I spent the rest of 2010 fumbling through various coding projects, some bigger, some smaller. By the time November had come around I’d made a decision, I was going back to school. By this time I had reached a point where I understood the fundamentals of MVC frameworks, had explored a few different languages, and realized that I was years away from becoming a great developer. Taking part-time CS courses at UBC seemed like the kick I needed to start understanding some of the more important concepts behind the languages and frameworks I was working in (and what was this O thing I kept hearing about?)

I registered for two second year courses, Intro to Software Development and Data Structures & Algorithms. My semester has now ended I am thrilled that I made this decision.  In general I thought my professors were excellent and I loved attending the lectures (particularly in my Algorithms course).  When I look back at what I knew 5 months ago versus what I know now the difference blows me a way. I’m still a long ways away from my goal, but I’ve definitely passed a few milestones.

However, along the way though I noticed a few things that either surprised me, bothered me, or both.

1. CS assignments are really hard. I have a science degree (BS Biochemistry), and none of the assignments I had ever came close to being as time consuming as some of the coding projects I worked on this past semester.  That said, none of the assignments I did for my biochem degree ever came close to giving me as much satisfaction as writing BFS and DFS algorithms did for my first Data Strucutres & Algorithms assignment.

2. My fellow students didn’t seem to know much about web development. It’s entirely possible that I just met the wrong people, but I was genuinely shocked that I didn’t meet a single student who had written at least one basic web app. Going into the semester I’d expected my classes to be filled with people hacking away on cool ideas, if not for the web then for iPhone or Android, but that was not the case. When I was showing a couple of people Lenguajero one of them asked how I built the GUI (his words) for it.

Me: “Uh the front end is just  HTML/CSS with a some  Javascript to handle AJAX calls.”

Him: “Oh, so you wrote all the code in HTML?”

Me: “Well no, that’s just what the browser renders. The site is written in Python/Django and it’s running on the Google App Engine.”

Him: Glossy look in his eyes.

That might seem like I’m being a bit of a snob, I mean the guy is only 20 years old and in his second year of university, but it is representative of the interactions I had with most of my fellow students when I tried to discuss web development. This is obviously not the case everywhere (otherwise we wouldn’t have Facebook, Google, or hundreds of other startups that grew out of dorm rooms), so I’m not sure why that I didn’t meet more students building companies (or at least exploring the idea).

3. There were (relatively) a lot of women in my courses. Yes this is a male dominated field. Yes it will probably remain that way for quite a while, but I’d say at least 25-30% of the students in my classes were women.  I’d expected the percentage to be significantly lower based on what my wife had told me about her experiences as a CS major at Waterloo (class of 2004). I’m sure I could track down some data to either prove or disprove this, but I’m just going to throw out the observation that it seems like more and more women are entering computer science.

4. We talked about the clients we were going to work with/for a lot. I found this really weird.  The first couple of times a professor mentioned it I didn’t think much of it, but by the end of the semester I was beginning to wonder if I was a cog being assembled to go work at (Insert generic software consulting company here). “When you’re talking with a client you need to do this…”, “Clients will expect detailed development road maps…”, “Remember that your clients might not ever know why you did X if you don’t clearly write Pre and Post conditions.”

Why aren’t we talking in terms of when we’re building our own systems, or working with a team of developers at a startup that’s experiencing a banana shaped growth curve? Now obviously neither case will be representative of what all the students are going to do, but it seems to me that our professors should be encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.  I did not get that feeling at all and I think it’s a shame.

I’ill be starting summer courses next Monday. I’ve chosen Intro to Computer Systems and Intro to Relational Databases.  My goal is to get as well rounded a CS education as I can in 2011 so if anyone has suggestions on courses that are a MUST take before the end of the year please let me know.

What follows is his first installment in what I hope will be regular parenting updates for the next 20+ years. (Names have been redacted to protect privacy).

