the office, just you and the cutest intern. You make out on the billiards table, and then take her over your desk. You wake up the next morning hung over but on top of the world. You have thousands of mentions on Twitter. You have a 100 emails pointing you to a TechCrunch article about SocialBox. There, on the front page of TechCrunch, is your picture, smiling and bright. In that moment, you are the darling of the startup community.

After a few months, the growth starts to recede. It's the first time you have a contentious board meeting. The board was expecting the growth to continue in a more upward direction, so were you. You come up with a plan to make a few key senior hires. You focus on senior marketing and sales leadership. While you are doing this, you cannot help but notice the 50 other copycats that have sprung up around you, all over the world. Some of them have closed an A round, but your advisors and friends insist you ignore the competition.

You've been running in the red for 8 months now. You are still showing revenue, but you cannot get in the black, there are just too many people on staff. You have made extensive cuts to the sales team, but you know it wasn't enough. Marketing and IT costs are starting to grow rapidly as well. For a while they seemed almost negligible, which made them easy to ignore. But lately they seem to be a big piece of the pie. The board keeps pressuring you about your burn rate, and as it stands you have 4 months of runway left. You talk about raising a B round but the board seems doubtful. "Your metrics are not showing the correct direction to inspire a B round," Fred says, as you walk out of the USV office.

Instead of going home, you head over to Carol's apartment. You lay down on her couch and put your head on her lap. She strokes your hair, and you exhale deeply. You tell her about the pressure from the board, the anxiety from the cuts you just made, the worry that you can't scale the product as you originally anticipated. You tell her of the days you dreamed of simply having an office with a few employees working on something cool. How happy you were to raise the angel round, back when you first met Chris. You reminisce, laying across her couch, your head resting comfortably on her lap. She just looks at the wall in front of her. You already know what she isn't telling you. She is getting tired of your late nights, not answering her calls, not being around. You exhale again.

"Maybe we should break up," she says.

You close the door behind you and head towards the subway. All you can think about is all the people that would lose their jobs if your company got shut down. And then you think about all the other founders who are now your friends. What would they think? You bargain with yourself that perhaps they have the same problems. But it makes no difference. You fear you are not on the trajectory you dreamed of. No one was going to make a movie about your startup.

At the next board meeting, nothing is left off the table. They start with a conversation about firing you. It is raised in jest, but you can sense the dark undertones. You assure the board that you feel confident about the company, and that you and your senior team are working on reducing costs and ramping up engagement. They ask about the 40% drop in user growth, and you offer a weak explanation about a bug on the sign-up page. They ask about the 4x drop in revenue, and you suggest that the market is getting swamped by competitors and eating into your share of the revenue. You feel like a 500 watt lamp is being shined on you. The heat of a thousand suns is burning you from within, and you are starting to sweat.

You head to Lillie's, a bar near the USV office. You order a double Bulleit on the rocks and sit at the bar staring at your phone. There are hundreds of unread emails in your inbox. You click on Carol's Facebook page and sigh while you investigate her timeline. You go through your phone and see who you can text. You text a few old friends. You don't expect anyone to respond. You order another double Bulleit, you're feeling very thirsty. Your phone buzzes, it's Noah. "How's it going? Congrats on everything with SocialBox man!"

You sigh. You start bantering with him over text. He's your only conversation partner, and to your drunk mind he seems like a voice from the void, a divine confessional. You tell him you are feeling overwhelmed. That there is no success for you. The bar is too high now, and everyone around you is making millions while you have a measly failing company and half a million left in the bank. You tell him that you are concerned about making $1800/month rent, and you know people who have million dollar lofts, that you might get fired from the very company you started. "I kind of miss the days when SocialBox was just a side project…" you text. He doesn't respond for a while, then encourages you to turn it around. He offers his help. You text back "If only I could gtfo of all this." The next morning you wake up regretting what you confessed to the divine voice in the void.

Then, another email. This one is from Amin Zoufonoun, head of corporate development at Facebook. A month ago, after making massive cuts to your team, you re-engaged talks with Facebook. They are one of the few companies you have talked to about selling SocialBox. Previous talks with them had gone flat, and you shifted focus to raising money. But now they are back, and they are asking for a new price from you, they are ready to put a term sheet together. You are desperate.

When the acquisition goes through, and the news hits the press, there is a celebration with the remaining staff. You are welcomed with open arms into Facebook, and your team seems overjoyed. Inside, you feel it is a pyrrhic victory, but you cannot share that emotion with anyone. The deal is almost all stock, and the cash being put down is going straight to the investors. The team is excited about the acquisition, and you know this means they will get to keep their jobs, and they may even get some stock. You were also given stock, 10,000 shares, currently valued around 250k. They come with a 5 year vesting period. Your very own personal golden handcuffs. You and your remaining team celebrate. But you cannot help but remember all the struggles and hardships along the way. Working morning day and night for something you once believed in. Something that, today, you can't even smile about.

Once at Facebook, you are quickly crushed under the bureaucratic, process-based management structure. You find that most everyone around you is there by acquisition, and you realize many teams have already laid stake in big products. You struggle to find your teams niche, all the while struggling with your stock units. Everyday you watch the FB stock price, and constantly figure out how much your stock is worth. You keep asking yourself if the 5 year vest is too long, then you consider how much 20% is worth. You tell yourself you will leave after one year.

