Archive

Hello world. Again.

With school being within walking distance I get an extra hour (at least) not stuck in traffic. Some projects I’ve had backlogged in my brain I’d like to work during that hour. Make the Great Wolf Lodge wand a smart wand using an Arduino Sticky advice videos Get better at roasting coffee Shared book project Write more Use the robots to code more Frame art more Hit post more Ring around the neighborhood Every day reader

For reason that are unimportant, I was reading some old blog posts of mine from 2005. The number of websites that I linked to back then that are no longer around is crazy. Over 75% I’d say. Back then, I thought these sites would never die and they would be the new institutions. I was wrong. Things change and links rarely get redirected. Side note, I hated Apple with a real passion back then. That passion waned over the years. Melissa won a HomePod Mini at work last week. This stupid speaker doesn’t work with Android or Spotify or Bluetooth. The hatred is back! ...

WordPress and SquareSpace and other camel cased companies have eaten the bottom the web market. For the most part, it’s for the better. However, if you’re looking to play around with web tech and want to see how websites can be blazing fast when not weighed down with plugins and overwrought templates give a static site generator a try. The most famous has to be GitHub Pages powered by Jekyll. I spun up a couple of those sites over last couple years. It’s easy and hosting is free. ...

Copying from a competitor is plagiarism. Copying from a different genre is creativity. I always slap my head when reading, say, an executive summary that’s being submitted to a competition and reads like every other executive summary. Why not stand out? Find inspiration NOT from other executive summaries, but from a short-story or a great recipe or a movie. You can still copy, err be inspired, by others work. Just not your competitors. ...

Write 1,000 words a day. Giving growth and marketing advice to the earliest stage startups is tough. So many things need to be done that it’s almost impossible to focus. Lack of team, time, and money overwhelms the mind quickly. I’ve noodled on what a good, simple, and achievable heuristic could be. The best I’ve got is to write 1,000 words a day. That’s not internal emails or Slack message words. That’s 1,000 public-facing words. Blog posts, LinkedIn comments, introductory emails, scripts for videos you produce, etc. If you can get to five digits of words a day I think you’re doing something. ...

Not in the first week, but probably the first year. If I had a time machine that allowed me to go back in time I would stop by id Software during the making of Quake and ILM from the beginning until the opening of Star Wars. The creativity and ingenuity of those two culture changing companies is inspiring. Since a time machine that goes backwards is almost certainly impossible the best I can do is listen to a five hour podcast with John Carmack and watch a six hour documentary about ILM. ...

Is he old enough to eat popcorn? Let me look it up. How can we speed up his potty training? Let me look it up. We all trust top search results more than we should. But I talk to founders every week who have no SEO strategy. If I trust the top search result to raise my kid, then I’m pretty sure I’m buying from a top search result too. ...

“Well, the main point is to make money.” It was a response I got some genius thing I said yesterday. I nodded and we went along with our conversation. Upon further reflection I think this what I wish I would have said. “Then get a job at ‘big company x in your industry’ or, heaven forbid, Wall Street. If there isn’t a passion beyond money I don’t know why you’d work for an early stage startup. It’s too hard and the chances for a big win are too low. Working to solve a hard problem and provide real and new value to people is a motivating factor that will keep you going.” ...