Is it time to earn or time to learn? This is something Mark Suster talks about a lot, both on his blog and his podcast. I follow him through my Google reader and often find his advice interesting and helpful. He is an LA-based venture capitalist and he often talks about things that I hope to some day have some personal experience with specifically around all things starting and running a company. Time to earn vs. learn is one of the things he mentions a lot that really resonates with me. In his post referenced above he more specifically talks about taking a job for the experience vs looking for your big break, but I think about it a little bit differently.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I would love to be able to quit my job, tomorrow for instance, and immediately be able to begin profitably executing on my own business. That would be great, but it’s just not realistic. I often come up with “great” ideas (I’m the only judge of that here) but quickly get frustrated when I think about implementing them with my current skill set. At this point I’m basically qualified to be a product manager for my ideas at best, this isn’t useful as a first step, it’s more of a complimentary skill that I need. After taking a step back from the whole process it’s easier to begin noticing the pattern. Brilliant Idea -> Design some basic concept -> Execute Technically…. -> Brick Wall. The more I think about how much I don’t know when it comes to executing on my idea, the more daunting the tasks become until eventually I’m overwhelmed thinking about all the things that I want to do but know I won’t be able to. There are much larger hurdles down the line, if I can’t defeat this one then I have no chance of ever being successful.
So it’s time to start. I’ve noticed that I always have a very short term plan in mind, and those seem to fail often. My new approach is a more long term goal to help with future short term goals. It’s time to learn. My initial plan, before it gets inevitably side tracked, is to use the rest of the year implementing a very simple project that will span across multiple skill sets that I don’t currently have with the purpose of being primarily educational. As long as I learn some of the things I’m shooting for then I don’t care if I provide value to anybody buy myself. Along the way this may change, but my number one goal is to learn things that will help me in my future endeavors.
Here’s the plan:
Web Technologies
- Ruby on Rails
- Learning the Rails framework when I’m not a seasoned veteran of working with MVC is only made more difficult by the fact that I don’t know Ruby either.
- I’ve already started using resources like CodeSchool and Codecadamy to learn many of the basics.
- I have a background in procedural PHP, so I’m not going in to this blind to coding, but at best I think this can be called a very basic foundation.
- Git w/ Bitbucket
- When it comes to version control my experience is mostly in SVN which has a very different approach to the same goal. There are enough similarities, in both concept and terminology, to make the learning process without an actual working project, especially confusing.
- I’ve already started keeping track of mini projects and tests using Git repositories. Baby steps.
- HTML 5
- This will just be about learning what’s new, all the things that I’ve missed out on not working on the web the last few years.
- CSS
- Bootstrap as training wheels. Seeing a working framework and being able to manipulate something that’s already there is a good way for me to start learning, so I’ll implement Bootstrap on my first project and go from there.
- jQuery
- DOM/CSS Manipulation
- AJAX
- I don’t have a ton of javascript experience, but I understand many of the concepts. I have a conceptual understanding of DOM manipulation and how AJAX works. The fact that jQuery makes much of this easier is incredibly helpful.
- Social APIs
- It would be nice to get a basic understanding of Facebook/Twitter logon and posting. More than likely I would come across a need for this at some point in the future and this fits perfectly into my project.
Mobile Technologies
- T-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-i-e-s-[backspace]-[backspace]-[backspace]-y! Technology. Just one. And I don’t intend on becoming an expert.
- iOS/Objective-C
- I may not be an expert in web technologies either, but I know enough to be dangerous and to know what’s possible. This is my target for where to be with implementing on iOS. Just the basics. Just enough to be dangerous.
I’m going to put more of an emphasis on the web, specifically functionality first and foremost. I’m going to build a walking skeleton that is literally barebones functionality. Then I’m going to build in small things on top of it to get exposure to certain other things. Although I plan to read The Lean Startup this year, this by no means will be an MVP (minimum viable product.) The purpose of this project isn’t to release quickly for feedback, it’s to feel comfortable with the information that I’m learning.
- Step 1: Functional website using Rails
- Step 2: Codebase sitting in a repository on Bitbucket
- Step 2.1: Auto push code changes to a production environment
- Step 3: Tie in some sort of template to make the site somewhat aesthetically pleasing
- Step 4: Retrofit existing functionality to take advantage of jQuery for a more user friendly experience
- Step 4.1: Use DOM manipulation to clean up some of the inherent UX issues
- Step 4.2: Use AJAX for form submission and other background processing
- Step 5: Integrate multiple user workflow with native registration/sign on
- Step 6: Integrate social sign on and registration
- Step 7: Integrate social broadcasting
- Step 8: API-itize for use with mobile native app
- Step 9: Learn objective-c?
This plan is still a little open ended, obviously. At the same time it’s much more defined than anything I’ve been working with before and that’s why I think it will be successful. So right now it’s time to learn so that at some point in the future I can use this foundation to start earning, for myself.
for more profundity or pithy humor follow me on twitter – @bicb
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