The founders and investors you used to hang out with have stopped calling. Facebook is about to kill off your company's product line. Everything about your brand, your company, your struggle and your creation is coming to an end. The friends you had made are gone, the friends you used to have moved on, and you are left wondering what is next for you. You try to go back to the drawing board but you can't convince yourself to get motivated again. You have a strong network, much stronger than before. But without an idea, traction and revenue, your network isn't that interested.

After 2 years of Facebook you cash out 40% of the shares, worth $128,000. You quit with nothing ahead of you except a one month vacation to Hawaii. While on vacation you hear a story about a fish. The fish would always grow to fill most of the space it was in. If you moved the fish to a bigger pond, it would keep growing. No matter how big the pond, the fish would always grow to fill most of the space. Because of this, the fish was never happy where he was, he always demanded more. After a while there was no more space left for the fish, no pond or lake could contain him. He was told that if he moved back to a smaller pond he would shrink back down to a normal size. He stubbornly refused to be smaller than any other fish, and due to his unhappiness, he ended his own life.

That night you lay on the beach, listening to the waves crash against the earth. You think about when it all started. The excitement you felt when that first email from Chris Dixon hit your inbox. The emotional roller coaster of raising the series A. The first paying customer. The ensuing fear, the loneliness. The celebrations. The excitement, the anticipation for growth. Back when all the possibilities of the world were in front of you, and you were ready to be king, master of the domain, emperor of the startup. You stare up at the night sky and for the first time in years and notice all the stars. They make you feel small. You think of Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. How earth is home for "everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." It reminds you of how small you are. No matter how hard you try you will never take up all the space on earth, you will never outgrow anyone else. Work should be done, whenever possible, for the pursuit of love. You remember the happiness you had with Carol, and beers after work, and programming SocialBox just for fun. It is all gone now, and you don't know when you will find it again. But you feel ok with that. You feel ok for once, not knowing, not wanting.

How to Get a Programming Job

Feb. 17, 2013, midnight

How do you get a programming job? It seems obvious, just apply for jobs until you get one. But that's not so easy for people coming from another industry, or people who have no programming experience. To get a programming job you will obviously need programming experience. Even getting a freelance job will require you to have some kind of portfolio. Also, there are many programming career paths. You could be a rocket scientist, a web developer, a genome researcher or a hardware programmer, just to name a few. For the purpose of this post, we will focus on the career path with the most jobs, web programming.

You will need to learn a few different technologies, and then you will need to practice, practice, practice. It should be said, first and foremost, to make money programming you have to want to program. This article is more of a birds eye view of how to get a programming career started. It is not intended to dive deeply into any specific area. There are already many in-depth resources for each topic I am going to cover.

Learn HTML/CSS

Aside from an elementary knowledge of computers, this is the most basic thing you need to learn. HTML and CSS allow you to layout elements of a webpage. This is the most fundamental thing you need for web programming. It is useful to note that HTML and CSS are not programming languages. HTML is a markup language, and CSS is a stylesheet. Neither is Turing Complete. There are thousands of HTML and CSS tutorials out there, so I won't cover that here. Just google 'html tutorial' and 'css tutorial' and you should have no problem finding tutorials to last you for days.

Learn JavaScript and jQuery

You will need to learn JavaScript. It allows you to interact with HTML and CSS dynamically, it allows you to communicate with your server using Ajax, you can dynamically load elements on your webpage; it is a programming language, and can do pretty much any thing with it. But for now you will just use it for web programming.

You will also need to learn jQuery. jQuery is a library built for JavaScript. jQuery simplifies many web programming tasks that would otherwise be very challenging. jQuery is not the only js library out there, but it is by far the most popular.

Like HTML/CSS, there are hundreds of tutorials out there to guide you through learning this stuff. If you need help finding some tutorials, msg me on twitter.

Become a Front-end Programmer

You will need to spend lots of time practicing HTML, CSS and jQuery. Plan to spend weeks to months understanding the basics of these three languages. If you think months is a long time, keep this in mind: with just these three skills, HTML, CSS and jQuery, you would be considered a front end developer. A front-end developer with a few years of experience will command a salary of 75-100k anywhere in the United States. If you don't believe me, please google it.

So take your time and truly understand the power of HTML, CSS and jQuery. Once you do, you will be in command of a powerful toolset that will allow you to make websites for the desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

Front-end programming is also called client-side programming.

Learn a Back-end Language

There are many languages to choose from: Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, C#, and plenty more. That seems like a lot of languages to learn, and it certainly is. But you should pick just one to start with. I suggest Python. It has the most readable syntax, and is easy for a beginner.

Here is some good news. All these languages accomplish the same thing: if/else statements, for loops, while loops, variables, data types, operators, data structures and standard libraries. Once you have learned these concepts in one language, it will be much easier to apply them to any language.

There are some core differences though, such as interpreted vs. compiled languages, open source vs. commercial, and syntactical differences. Part of becoming a proficient back-end programmer is mastering multiple languages and programming styles. Like front-end programming, expect to spend months learning back-end programming. A back-end programmer is a job all by itself, with salaries ranging from 60k-250k. Back-end programmers are also more versatile. While front-end programmers are almost always web developers, a back-end programmer could work in a variety of fields, from web to finance to research.

A back-end programmer is also called a server-side programmer.

Learn a Good Web Framework

The next step is finding a good web framework for your back-end language. I suggested Python for the language, and I would suggest Django for the framework.

A web framework is basically a software library that simplifies your web development. All the good web frameworks provide a similar set of features. Web request/response handling, database modeling, user authentication services, URL routing and web form handling are just some of the features that a good framework will have.

