I wasn’t sure I would participate, but an idea popped into my head. Inspired in part by a segment of Dragon Ball Z Kai, I pondered what it would be like to jump from tiny planet to tiny planet. Mainly, what would happen to your perspective of “up” and “down” if you jump from the top of one planet to the bottom of another? The concept of “down” essentially just means “in the direction of the pull of gravity.” What drove me to want to build the game was the idea of making a 2D platformer where the directions up, down, left, and right are completely fluid and based on the gravitational pull of planets around the character.

Even though I haven’t used CoffeeScript or Processing.js before, I decided to try them out. Probably not a good idea on such a short timeline, but oh well.

The result was an auto-orienting 2D puzzle game where you have to jump from tiny planet to tiny planet to get to your goal before your oxygen runs out. You can walk around on planets and jump, but after leaving a planet’s surface, there is no longer any control over the character. That means if you miss a planet, you can drift off into space forever!

I finished an hour before the deadline and set up the game at PicoPlanets.com (a play on “pico” meaning one one-millionth, or 0.000001) and made the source code available on GitHub. You can also see screenshots and blog posts about the progress (“making of”) here on my Ludum Dare author page.

If I had that primitive alpha version of Kerplunk! today, it would still be able to improve my Twitter experience. Twitter has only gotten noisier, and Kerplunk was the only application to provide ways of suppressing certain types of content—craptweets—either partially or entirely. To deemphasize craptweets, Kerplunk! would simply reduce the screen real estate available for that tweet and truncate it after a certain number of characters. If it turned out to be interesting, despite tricking Kerplunk! into thinking it was crap, you could still spot it and expand it. Simple, yet amazeballs. I miss it.

What’s more, Kerplunk! was designed from Day Zero to go beyond Twitter (in fact, the core application included ZERO references to Twitter or tweets, aside from a command to download and install a plug-in called “Twitter”). You see, I don’t give a damn about tweets or Twitter. I care about what my friends are posting and sharing online, be it on Twitter, Facebook, blogs/RSS, etc.

While the prototype source code lay abandoned collecting dust, the idea and desire remained. The idea grew beyond Kerplunk!, though. Beyond a desktop application, at least. Since 2009, I’ve used my phone more and more to see what my friends are up to, probably up to 50% of my social media usage. I also came up with concepts that would benefit from my application to talk directly to another application, rather than communicating only through social network APIs.

The nice thing about ideas is that they can evolve and change entirely. Over the last 3 years, I’ve wanted different tools to solve different problems I had with my disparate social graph. Kerplunk! evolved into something else entirely. I’ll share what the new project is all about in a subsequent blog post. Stay tuned!

There are always valid arguments in favor of and in opposition to raising capital. After a couple of years of having no intention to seek funding for this project, I started to lean in favor of it. Part of it is manpower and not spreading myself too thin. Another part is skill set—my skills are too broad.

I’m pretty good at a few things (interactive development; “making stuff move with code”), but much less so at a bunch of other things. I can do various things under the “big D Design” umbrella (from product to user experience to graphic design), but that doesn’t mean I should. My design work is definitely inferior to those who specialize in it. I can do database administration and query optimization, but that doesn’t mean I should. My low-level systems prowess is definitely inferior to those who specialize in it. Basically, I have the ability to build a fully functional and fairly usable proof of concept, but not an all around amazing product. I can bring an idea to life, but beyond that, it’s best to let specialists take it from there.

Throughout most of my career, I’ve always worked alongside complementary specialists, allowing me to focus my attention to my own specialty. My best work has always been the work I’ve done with good teams. My best solo work, while sometimes being technologically innovative, is nowhere near as well-rounded or impressive.

So, I hit a roadblock. If I were talking to investors with an idea, a plan, some slides, and no ability to pull it off myself, an investors answer would simply be, “Yes,” or, “No.” However, because I technically can build everything from front to back, the answer becomes, “No,” or, “Come back after you launch it and start getting some traction.” If an investor has the option to see the product in action and gauge real-world interest, why not wait and see?

Well, I need to get back to my client work now…

I didn’t set out to last any specific amount of time. I thought 6-12 months of full-time travel—the much more glamorous way of saying homeless—was doable, considering I had already spent a few years traveling part-time while working. On a few occasions, I had used my 1-week carry-on bag to last 4 or more weeks. I figured as long as I could find a way to do laundry every week, I could travel indefinitely.

The core of the experiment was about living expenses and sustainable travel. Traveling, even on a tight budget, is very expensive. The cost of food, lodging, and transportation while traveling can easily match or exceed your standard cost of living. Full-time travel could thus double your monthly expenses. But what if you were able to eliminate the first part of the equation and only pay living expenses wherever you currently are? What if you could go to Rome for a month and not have to pay for the month of rent and utilities back home?