Preface and Inscription

August,

I’m honored by the prospect of becoming Lil’ Flanagan’s Godfather. It’s a job I don’t take lightly. I should disclose that I have zero experience in the field of godparenting. I don’t know much about parenting (or God!) but I’m learning as fast as I can.

Anyway, I’m enjoying this particular first assignment because I can spout off like a pompous blowhard, acting like I have succeeded as a parent, despite the fact that my first child is only 19 months old and is off-the-chart underweight!

So, how is a baby like a startup? Man, let me count the ways…

–XXXX

Basics: (Value | Human) Creation.

Startups create value. They don’t just shift it around in a zero sum fashion. An entire industry can be created by a couple of crazies working on something that experts have already decided isn’t worthwhile.

Parents create a new person and pour themselves into him. The moment your brainy little automaton pops out, Team AmeriCanada (and Team World) will be measurably stronger. From then on, your parenting i.e. “nurture” has an unquestionable impact. You get to teach your kid how to see things and how to think about them. They pick up your sensibilities about what is generally reasonable in day-to-day living and what is possible in a lifetime. They spend their first few years looking at the world exclusively through the lens you give them.

Scaling your ideas to a bigger organization

Many small businesses thrive on the ability, empathy and drive of one person. But as the founder succeeds and gets more customers, they have a tricky task of expanding the business. They have to teach employees how to create the same magical experience for customers. A good business needs to scale.

Parenting is similar to growing a business. You have already achieved measurable success as an individual. You live comfortably, have a solid education, and found an awesome mate. It’s time to scale your ideas to more people. You are a success, but can you teach your kid to be one too? It’s like you’re taking on your first employee or franchisee. Can you provide a recipe that’s so good that someone with zero knowledge can run with your idea and succeed?

The success of your ideas is measured by, among other things, the successes of your kids. What an interesting challenge! In reality the metrics are vague (your goals are not necessarily inherited by your kids), but you’ll have constant (and visceral) feelings about whether you’re on track.

Zero-to-expert in a very short time, fake it till you make it

Startups often involve a novel concept, or novel application of a concept. You rarely start out as an expert in whatever it is you end up doing. In the end, after thinking about one thing night and day for years, you are an expert. In the middle, you’re just trying to figure out how to maximize expected value while keeping the ship from sinking.

Along the way lots of people offer help and advice, but it’s often conflicting and no piece of advice is blindly actionable. Everyone has an opinion but you have to make your own calls. Many people will question your strategic decisions, sometimes publicly.

Parenting advice is valuable but, to put it diplomatically, the value can be very difficult to extract. Parents are happy to advise soon-to-be parents but their earnest efforts for succinctness often result in bulleted lists of things that they wish they knew (or bought) before starting. These lists are very hard to digest and assimilate. Don’t feel bad about it. Just make an effort to absorb and then do your own thing. Don’t worry if you don’t know what’s going on at first. Learn as you go along, and your subconscious will help you synthesize your own strategy from all the advice and experience.

And yes I appreciate the irony in my advising you that advice is useless

Have an amazing co-founder; do your part

It’s a bad idea to do a startup alone. You need a good partner to help offset the highs and lows (and associated competence swings). One day you think you’re going to take over the world, the next day you feel doom around the corner. By having a small team of multi-talented collaborators, all the hard things seem more doable and everything goes more smoothly. You just have to make sure that no one thinks anyone else is slacking or useless.

Two parents have to work quite hard to raise one baby (though many people manage with tougher ratios). If each parent feels like they’re doing more than half the work, you’re probably on the right track. If (like me) you feel that the mom is doing more than half the work, the disparity is probably even worse than it seems.

So be prepared to be in trouble pretty much all the time. I feel like I work pretty hard at being a dad, and that I’m doing an OK job, but I’m way behind XXXX in both respects. So I get in trouble a lot. Maybe you will be able to avoid this.