Django is a good web framework for Python. There are lots of other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Drupal for PHP, and many others.

Learn a Database

A database is where you persist (store) your data. There are many database options, but I would go with MySQL (pronounced my see-kwul). You will need to setup a MySQL database on your computer, and you will need to install mysql libraries so your programming language can talk to your database. Once you have your database setup, you should look at what kind of database support your web framework has. Database support in a web framework is typically known as an ORM (object-relational mapper) or a model layer. Your framework should have a way for you to define a database model and interact with it programatically. This is a rather huge topic, and you should expect to spend a fair amount of time understanding databases and how they work.

Build Up Experience

There are two ways to make money programming: either have a job or do freelance work. To do either, you will need some kind of experience. There are a few ways to build up experience. The most important way is always going to be spending time. No matter what, you will simply need to spend a lot of time programming. But it is also important that you have something to show for it.

You can start by programming a personal homepage for yourself. This is a good small project, and you can use this website to showcase the rest of your work. Once you have your own site built, you can start building experience by freelancing, or you can get a job as an intern or an entry-level programmer.

Freelancing

Start looking for small freelance projects on Craigslist, Elance and oDesk. It is important to start small with your first few gigs, don’t take anything more than you can handle. It’s better to let work pass you by than to take work you cannot complete. You don’t want to build a bad reputation.

Freelance hourly rates vary wildly. A newbie programmer will charge typically somewhere around $25-$75/hr and experienced programmers will charge anywhere from $75-$250. The hourly rate will vary by client and by the nature of the work you are doing. You should start by charging less, and then slowly raise your rates as you become more confident and experienced.

Make sure to always be updating your personal homepage with samples of your work and screenshots or links to your projects. Keep your resume up to date as well, and always make sure you have a good relationship with your clients so that you can use them as a reference later on.

Entry-level

Getting an entry-level job or an internship can be challenging for certain people. Getting an entry-level job may be more feasible for someone coming out of college than for someone who already has a job and is coming from another industry. Entry-level positions are usually filled by people aged 22 to 25, and are no pay or low pay positions. Entry-level positions will usually see a slower development growth than a freelancer. An entry-level employee could expect to put in 2-4 years before being bumped up to a mid-level salary range.

Conclusion

So by now a few years must have passed, and you must be a master of HTML, CSS, JS, Python, and probably a few other languages. You probably learned what OOP is, you are probably an Ajax ninja, and you must be very familiar with JSON. Maybe you’ve built your own API, or are consuming someone elses API. Perhaps you’ve built a mobile app and made a killing in the App Store. If that’s the case, let me just direct you to my little donations link over here…

Further Reading

Here are some good books which will help you along your way

HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites

JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual

Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, 3rd Edition

The Django Documentation

Your Facebook Posts are 'Public'

Nov. 8, 2012, 7:30 a.m.

Turns out that I've been posting in the 'Public' setting for some time now. This means whatever I post, anyone on Facebook can see. And anyone with an email address can sign up on Facebook. It does NOT mean anyone on the internet can see your posts, but a simple registration to the Book is all it takes.

I quickly created a new Facebook account and checked out my profile. Sure enough, all the public posts I have made are visible, and turns out I've made a lot of public posts. I browsed around on Facebook and could see my wife's profile in full, and lots of other folks.

All it takes is a short script to start mining this information.

I think this new privacy setting rolled out when they added the Subscriber model, but in my humble opinion they should have defaulted the setting to Friends. This new account I created was set to Public from the get go. And I noticed the app on my phone is also set to Public.

This is probably not how you intended to use Facebook.

To fix this, make sure you are marking your posts Friends only in the status update box. Make sure you do this for your mobile/tablet apps as well.

Then go to your privacy settings and make all of your Public posts Friends only

Go to Arrow drop down in header -> Privacy Settings

I can understand Facebooks intention of making your posts Public by default. If posts were public think of the power of Facebook Search, especially during a crisis like Sandy or a major public event like the election. It would change the way we look for information. It is also the product they need to really grow as a company. And just think of what it would do for the stock.

Here's an idea:

1) Buy lots of Fb at $20~
2) Make all posts Public
3) ?????
4) Profit!

Big Companies Are Trying To Protect You, For Once

April 13, 2012, 9 a.m.

Three big players and one little guy are looking out for your best interests. It is a good time to be a consumer. In the past we've seen loads of debacles around Facebook and privacy, and it seems like these guys don't want to make the same mistake.

The most recent protector of your identity is Apple. A few months ago they announced they would no longer allow developers to track your UDID, a unique identifier on your phone. The UDID is essentially an ID on your phone which allows apps to identify you. The problem is your UDID never changes, so Bob's app and Jim's app both call you the same name. Now Bob and Jim can talk about you, they can share your interests with each other, and in the best case, find much better ways to advertise to you. Apple is no longer allowing this practice, and that is definitely for the best.

The next public defender is Google. Although their intent for pushing this on users is double-edged, the 'keyword not provided' issue is an unknown boon to google junkies everywhere. There was a time when webmasters could see everything you typed to find their website on Google. Those days are quickly passing us, as Google now encrypts search keywords for logged in users. This means webmasters can no longer figure out what those users searched for to arrive at their site. This was not a breach of Google security however (unlike Apple), this was them just changing a widely accepted practice. In the end the consumer wins a bit more privacy, and I think that's what is important.

The third company is Yahoo, although they probably aren't considered 'big' anymore. They have announced that they will be implementing a Do Not Track header solution which allows consumers to easily specify preferences for advertising. I don't know how much privacy this will bring to consumers, but it is a step in the right direction.