To keep travel cheap, on a per-day calculation, you need to travel slowly. Going to another continent for one or two weeks results in a very high per-day cost, but you can save on lodging by staying longer (weekly rates are lower than daily rates, and monthly rates are lower than weekly rates) and lower the per-day cost of transportation by putting more time in between flights.

I decided a year ago to try this out. I rented a studio in the Bahamas for 35 days for $600, a room in DC for 4 weeks, a hotel in Germany for a month (which was thankfully reimbursed by a client), a hostel in Budapest for 3 weeks, a mountain-top hotel in the US Virgin Islands for 3 weeks, and a cabin in lower Manhattan (which I had to see to believe) for 5 weeks.

So, 6-12 months. When will it end? When will I “settle down” and return to traveling only part-time, 1-3 weeks per month? It’s an internal conflict I’ve had since the 6th month. The full-time travel is exhausting, stressful, and both physically and mentally taxing. But at the same time, I’m in a position to travel longer and farther than I would otherwise be unable to. Giving up now would feel like squandering the unique opportunity I have. I have never been to Asia, Australia, Africa, or South America, and this would be a great time to do it.

The jury is still out. It could be up in the sky, for all I know. Speaking of which, I am now on my descent into Charlotte, North Carolina. Time to turn off and stow all portable electronic devices.

They wanted me to move to SF and work in their headquarters (they had a satellite office in Santa Cruz), but they ended up giving me two job offers. One included a high salary, a signing bonus, and required I live in SF and work on-site full-time. The second offer had about $40,000 chopped off the salary, no signing bonus, and allowed me to work from home, while visiting the office for at least 2 days per month.

For almost 3 years, I was in SF every calendar month, and for the last of those years, I subletted an apartment there.

The brilliant thing, though, is this: my reduced salary was still very competitive against local Phoenix salaries, and the yearly travel cost was less then the difference. It was a win-win. My employer saved money while paying me fairly well and covering my travel expenses.

While in Phoenix, I got to live the work-at-home freelance lifestyle (i.e. flexible hours and no work/life balance), which helped me get actively involved in the Phoenix tech community.

Oh, how I miss direct deposit..

I was hanging out with a new friend I made in Budapest, via Twitter no less. A homeless guy approached us, stood in front of me and started speaking in Hungarian. My friend stepped in, speaking Hungarian to the man, gave him some change, and then the man left. My friend translated what the man had said to me. “Finally, a REAL Hungarian man!” My friend set him straight. Just a funny looking American.

In Hungary, almost every person on their paper currency features some sort of facial hair. Most of the statues, too, don mustaches and beards.

My handlebar mustache was uncommon among the people there,but it seemed to fit right in with their money and art. Their history.

I was a blast from the past.

I’ve seen this type of instant occur for other people—in some cases, I’ve been told I was there for it. Something happens, and opens a new door for you or gives you an all new perspective. You walk through this door, even though it feels strange, like uncharted territory. That leads to something else happening, and then something else. It’s a chain reaction that, once set in place, will continue to move you in new directions, even if you don’t realize your new life can be traced back to on event, person, conversation, book, or whatever.

This chain reaction, in a less combustive term, is the path of your life. Is your life stuck in traffic on the highway with everyone else, going to a 9-5 cube farm job? Sometimes it’s not your decision to get kicked off that highway and into the woods, as you can see in the Lemonade documentary. In most cases, if you really want to keep that comfortable, consistent life, you can fight your way back on it. So whether or not it’s your choice to get off the beaten path, it’s up to you to stay on it and see where it’ll take you. This decision is the beginning of a journey.

Setting off on a new path doesn’t necessarily require quitting your job or getting laid off.

After my path-altering realization, I kept my job for a couple of years, and then I got a new job and worked there for almost three years. So for me, entrepreneurship only came after many other things happened and I achieved what I referred to as exit velocity. At some point, it did become inevitable.

In 2005, I realized that even if I reached the peak of my career, having a good portfolio doesn’t make you an industry leader. At the same time, I was starting to wonder how Digg was taking off, even though it was the same content as Slashdot. I realized digg was primarily successful because of Kevin Rose, who had spent years on one of the only nationally broadcasted TV channels that focused exclusively on technology. That gave him an incredible amount of exposure within the tech industry. If you or I had launched Digg at the same time he did, it very well may have floundered, as the first 10,000 users of a User Generated Content site are the most crucial when going up against an incubant like Slashdot. When people heard Kevin Rose had founded Digg, many surely signed up simply because his name was attached to it.