And aside from the work, you need to keep each other’s morale up. Fatigue can move in quickly and unexpectedly. One minute it’s all sunshine as a tiny-faced cutie pie hugs you or says “daddy.” Then when the kid’s even slightly unhappy, all the tiredness that you’ve been ignoring all day hits you at once. Euphoric pride can change instantly to a crushing sense of responsibility and exhaustion. Both those extremes are better experienced with a partner.

Identity transformation; No vacation; Waking up in the middle of the night

Startups are very immersive; your company becomes intertwined with your identity, and sometimes other parts of your life get compromised. Vacations aren’t really vacations, and on evenings and weekends you’re always at least kind of working. Too bad the term “full time job” has already been defined to mean less than 100% time.

Babies are also actually-full-time jobs. I used to wake up in the middle of the night when stuff went wrong with XXXX; I’m not as good at it for XXXX.  Hopefully you’ll be good at it.

All kinds of people are doing it; the secret network

There are a lot of small business owners out there, and even though they work on a wide variety of things, they still have a lot in common. All kinds of people start small businesses, with varying degrees of success. When one entrepreneur talks to another about business matters they understand and relate to each other easily even if they run totally different businesses.

In other words, small business ownership seems orthogonal to education level and industry. And so does parenthood. All kinds of people start families, and there’s always something you can talk about with another parent. There are lots of knowing looks and meaningful exchanges between strangers.

Edit: And congrats to my wife, @natgordon, for launching her own project baby list two weeks before our son was born.

This announcement came after couple of very tormented months, during which time I tried in vain to either increase revenue or drastically increase traffic.  I needed something to justify continuing to work on a project that I loved, but that was generating almost no revenue. Nothing seemed to work, and I was so frustrated with myself and the site that I did something cowardly. I wrote a post-mortem, and then I just walked away.

I puttered around on other projects trying to figure out what my next steps should be. I dedicated a few months to learning to code (still learning). I tried launching a few new sites (most of them flamed out without anyone taking notice), and I kept searching for “the next big idea”.

Finally, about a month ago, I started to realize that perhaps I had given up too soon. Despite spending almost no time on it, Lenguajero’s traffic had been holding steady and the community had passed the 10,000 member mark sometime in September.  I started spending a lot more time on the site. I updated some existing features, and built some new ones as part of my learning-to-code adventure. I also started feeling genuine joy to be working on the site again.

But, to continue to justify working on Lenguajero it had to start making more money than it was.  Lenguajero needed to sell something.

Now, this seems like an obvious choice for a website that wants to make money. As David Heinemeier Hansson puts it “Having a price is pretty good for getting profits. You have customers, they pay money for a product or service, and you get profits. That works for us.”

The problem was I had never come up with a good idea for a product or service to sell on the site. This time around I wanted to try something basic. Instead of building something complicated that was based on our free community (i.e. a freemium service), I decided to write two guides about something I know about, and something our users care about, learning Spanish slang.

Since slang is something that is very country specific I decided to write about Spanish in Spain, and Spanish in Mexico.  I also wanted to include more than just translations and examples of using Spanish slang. I wanted to write something that would give travelers a better understanding of the culture they would experience when traveling to these countries. I decided to base the guides on four loose subjects:

1. The history of the Spanish language in each country
2. Modern slang with definitions and examples on how to use it
3. Books, movies, and music that would be help people improve their Spanish, and better understand the slang from the section above.
4. A brief look at the food in each country (mainly because I love food).

It took about a week to write each guide.  Since I’m not a native Spanish speaker I also didn’t want to be the authority on Spanish slang.  Luckily, working on Lenguajero, and living in Latin America for the past couple of years, meant I had lots of friends who could help me out. Laura (Spain) and Jorge (Mexico) helped edit the slang in the guides.  It took me a couple more days to design the layouts in InDesign, finish the cover design, and then get the books converted into a format that could be uploaded to the Amazon Kindle Store.