And finally, there is this chart. There are plenty of cynics and skeptics talking about Duck Duck Go's recent success, but it takes time to build a business and you always have to shake off the haters. That is precisely what DDG is hard at work on. They are working to provide a world of searching that isn't driven by tracking your every movement, your pets name and your favorite ice cream. While their growth may be a drop in the bucket to some, I am sure to DDG it is very significant.

It is nice to see companies acting in our favor, since it seems like they are constantly trying to gouge us, penetrate us, or otherwise exploit our every advertise-able orifice. Here's to them keeping up the trend.

Moving Art Work Seen From Q Train

April 8, 2012, 1:50 p.m.

I've always wanted to get this, and I did a few days back. There's some art work (graffiti?) you can see from the Q train as you leave Brooklyn, just before you get out of the tunnel and on the Manhattan bridge. I always love seeing it on my way to work.

Xcode Sucks And Here's Why

April 4, 2012, 12:20 a.m.

1) It crashes. A lot. I remember back in the early days of Eclipse, it would crash pretty frequently. It's funny because I had forgotten all about that until I started using Xcode. Then I remembered what it's like to be using a shitty IDE which crashes all the time. Ironically enough, Eclipse NEVER crashes on my Mac, but Xcode, which is an Apple product, is crashing on its own hardware.

2) It manages the project files and their hierarchy using a shitty flat file (pbxproj). This means if you want to use Finder to organize your project, which is sure to have tons of graphical assets, forget about it. If you try to copy a file from Finder into your Xcode project and that file exists on the file system but not in the Xcode flat file, it throws an error. You have to go into Finder, find the orphaned file, delete it, then go back to your copying operation. And the actual files on your file system are in one big gigantic mess.

This is how Xcode manages your file hierarchy and project workspace

3) I have never seen something have such tremendous lag and failure rate when connecting to the emulator. Approximately 50% of the time Xcode will just hang, and never connect to the emulator when I run the project. Ditto goes for running the project on a device. There have been numerous times i just have to kill Xcode.

4) Speaking of killing Xcode, sometimes I have to reboot my entire machine. Xcode can leave zombie processes of your app running, and these zombies can prevent you from doing any more deployments to the emulator. ps -el | grep 'Z' can show you if you are afflicted. A similar bug can happen on the hardware where you have to reboot the hardware, restart Xcode, or both.

5) IOS4 vs IOS5. Come on Apple, I am begging you to not turn IOS into the next Internet Explorer. That would be so sad. Granted, the backwards compatibility is 'ok', but it's not amazing. For starters, storyboards don't really work on IOS4. You can get it to build with storyboards, but you cannot instantiate a UIViewController from the storyboard. You have to do it from the nib. Some key methods are deprecated, so if you want to stretch an image over a button you'll need to check if your UIImage has the right selector.

You'll need some code like this for stretching images in IOS4 and 5

6) Connecting UI elements to their IBOutlet is the most annoying thing I have ever done in an IDE. First you add a text field, then you add the IBOutlet to the interface, synthesize the object, then click and drag a line from the UI element to the parent class and select the correct outlet from a menu. Are they f*&king smoking a pound of crack over there? I thought Apple was the paragon of design perfection and usability. Who the hell designed that? At the very best, adding a UI element should somehow automatically build out the declaration in the interface, synthesize it and do whatever the hell that blue line connector does. But at the very worst, I should be able to click something that just does all that for me, and I simply provide an argument name.

Well, there's plenty more to say, but after about 5 seconds of googling, I see I am not the only one. Maybe all of this is solvable, perhaps some of you know a way around all of this nonsense. If so, please do let me know. Otherwise, I hope the Xcode team gets it together and really makes this software usable and stable. Their market is getting massive, and if they want to prevent a few less gray hairs in this world, they could do us all a huge favor and make the IDE a bit more sane.

I am using XCode 4.3.1

If You Build It, They Won't Come: A Warning To Developers

April 3, 2012, 1 a.m.

That was one of the best lessons I've learned in recent years, something I like to call the Field of Dreams mentality. That if you build it, they will come. They being the critical mass, the teeming hoard, ready to blast your servers to hell. And it being anything your fingers could program, possibly something you thought of with a friend, and most likely involving social, mobile, geolocation or all of the above.

Some years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about building something for an audience. The conversation went something like:

"We should build something..."
"Ok, what?"
"I don't know, something that will get a lot of users."

I have a feeling that is how 90% of apps or websites are born. We decided to build a social polling application. The idea was that you could create polls, share them with friends and get others to vote on them. We thought if we included some juicy graphics, some sweet jQuery, fast server response times and Facebook Connect, then we would just need to sit back and wait for the benjamins to roll in.

How wrong we were. It took some years, and working at a startup for me to understand the effort and the roles it takes to build a successful business.

Developers often balk at marketing, or sometimes sales, suggesting that these people are not doing any 'hard' work. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you still think 'bizdev' is just someone who wastes your time with stupid 'features', then you might suffer from the Field of Dreams mentality.

This isn't just me, others feel this way too. Patrick McKenzie suggests coding is only 10% of your business and the rest is "dealing with pre-sales inquiries, marketing, SEO, marketing, customer support, marketing, website copywriting, marketing, etc."

So before you spend a ton of time on that next project, ask yourself why you are doing it. If it's just for fun, to learn something new, go right ahead. But if you are telling yourself you are on to the next big thing, think again. Maybe you will luck out and become the next Instagram, or the next Pinterest. But maybe you could've won that huge mega millions jackpot too.