That realization in 2005 set off a series of reactions that eventually led to my change in jobs, starting my business, and my world-wide couch surfing adventures. Digg was where I started getting my name out in the tech industry, which is how my next employer found me. I built simple applications that crawled Digg’s data and allowed Digg users to explore and interact with it. My name was plastered all over it, in hopes that it would start to look familiar among people in the tech industry.

When I signed up for Twitter, it seemed very similar to Digg, except more personal and more interactive. Twitter was primarily made up of people in technology, and thus people I wanted to get my name out to. I did the same thing I did on Digg. I ran experiments and developed simple applications, such as twitter-based games and crappygraphs.com. Next thing you know, I was the second most-followed user on the site! Twitter, then, indirectly led to many more things happening in my life.

But would any of this have happened if I hadn’t made that realization in 2005?

I always try to get a window seat when I fly. I always stare out the window during take-off and landing. I try to force myself to maintain the perspective of someone who is flying for the first time. I try to be that kid. I try to see the magic of it all, even though I’ve seen it hundreds of times.

This perspective can be applied elsewhere. In a way, your daily happiness can be proportional to how easily amazed you are. I envy people who say “wow” to things I take for granted.

Human flight truly is a magical thing. Just one hundred years ago, the richest and most powerful people in the world—kings and emperors—couldn’t do with all their spoils or slaves what I can do for the cost of a day or two of work.

I was reminded of this today while reading a book recommended to me by my friend John Murch. It’s called, “Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs.” I’m only a few pages in, but the author starts by saying these rich and successful entrepreneurs actually got rich by making everyone and society richer. While walking through a museum, “some wealthy dead French guy’s house,” the author remarks that he would never trade places with that rich guy, adding, “this guy was one of the richest in the world, but he’d be considered living under the poverty line in our day.”

While the book will surely go on to make a different point, I couldn’t help but reflect on the idea that we cannot and should not take for granted the magic and wonder of the world around us.

It’s all about perspective.

As a developer, you’re a resource. A cog in the machine. The more work they put on your plate, the later you work and the more you get done. But with all this undercutting going on, you end up working too hard for too little.

It was well worth it for me, at least at first. My life changed once I had completed that project for Mazda & Quiksilver. My portfolio went from having nothing to having a cool looking project for major brands. The difference between 0 and 1 was immeasurable. They could have paid me nothing and it would’ve been worth it to me.

But what’s the difference between having 10 and 11 name-droppable clients in your portfolio? The value of that 11th client, I realized, was miniscule compared to the 1st.

When you’re listing the clients you’ve worked with, people stop paying attention after about 4 names. By the 7th, they start thinking about how pompous you are. By the 9th, they start thinking about how to ditch you.

When I had this realization, I started to think about what I was getting in return for all the hours and and sweat I dumped into my work. That’s when I realized my days in the ad world were numbered.

Where I stand on education is complicated. I did what was best for me and my career, and it’s by no means the right answer for people in different positions.

My decision to drop out was based on a number of factors.

First, I’m not a scholar. I always despised homework my D in high school Trigonometry was due to scoring the highest in my class on tests while not turning in any homework assignments. In high school Algebra and Algebra II, I was constantly scorned for not showing my work (or enough work). Where we clashed was that I valued the result and they valued the process. If I understand something, it feels like a waste of time to walk through elementary steps over and over. My educational career was doomed.

While in high school, I got a computer. It sucked me in. I didn’t go to parties. Instead I was at home, on the computer, learning. With a strong background in logic and math growing up, I was well suited to do visual programming. Code-driven animation, interaction, complex effects, physics, video games, etc. I taught myself Flash, with the help of online tutorials and forums.

I decided to get a degree that would help ready me for a career in video games or special effects in video.

Here’s where I lucked out. Because I had become proficient with Flash, I could jump into a lucrative field that flexed similar brain muscles: interactive web development. I had no experience and no degree, but I had years of code samples. I sent my experiments to a local interactive advertising agency, and they decided to give me a shot. They put me on a project that they could assign to someone else if I couldn’t pull my weight. My first commercial software development project? A co-branded microsite for Mazda & Quiksilver.

People who had the degree I had yet to earn would be lucky to land a job like that. The piece of paper doesn’t mean much in some circumstances. Instead, where I was also very fortunate, I was good at something visual. I could *show* my abilities. Then, once I started lining my portfolio with major brands, I realized I had a stronger job-seeking arsenal than any degree could provide.

It was quite a profound realization to have at the age of nineteen.