I set the price of the guides low ($4.95) and sent out an email to our Spanish learning members on Sunday night, hoping that the low price and the email blast would drive a good number of sales starting on Monday morning.  So far it’s been a great response, and a really high conversion rate from the email (the past 24 hrs has netted 4x more than a normal month of ad sales).

There are quite a few steps I need to take to make this a perpetual passive income channel.  First, I need to do some A/B testing on the price once this initial sales drive from the email is over.  I had considered doing it on the initial email, but wanted all of our members to have the chance to get a guide for a low price.  The second thing I want to do is drive enough sales on the Kindle to rank on the first page of search results for the term ‘Spanish’.  And finally, I’ll be working to develop other country-specific guides (Costa Rica, Argentina, Colombia and the Caribbean are all on the list), that are a little more niche than the first two.

Of course the end goal of all of this is to generate enough revenue that I can continue to work part-time on building Lenguajero. While I don’t think that Lenguajero will ever turn into an enormous community like LiveMocha or Busuu, I feel confident that there is still a place for a small community of Spanish and English learners on the web.  I’ll keep working towards building that community. This time with a little more patience and a few more ‘Notification of payment received’ emails popping up in my inbox.

1. Search for a Graphic Designer with perfect 5 star rating and in the $15 and up price range.

OK, the #3 result is actually for a graphic designer, but that’s the only one on the first page.

2. How about Accounting and Bookkeeping $15 an up.

Hmmm…notice that 2 of the first 3 results are the same for both of those? I’ve never met a graphic designer doubling as an accountant, but maybe there are a couple out there. Let’s try one more.

3. Administrative support $15 and up.

It’s our good pal Sunny J. again (Norman H. is just slightly below the fold).

How’s it going to go? Am I onto something incredible here? Will I be on the front page of every industry publication before midnight?

Unfortunately, the answer is almost always “No”. Still, that feeling of accomplishment when a site goes live and is all of a sudden available to the entire world is an exhilarating moment.

My most recent project (I’m starting to really hate the word(s) “startup”) hasn’t really had that moment. In February I published a TOEFL eBook. By the end of the month sales from that ebook were outpacing revenue from my startup. And this was after only about 40 hours to get the book out there on a super basic/ugly site. It was around this time that my partner and I started considering shifting our focus away from Lenguajero and onto our TOEFL iBT site.

Unlike when Lenguajero went live TOEFL Now never had that all encompassing “this is it” moment. Instead over the months we continued to work part-time on developing the site and new iterations were pushed as they became available. Small changes two or three times a week, a relatively big change here or there, but nothing to get excited about.

Finally last week we invested in some long overdue design changes (Karlik Design is absolutely fantastic). All of a sudden I can see the site taking shape in front of me. Those cloudy ideas are starting to become more concrete, almost visible.

Of course we have a long way to go, and most of the things we want to implement on the site aren’t there yet, but a vision has presented itself, and that is the closest thing I’ve felt to a “this is it” moment since starting work on this project.

I’ve been learning to code for about 6 months now, and have developed a real liking (dare I say passion) for it. Of course 6 months is nothing, and I’m about as far from a savant as you can get. So far I’ve learned just enough to be able to actually start building things on my own, even if they suck. I’ve also learned just enough to know that I don’t know very much yet.

With that said I present my little app – www.lifechore.com

Premise: A simple way to remind yourself to do those really, really small tasks that you always put off (canceling a gym membership, calling a relative, etc.).

Function: Sign up by entering your email and a list of “lifechores” that you want to be reminded to do. You’ll get a daily email reminding you of what you have to do. You can add/remove items from your list by replying to the daily email (instructions in footer).

Why Build It: There are a lot of task management apps out there, and they might all be better at solving this problem, but I don’t use any of them. I don’t really know why that is, maybe I’m just lazy… But, I do use email (like my gmail is constantly open), so a simple reminder everyday will always be right in front of me.