Apple stock is Steve Job's Thriller album

March 29, 2012, 7 a.m.

This is a guest post by Stephen Johnston

Just like when any good celebrity worth their grits dies, we all go on a rampage to buy anything and everything that has to do with the late great entertainer. Oh yes Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) was a genius, but he was also a celebrity and an entertainer. A keynote delivered by him in a lot of ways was better than seeing Radiohead live in concert.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with Apple. In the late 80s they were the computers at school that I played Oregon Trail on. Then I would go home and play DOOM on my PC, which was much cooler at the time. Back then Apple was just a boring educational computer to me. I was always a PC user at heart, and although I wasn't enamored with Windows I would use any computer that allowed me to play X-Wing or Tie Fighter. And whatever happened to those?

Then began the Apple heyday, the early aughts, and I considered the new Apple to be something of an elitist brand. It was expensive, and I viewed it as something for people that lived on the coasts and kind of pretentious. I lived in Austin at the time, and to me it was like a BMW or Mercedes to my Honda Civic.

Now that I am old(er) I have lived on both coasts, want the fancy cars, and play my games on consoles; I can safely say that I am also on the Apple bandwagon. I'm currently typing this on my Macbook Pro which happens to be, perhaps the best computer I've ever owned. I don't own an iPad or iPhone yet, but I am beginning to fall out of love with Android and Google in general. I also don't own any Apple stock, but it is booming and people around me are constantly reminding me to buy in now because it is going to hit 1000.

I can't help but wonder if Apple stock is getting the same treatment as album sales that typically follow an entertainers death.

What do you think about Apple's stock / Apple in general? Are you with us, or against us? And before you say you’re against us don't forget about our iShark army with frickin lasers attached to their heads!

Why We Didn't Get Into Y Combinator

March 28, 2012, 12:20 a.m.

Our idea sucked. That was probably the biggest reason. Other factors include: we had no prototype, no users, no traction and no revenue. We went to YC NYC and asked Paul Graham, Harjeet Taggar, Fred Wilson, Jessica Livingston, one of the founders of Airbnb, and some other really smart people about the space we were trying to get into and they didn't turn us off right away. They didn't say we had a great idea, but they didn't say we had a horrible one either. I suppose they knew what we all know, which is that an idea is worth very little. (Also, YC is accepting applications without ideas now.)

We didn't think for too long about the reactions we had received at YCNYC. Instead we went home and continued working on the prototype, landing pages and doing research on competitors. We spent the next couple of weeks polishing what we had, getting the demo pretty and the YC video just right. We crossed our fingers and hit the submit button.

Getting into YC might be pretty amazing, but the value of applying should not be underestimated. Even if you aren't sure about YC, if you are sure about starting a business the YC application process is a great exercise. Going through the questions is an experience that will re-shape your ideas. You might go into the application thinking you are going to make a location-based mobile chat app, and come out with an enterprise tool for software developers.

Which is exactly what we did. Seriously. And in retrospect it makes 100% sense to me that YC would not want to invest in something boring like development tools. I think it may still be a good market though. But not only was our idea boring, it was half baked.

YC alumni told us a bit on how the application process works. They said your app goes through a pre screen carried out by YC alumni who vote up or down. Kind of like a really important Hacker News. I bet our app didn't make the first cut. (We also heard that it's great to know YC alumni when applying. I think I know why, so you can get some sweet upvotes. There are a lucky few who have been through YC several times. I wonder how much of that is in thanks to an upvote crew that consistently gets them to the 'front page'.)

But any audience will respond to something that is truly great or interesting. An interesting product is hard to ignore by anyone, and that is what you need to get into YC. Of course after you spend all that time building a great product with traction, revenue and consistent growth, you may not want to give 7-10% to Y Combinator. But it's hard to put a price on PG and his network.

If I were to apply to YC again, I would think differently about the idea, and focus on something that brings value to an investor (quick, huge returns). I still love what YC and all the other incubators are doing, and can't wait for when I can try again.

If you are interested in Y Combinator, they have extended the application deadline till March 29th 8pm PST. And this is the best compilation I have seen of YC resources: https://kippt.com/karrisaarinen/yc-application

Good luck!

Hypem Extension For Chrome Lets You Download Your Favorites

March 27, 2012, 9 a.m.

This sweet new Chrome extension creates a temporary history of the songs you've been listening to and provides an easy download link to nab your favorite tracks. It even sets the right name on the file and adds id3 tags. I'm using it right now and I have to say, it is very convenient.

My biggest gripe with Hypem used to be that I would like a song there, come back a few days later to hear it again and it'd be taken down. That always sucked. Now I can just download it for my future listening pleasure, in case Hypem has to take it down.

Scott Rogers, the creator of the plugin, also plans to add desktop alerts for what track is playing and support hot keys. Sounds pretty sweet.

Which Programming Language Should You Learn To Make Money?

March 23, 2012, 9 a.m.

I often hear people ask what programming language they should learn first. But the question should be: why do you want to program in the first place? If you are interested in it because it seems fun, then any language will do.

But I have a feeling some of you have bills to pay, and you're thinking it wouldn't be so bad if programming could foot some of that.

Now the question is more specific: which programming language should you learn to make money? Now the question is ponderable, but be warned, the answer won't be the same for everybody.

The good news is that all popular languages are pretty fair in terms of compensation. The median pay today with 3-5 years of experience is around $60-80k/year, but that number can vary wildly, and can be much higher, particularly for folks on the east or west coast, or in consulting. YMMV.

The popular languages today are: Ruby, Python, PHP, Objective-C, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, .Net, C/C++. Google all of those.

Each language has its popular uses:

Language	Popular Use
Python/Ruby/PHP	Server-side for websites and mobile apps.
Objective-C	IPhone
HTML	Client-side for websites. Markup language for building web sites, the 'building block' of websites.
CSS	Client-side for websites. Presentation language for HTML.
JavaScript	Client-side for websites, used to manipulate HTML/CSS. jQuery is what you need to know here.
Java/.Net	Android programming. Server-side for websites, more popular with big businesses.
C/C++	High performance (stock trading) or graphics (video games).

Which programming language should you learn to make money? The bad news is probably not just one. The good news is you don't need to learn everything about every language, just enough to accomplish your goals.

So which one of these should you pick up first? As you can see, it really depends on how you want to make money.

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If you don't care how you'll make money, then my opinion would be this, in order: Python, Objective-C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS. You'll also need to get some kind of database (MySQL, MongoDB), and learn how to program with it, although that's not a big problem.

If you want to program video games or high-frequency trading apps, then C++ is probably the way for you. If you want to make websites, Python, Ruby or PHP are great, along with HTML/CSS/JS. If you want to program IPhone then Objective-C is the way.

JavaScript, HTML and CSS are used together and is used for making stuff look good in your web browser. They will always be used in conjunction with a server-side language such as Python, Ruby or PHP.

In the job market, you would not likely not be using all the languages I suggested, rather jobs are generally broken out by skills:

Job Role	Skill Set
Back-end/Server-side Programmer	Usually uses one of the following: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java or .Net. Has database knowledge. Possibly has some sysadmin knowledge.
Front-end/Client-side Programmer	HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Possibly has design skill.
Mobile Programmer	Objective-C or Java (for Android). HTML/CSS for mobile websites. Potentially has server-side knowledge.
3d Programmer/Game Programmer	C/C++, OpenGL, Animation. Possibly has good artistic skill.
High-Performance Programmer	C/C++, Java. May have background in mathematics or quantitative analysis.

Typically, there are folks who deal with the back-end and folks who deal with the front-end. These days there is a new crop of people who do mobile. Sometimes you can find people who do all of the above, but generally when you look for a job you will fill just one of those roles.

When learning these languages, start small. Don't start by wanting to build the next Facebook, it's not going to happen. Start with small projects and find tutorials. Google 'hello world python' or 'hello world javascript' to find simple tutorials to get started. Once you can program projects for yourself and friends, then you will be ready to put a portfolio together to try to get a job, or start with some freelance work to build up that portfolio. You can definitely do it.

Also check out

5 Ideas For Your Next Startup

March 20, 2012, 1 a.m.

It feel like every week that I read some post on Hacker News or some random blog post extolling the virtues of free love with our ideas. People say that ideas are cheap, it's execution that matters. They say that nobody is interested in stealing your crappy idea. And if your idea is worth anything, you will have to shove it down peoples throats.

I think that ideas are floating around in the collective unconscious, and it is rare that you are ever the first or last to think of something. Consumers are fickle, markets fluctuate, and ideas are always floating around, waiting for the proper execution. With that in mind, here are 5 ideas to add to the pool.

1) Communication tools for Product-to-Developer - What I mean by this is software to help product owners communicate with engineering teams. I am aware that groupware is bad, but each year more software is being made. Software engineers are in high demand, and for the foreseeable future, people are going to continue to need software built. Managing these software projects is going to be a bigger market, much bigger. Developers are looking to accomplish more work with less overhead and product owners are looking for ways to check scope, set timelines, and prioritize features. That is a lot of communication. There are already a ton of players in this space, so you'll have to be innovative.

2) Mobile-controlled Jukebox - Essentially I want to be in a bar and play a song on the jukebox from my phone. That's the core use case. But the implications of that idea are massive, so I'll just let you dwell on that. (I really love this idea and hesitated to throw it up here. A while back, we even bought http://musicbar.fm but we ended up re-purposing it, for now... :)

3) The New News Aggregator - I am confident the #1 thing to do on the internet is consume content. It's what we all do all day. Sharing the content is still being worked out however. People share on Twitter, Facebook and their blogs what they find from Reddit, Pinterest or StumbleUpon. But I think there is room in there for a new player to bridge the gap between the social network and content discovery. The business model would probably have to be based on eyeballs, however.

4) A Health Community - They say health is the first wealth, and nothing is more true. There are lots of sites out there right now which cater to health related questions. Most of the sites are divided up by disease or illness. People on a diet have a site, people who have chronic pain have a site, and people who have mental problems have a site. IANAD but I think health should be approached holistically, and having a community for all sorts of health issues, and being able to connect the dots on peoples 'unrelated' issues, would be HUGE.

Example: John goes to a site for his stomach aches, he goes to a site for his drinking problem, and he goes to a site for his STD and he goes to a site for depression (poor John). And for some reason, John just isn't seeing how these are related. In this contrived example it's easy for us to see what is going on, but most health issues are way more complicated, and most doctors just aren't approaching patients from the right angle. I am sure there are TONS of challenges to solve here, but it would be worth it.