I’ve also had a real desire to write an “email app” for a couple of months now. I use the term to describe an app that users interact with through sending and receiving emails. I’m not sure why I’ve wanted to do this, but I’ve been brainstorming ideas on what I could do to satisfy this desire. This was the first one that actually seemed to make any sense at all.

How I Built It: Python + Google App Engine

My first interaction with “real” code (i.e. more than HTML/CSS) was when I started working on Lenguajero with my partner. Natalie, my partner, chose to build Lenguajero on top of the Google App Engine mainly as an experiment, and chose to do so using Python. So, I’ve been around Python for longer than I’ve actually been writing code.

I first started learning Python with Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way (or at least what there was of it 6 months ago), and then I wrote a few small scripts/programs in Python after going through it.

For the past 3 months I’ve been working in Ruby on Rails, so it was nice to go back to Python after gaining a better understanding of the basics and having a better $global understanding of how the pieces all fit together.

However, the real reason I used GAE was the Mail API. It made it really easy to start sending and receiving email, and since that is the basis of the app it was kind of a no-brainer.

Future Plans: I’ve been using my own service for about a week now. I also showed it to about 10 friends, and a few of them are also using it.

The truth is it is not as useful as I thought it would be. I do get the email everyday and look at it, but it hasn’t made me any more likely to do those small tasks. Whether that is because of a lack of utility on the app’s part, or simply proof that these little tasks really don’t matter that much I’m not entirely sure.

There are a few very obvious things I can do to improve the lifechore.com (scheduling of daily email, email verification, etc.) whether I will actively pursue that depends on whether anyone shows an interest in using it.

I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, criticisms, etc. So please leave a comment or send me an email (address is on the left side of this post).

I’m also currently trying to decide what I should build next. If anyone wants to make some suggestions for next steps in my educational process I’d appreciate suggestions. (They don’t have to be novel ideas, just something that would teach me some new skills.)

I bring this up so that the rest of this post doesn’t come off as sounding like I’m pretending to be a wizened entrepreneur who is handing out advice based on his past successes. I’m not. But, with that said, I have learned a few things over these past 18 months.

The one thing that I have learned above all others is “keep it simple”.

Despite the fact that my startup never turned into a profitable company (at this point it pays for itself and a couple of nice dinners per month) we were able to launch in three months and gather about 5000 active users within 4 months. Nothing remarkable at all, but solid numbers that showed an interest in our site. Aside from my partner and I’s time it also only cost us a couple of thousand dollars to build out our site. We were able to do all of this because we kept the site simple and focused on releasing quickly and then building on it from there.

The advice that I’m trying to offer here isn’t anything revolutionary. Quite the contrary, it’s a whole development meme and has been for a couple of years now. Buzzwords like “MVP” and “fail fast” are heard all over the place, and “keep it simple” is no different.

So why do I still see so many people investing so much time in something without trying to put a simple product in front of their customers? I personally know several people who have sunk huge sums of money and months, if not years, into a product that is always on the verge of launching, or is now open to a small group of “beta users”, but is never quite ready to be released to the world.

Everyone I know working on a startup like this is a smart person. Definitely smarter than I am. So why haven’t they launched yet? This isn’t a question I feel like I can just ask outright to an acquaintance.

Me: “How’s xxxxxx coming along?”

Them: “Good, we’re really excited about a couple of new features we are adding, but it’s going to take a month or so to have them ready?”

Me: “So why don’t you just launch with what you have?”

Them: Awkward glare.

Instead I’ll ask the question here: If you are one of these people please share with me and help me understand why not keep it simple and just launch already?

Or, if you know one of these people, and know why they keep pushing off their launch date please tell me. I really want to stop squandering so much of my own limited mental powers thinking about this.

Create content. It’s the golden rule. The one thing that you HAVE to do if you want to attract new visitors, create a following, and ultimately sell a product or service.