5) The Newest Way To Share Content - Granted, this is very broad, I still think it is important to consider. Usenet, the web, blogs, social networks, twitter. These are the primary ways we have been sharing content over the last 15 years. Pinterest is coming up next, and we see the shift going from textual to visual. In previous incarnations, sharing went from factual to personal, and long-form to short-form. Sharing has become more visual. So where is it going next?

Facebook wasn't the first, and it won't be the last. So steal some of my ideas and get out there. And don't worry about me these aren't even my good ones.

The Value Of An Idea

March 9, 2012, 8:30 a.m.

Many people guard their ideas, as if simply sharing them would give others the desire, will and motivation to begin working on them and outpace the conceiver, who is probably not the only person with that idea. In Waking Life, there is a scene with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke lying in bed, and Hawke suggests that there is some telepathy, some type of Carl Jung collective unconscious:

It's like there's this whole telepathic thing going on that we're all a part of, whether we're conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these, you know, seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts. You know, like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer, he figures something out, and then almost simultaneously a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time, and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles, right, in relation to the general population. And they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people, right. And their scores went up dramatically, like 20 percent. So it's like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on 'em. It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

Personally, I have experienced this phenomenon many times. I am sure many of you have as well. I would come up with an idea, and within weeks or months I would see it implemented elsewhere. I have basically relegated myself to the fact that whatever idea I have, a thousand other people have already come up with it as well, and a few of them are about to launch it.

Building An App Is The New 'Starting A Band'

March 6, 2012, 10:40 p.m.

Although that's probably not a big surprise since everyone is looking for a 'rockstar programmer' or 'ux ninja' these days. I feel bad for my friends who don't posses these skills, it seems like that's all anybody cares about in the job market. And that reality is tough for job seekers, but it has an entirely different effect on youth.

Back in my day if you wanted to be cool, popular and get the girl/boy, you would simply need to start an awesome band with your friends (preferably in one of your garages). You didn't all know how to play your instruments but you'd pick it up as you go along. You would learn a thing or two, and some might play some local shows, some may even go on national tours. A lucky few may become Rockstars, trashing hotel rooms, doing cocaine in private jets, and proclaiming their idolization from rooftops.

Back then peoples heroes were the likes of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant or Bob Dylan. Today it's Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Reid Hoffman. An entirely different breed.

We've got more teens than ever building apps, starting businesses and getting rich. And why not? It probably takes the same amount of time learning to play guitar or learning to program. And it seems like the success rate is much higher for folks building apps, but don't ask me for the numbers on that. Also, it's probably just cool.

I can only imagine the pride and joy a teenager must feel if a good deal of their high school or even circle of friends is using an app he or she built. The media covering tech companies is only getting wider, and every day there are new stories of entrepreneurs under 25 doing amazing things. Not every teen who builds and app will strike it rich, or even become a programmer, but the low cost and high return of software development is attracting lots of young people. Young people who know that building an app can make them rich and famous.

The National Advises You To Quit Your Day Job, Do What You Love

March 5, 2012, 11:18 p.m.

One of my favorite songs by The National is Theory of the Crows. It takes place during the dotcom era when a couple of the band members were working in a startup, looking to IPO or have a sucessful exit, and Cash In. They caught the goldrush fever of 2000, and like so many others, got burned. Stereogum asked Matt Berninger what he would have done had he had struck it rich.

STEREOGUM: Ever wonder what would’ve happened if you’d become that millionaire?

MB: I probably would have taken guitar lessons and tried to start a band. Isn’t Steve Jobs or somebody in a rock band with Russell Crowe or something? I would’ve tried to hook up with those dudes.

Seems like he knew his passion from day one, and though he was doing a different line of work he knew he wanted to be playing a guitar, and he wanted to be in a band. Now The National has 5 studio albums and is crushing it in hockey arenas. I wonder if Matt Berninger is still doing consulting on the side.

We do our absolute best when we are doing what we love. It is not easy to find what you love so don't be discouraged. Sometimes it even takes a little magic. Just keep looking, and keep an open mind.

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Why I Work At A Startup

March 5, 2012, 9:30 a.m.

I have been trying to trace back to when I first became so enamored with startups, and creating a business. I think it began when I met the founder of MenuPages, Greg Barton. Prior to that I was just another software engineer, totally oblivious to what the world had in store for me. I spent my days slinging code and my evenings chugging brews with my fellow developers.

When I accepted the job at New York Magazine (NYMag) I had no idea I would be working on MenuPages. My manager at the time did mention I would be working on some top secret project, but he could not mention what it was, as the acquisition was not yet complete. When I started, I was immediately thrown into the pit. NYMag had just acquired MenuPages and they wanted to overhaul the codebase and the design, basically the entire site. We got to work, and it was in that process that I discovered so much about how a business works, how it begins, and what sacrifices go into making it successful.

Greg shared a lot of his secrets with me, including why he started the business (saw a market gap), how he marketed the business (word of mouth), how MenuPages worked and how he raised capital. It was amazing to see what he did with MenuPages, and where he took it. Greg was my first real glimpse into the mind of an entrepreneur. Prior to that, I had known other entrepreneurs but never regarded them as such, and consequently never capitalized on my time with them. Maybe it was because I had just moved to New York City, or maybe because Greg's story was so compelling to me, but a light shined into my world of startups.

I started reading TechCrunch and Hacker News on the daily. I began following bloggers, and began honing my coding skills. In the beginning, as a naive developer, I stupidly had the 'Field of Dreams' mentality where if I built it, they would come. It being anything I could hack together and cobble up with my incredibly subpar design skills, and They being a massive hoard, the teeming critical mass causing my servers to burst at the seams. I built a few different sites, bless my friends and family for being the beta testers to lots of terrible ideas by yours truly.