“Write about what you know.”, “Become an expert in your field.”, every time I hear these mantras I feel like curling up in the fetal position and making groaning noises for 5-10 minutes.  I understand why people say these things, but what about all of us who are working on something because we see an opportunity, not because we are (or want to be) experts in the field. I’m not alone here am I?

Recently I’ve been working on a website related to the TOEFL exam (Test of English as a Foreign Language – a requirement for any non-native English speaker who wants to attend university in the U.S. or Canada). Building a website is easy enough, and we’ve even hacked together a couple of prototypes of the new tools we hope to soon offer test takers. But how are we going to reach our audience?  Well…I guess we’ll just have to become experts on the TOEFL exam, create a new blog where we share our wisdom through regular posts, build a massive following, and then sell our products to them.

I’m going to skip the sarcastic list of problems with this approach and just get to the meat of this post, namely how we created content and became an authoritative source on a question all TOEFL test takers want to know – “What score do I need to get into the school I want to go to?”, all within one week.

If you spend even 5 minutes browsing any popular TOEFL forum you’ll find all sorts of questions like “What’s the minimum score I need to get into M.I.T.?” Well, we found those questions too, but we didn’t find a good answer. Of course, you can go to M.I.T.’s website and dig around in admission requirements and you’ll find the information you need, but why couldn’t we find a simple list of all U.S. universities and their TOEFL score requirements? Probably because one didn’t exist. AH HA!

All of a sudden there was something we could offer that no one else could. From here on out it was a pretty easy process.

1. We hired a woman on oDesk for $50 to complete a spreadsheet with the scores for 260+ universities in the United States.  She worked quickly and had it done in less than two days.

2. I wrote a simple Ruby script to translate the CSV file into an html table, and published the results on our website.

3. We posted this to Wikipedia’s article about the TOEFL. It was reviewed and accepted by an editor thus making us the only authoritative list of required TOEFL scores for U.S. universities.

4. Wikipedia is now the number one source of traffic to our site and since being re-crawled by google we are starting so see a big increase in traffic from searches for scores for specific universities (e.g. TOEFL score requirement University of Washington).

The link attributed to the author of the quote up top goes to a great blog post about building this type of content. That said, I’d really like to hear from anyone else who has experience building this type of content? Do you have any strategies for picking out niches inside your target audience?

About a month ago I decided that I was going to take a big step in my personal development and start to really write code. I came up with an idea for a service, picked a platform and a language (python on google app engine), and got to work building v1.

After a great month of utter frustration, joy, API integrations, and AH HA moments I launched my site. Now comes the hard part, sales. I’m not a sales person, but I know that for the service I’m offering the best way to get people to sign up is to do direct sales calls, so that’s what I’m doing.

I worked on my pitch for a while (it involves assuring whoever answers the phone that I am NOT trying to sell them something, only ask them a few questions about how they currently solve a day-to-day office problem), and then started making calls. And that’s when I noticed something interesting…

Sales calls that start like this “Hi, my name is August and I am a small business owner…” typically end with the receptionist (or whoever answers the phone) getting rid of me as quickly as possible.

Whereas calls that start like this “Hi, my name is August and I am an entrepreneur working on a new start up…” have a high probability of getting me transferred to a manager or decision maker of some sorts.

To be honest I was quite surprised by this difference. While I do consider myself an entrepreneur I also consider myself to be a small business owner, and in general look upon the title “small business owner” with greater respect. In fact, when I listen to people like Jason Fried, the WooThemes guys, or Gabriel Weinberg speak I  admire them for being small business owners. They are operating the type of small, profitable businesses that I want to be operating.

So what is it about calling myself an entrepreneur that gets me almost immediate access to decision makers at a company? And why, when I introduce myself as a small business owner (a position that everyone from our nation’s politicians to our local newspapers revere as the backbone of our national economy) are excuses made and phone calls ended?

Does it say more about who is answering the phone, or has the term ‘small business owner’ simply lost its luster only to be replaced by a sexy french word entrepreneur? *I’m saying it with my sexiest french accent right now*

I’d love to hear your opinion on this. Do I have a skewed perspective (I’ve only made about 60 calls), or is there a general shift away from the use of the phrase small business owner? If so, why?

None of these sites are small obscure sites that only a handful of brilliant visionaries are using. Rather, they are all well established, profitable companies that have found a niche (some large, some small), and are simply being the best of the best in their chosen space. While most people who read this have probably heard of or used every one of these sites the number of my friends and associates who have not constantly surprises me. Here are 4 sites I can’t live without.

1. Dropbox

Out of all of these sites these guys are probably the most famous, and with good reason. They make an incredible product, and they make it easy to use. Simply put, Dropbox allows you to backup and then access files online.  This comes in damn handy when someone decides to oh, I don’t know, break into your apt. over the weekend and rip off two of your laptops (as was the case with me this past week). I was pretty panicked for a bit, but once I got a new laptop I just disconnected my old laptop from my Dropbox account and synced it to me new one. All my important contracts, images, .psd files, etc. were back on my machine, and I was back to work.

2. WooThemes

I love these guys. They build the best WordPress themes out there. Period. I’ve used several of their themes on my own sites, and have also used them to build clients’ sites as well. They are so easy to setup and use that I just automatically turn to them for any site design that isn’t going to require much proprietary work. At least once a week a friend of mine will say “Yeah, I’m thinking of redesigning my blog/website, and I’ve found a pretty good designer here in (insert city name here) who can do it for me for (insert price range of $300-$1000 here).” To which my response is always the same – “Oh my God, don’t pay someone that much money for a simple WordPress blog. Go check out WooThemes.”

3. WUFOO

While I’m on the wu’s/woo’s I might as well throw this one in there. WUFOO is another great small business that is doing one thing, and doing it extremely well. They make embeddable forms and surveys that are really easy to create, and can be added to any webpage in just a couple of minutes. I think I am currently using them on 3-4 different sites.

While my love for their product is strong, there is another reason that I love these guys (and the other Woo guys as well). They have a kick-ass business in a niche, and they aren’t trying to blow up and sell their company for hundreds of millions. They are following the 37signals way and growing a profitable company organically. They have a small team (I believe it’s 6 total), and they all work from home, and many of them from different cities. I find companies like this to be extremely motivating for myself as I work on new ideas. My goal isn’t to be Twitter, it’s to have a small profitable company that I can operate from anywhere in the world.

4. Google App Engine

“I fucking hate idea people.” – Jason Fried

I don’t really consider myself an ideas person, I consider myself a “get shit done” person. I believe that those people are called Project Managers (thought I’m willing to concede that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one). The problem is, when your startup has two people working on it and you are a “get shit done” guy, you need to either be designing your product, or building it. With this realization in mind I have been working on improving my coding chops for the past month or so. I recognize that it is a long process that will take at least a year or two for me to get to the level I want to be at, so until then there is Google App Engine.

Here’s what I love about GAE (which we built Lenguajero on). It is really easy for someone like me (limited tech background) to get it up and running quickly. It took me about 4 hours to get the python SDK installed, and to figure out the basics of how it all worked (the basic tutorial is really great). It takes away a lot of complexity for me at this early stage. I don’t need to setup a MySQL database, or worry about running an app server. It’s all handled by google, which lets me focus on the things I want to be focusing on (writing lines of python code).

In the spirit of being fair and balanced, I’ll say this. GAE has some serious drawbacks. I find that datastore to be very frustrating from time to time and having learned a lot of MySQL basics GQL frustrates the hell out of me. However, for the little coding projects that I am working on right now it more than does the trick, and allows me to learn very practically, by building webapps.

I’m curious to hear from other people about what sites they simply can’t live without.  Are there any sites that you just can’t stop talking about?  Let me know in the comments.