I suspect that developers have a short-sighted view of startups. Since so much of the emphasis today is placed around engineers, I think many technical folks don't realize how much other work goes into a startup also known as a business. My vision became more entrepreneurial as I studied startups, but I also found more questions. What made a business win or lose? Why did some get funding and others did not? What constitutes a great product? How much of it is who you know?

I knew I had the skill set that many startups needed, and I really wanted to know how I could put that to the best use possible. Did engineers posses some magic that made these startups win? Why were we in such huge demand? The questions left me open, and a friend reached out about an opportunity at a startup called Savored (VillageVines at the time). I remember speaking to Greg about it, and he asked me what I hoped to accomplish by going there, and I remember feeling so much passion at what I may be able to affect; and all I could say was magic.

What I learned since then is that it does take magic to run a startup, but only a part of it is in the engineer. The rest of the magic is all mixed up in the founders, the crazy-dedicated (that's crazy and dedicated) employees who come aboard, the customers, and the desire to make something new, something out of nothing. That magic is why I work in a startup. And until the magic is revealed to me, I don't think I can work anywhere else.

5 Reasons People Are Busier Than Ever

March 4, 2012, 2:49 p.m.

Maybe you missed it, but there's been a slew of new productivity apps lately: Orchestra, Clear, Asana, and so many others. We haven't had this much productivity since David Allen coined GTD. So why the obsession with productivity apps?

Email Overload - People are inundated with email. Most productivity apps today are really touting email connectivity, with the promise to help reduce the burden of growing email. Most are offering features around email forwarding. We're going to be seeing more of these email aggregators/hubs in the coming years, especially for niche markets. I could really see something like this for developers.
Distractions - Work is piling up because there are too many distractions in our day to day. Between my Facebook alerts and Twitter stream, I am pretty flooded. Then add in the rss reader shoving thousands of headlines a day at me, throw in some random links here and there and 4 hours could be gone.
Work Yields Work - All these tools we've got around us aren't just jockeying for our eyeballs though, some are actually helping us get more work done. But work is funny, it just yields more work. And the faster, more effective we are, the more work we find ourselves doing.
Things Are Getting Too Technical - Things are getting very technical these days. We've been sinking in acronym soup for years now, and we are beginning to add a healthy dose of hardware with the rise of smartphones and tablet devices. In some ways the technical growth on these things are outpacing the learning curve, leaving many in the dust. We're so busy playing catch up with the latest and greatest technology that we barely have time to focus on the things we'd rather be doing.
Keeping Up With The Jones' - When we aren't keeping up with the fastest processor or biggest display, we're keeping up with the latest design trends and entrpreneur cum celebrities. We've got to make sure our website has the hottest design, our clothes are the tightest and our gadgets are the latest. Maybe it's time to throw it all away and head back to the woods?

We are more connected than ever, which is awesome, but we should also remember that these pleasurable distractions are here to serve us, not the other way around. As artisans, creators and thinkers, it's our job to make the tools work for us.

Playstation Vita is the Foursquare Killer

March 3, 2012, 8:26 p.m.

The Sony Playstation Vita came out just a couple of months ago and has already sold over one million units worldwide. And it could be the next Foursquare killer.

The Vita includes things we take for granted: GPS (3G only), accelerometer, motion sensor, front and rear camera. All these are ubiquitous today but they are still new to the portable gaming community, especially GPS.

Dennis Crowley envisioned a check-in game, but recently Foursquare has had to look for a business model, slowly moving it away from gamification and into local advertising. This is where an actual game could be different. Gamers are of a different variety, and will spend their days building up characters or points, just to watch numbers go up on the screen.

A clever game developer could make something like Geocaching meets Foursquare. If executed correctly, gamers would eat that up. Developers could charge for the game, and possibly some DLC. In game form, the check in already has a business model: sell the game. This enables developers to take the idea beyond local advertising, and gives gamers something new and innovative to play. Imagine the leaderboards.

Sony has also ditched the highly underwhelming UMD in favor of storing games on a memory card. The Vita has slots enough for two, but it only takes the new proprietary Vita memory card. No surprise there, as Sony has been pushing proprietary memory cards for as long as they've been lagging in the portable electronics space post Walkman. The most annoying thing about this is how much it jacks up the price of the device. $250 for the basic wifi model, and the most ardent of us will want to fill it up with 32gb, so tack on another $100. Maybe Sony thinks they are combating piracy by selling their own memory cards, or maybe they just love skimming off the top.

Boring memory cards aside, Sony has some other innovative stuff going on with the Vita. The touchscreen is joined by a touchpad on the back of the device. This helps keep your fingers from covering the screen during crucial gaming moments. It's not something that caught on with smartphones, but Sony appears to be trying something new and people seem interested. It will be interesting to see where game developers go with this new control.

And maybe Foursquare is already developing a game for the PS Vita. One can only hope.

First Post

March 3, 2012, 3:51 p.m.

Customary first post. This is sort of like smacking the side of my yacht with a champagne bottle, or cutting a ribbon on the neighborhood grocery store, or making that first dig. But it takes more than a shovel to build a town hall. So I think I'll stick to building shacks, or dinghy's.

I look forward to covering weird programming things I discover during my day to day, hot button issues on tech, only the most white-hot startups, and all the video game excess I can squeeze in. We'll see how this goes.

Now I just sit back and wait for the inspiration to hit.