I’ve written about immortality before because our limited time on this earth keeps being a subject that highly interests me. We all know it’s impossible (and not even favorable) to live forever but there’s one thing that comes close to immortality: Legacy.

You can accomplish legacy in two ways. One way is to have (lots of) children and try your best to raise them right. The second way is contribute to society in the most memorable way you’re capable of.

Ever since I was a teenager I’ve constantly felt that I’m in a race against the clock to achieve something, to leave my mark on this world. I feel restless whenever I’m doing something that does not contribute to it (I’m looking at you, college). This has resulted in a lot of choices in my life that feel odd to most people but make perfect sense to me.

I would not go as far to say that I actually am leaving my mark already on this world, but this mindset definitely has steadily improved my life and I already have accomplished things that I would never believe I could.

But… it’s also a mindset that drives me crazy.

On any given day I’m having lots of ideas on how to achieve this legacy of mine. Constantly contemplating about what to do next means that I end up feeling that I’ve done nothing productive. Exactly the thing that makes me restless. And. That. Keeps. Me. Awake. At. Night.

The strange thing is, you can’t plan your legacy, no matter how hard you try. But you have to keep trying because one day you’re gone and all people have left of you is your legacy. You just have to keep working hard on it. Every single day.

Ik ben naar een protestants-christelijke basisschool gestuurd waar ik elke ochtend moest bidden en uit de Bijbel moest lezen. In groep 7 en 8 leerde ik alle belangrijke psalmen uit mijn hoofd en zong ze onder begeleiding van het orgel met volle borst mee. Ik kreeg een persoonlijke Bijbel cadeau bij vertrek, waarin mijn naam op de kaft was gekalligrafeerd door de vrouw van mijn meester. Het staat nog steeds in mijn boekenkast in volle ornaat.

Geschiedenis was op de middelbare school een van mijn leukste vakken, met name het Nederlands-Indisch verleden.

Ik was in 2003 geslaagd voor de HAVO – met een 8 voor Nederlands. Het was een jaar geleden dat Pim Fortuyn vermoord was.

Het politiek incorrecte woord buitenlander was vervangen door het politiek correcte woord allochtoon om “het probleem” bespreekbaar te maken in het publieke domein.

Rond deze tijd zocht ik het woord ’allochtoon’ voor het eerst op in een woordenboek: “.. waarvan minstens één van de ouders in het buitenland geboren is”.

Ik was nu een allochtoon.

Op het hogere onderwijs corrigeerde ik met regelmaat spel- en grammatica fouten van mijn “autochtone” klasgenoten. Dit werd niet altijd in dank afgenomen maar de leraar was in ieder geval altijd vol lof over mij: “Zie je nou wel, zelfs de allochtoon weet dat het d en geen t is!”.

Op introductiegesprek met mijn mentrix werd mij de vraag gesteld of ik “wel voldoende Nederlands” sprak thuis. Ik vroeg me af wat de aanleiding was. “We hebben geconstateerd dat allochtonen..” - het was in andere woorden niet persoonlijk bedoeld.

Ben geëmigreerd naar Amerika, om daar een bedrijf op te bouwen. Pas toen hebben Nederlandse journalisten mij opgemerkt. Ik ben in elke belangrijke Nederlandse krant verschenen. De dikgedrukte koptekst bij het paginagrote artikel over mij in de kersteditie van de Nieuwe Revu zei: “Nederlanders in Silicon Valley”.

Gelukkig, ik hoor er weer bij.

Let’s assume you’ve been stranded on a deserted island with a finite resource of food. When this food runs out, you’ll die, but you don’t know when. You have two options: sit around on the beach and enjoy the sun until you die. Or.. take on a huge effort to cut every tree on the island and work your ass off to build a house to live comfortably for the rest of your life.

What would you do? If you’re anything like me you would choose option 2.

But then in retrospect, you only had food for 10 days and because you chose option 2, you died sweating in the forest while you could’ve enjoyed the sun at the beach in your last days.

Would you do things differently if you would know you would die in 10 days?

I’ll bet the answer is yes.

While we all know our lives are finite and tomorrow is definitely not promised, we tend to live our lives like we’re immortal and mostly ignore our impending fatal destiny when we’re making decisions. However when we’re confronted with death on a smaller, more apprehendable, time frame, our decision making changes.

From the homo economicus perspective, this doesn’t make any sense. Whatever decision we make in our lives, we can’t escape our faith, thus any short term gain should be made in favor of longer, uncertain gains. Especially gains that we know for certain we won’t reap benefits from in our short lifespan (like preserving the earth for the future of your grand children, why would anyone do that??).

Yet, we irrational people live our lives like it has no end and while this may not have been always optimal in individual cases it has benefitted humanity as a whole enormously. Because of this irrational twist in our brains we’ve been able to survive and evolve as mankind.

However, when confronted with our mortalism, we switch to our indivualistic brain and make decisions that are essential for our own survival – on the short term.

The paradox of all of this: we like to think we’re immortal and make long term decisions based on that but our ignored mortalism is the reason why we actually make these long decisions. We wouldn’t be making long term decisions if we were actually immortal.

Because if everyone would be immortal, there’s nothing to worry about as a group so we wouldn’t be inclined to contribute as individuals to a greater whole. The same applies if we were constantly aware of our mortalism. In both cases, humanity doesn’t advance.

Whenever I’m thinking of this, it makes me humble and thankful for what our ancestors did to get me where I am today (more on that next time).

I hope I can do the same for future generations.

Ever since I was a teen I’ve always been into computers but I was always more interested in setting up a business of my own. I wasn’t particularly interested in the nits and grits of developing applications and I could already assemble my own computer with parts, so what more did I need to know about computers, right? I just needed to sell them. Which is why I chose to study Marketing instead of Computer Science.

Flashback to 2004. I was eighteen and was running my own computer webshop with proprietory e-commerce software for a year now. During that time, my best friend Alex was studying ‘Graphimediatechnology’, a typical buzzword study where he attended a lot of courses related to developing front-end media applications.

One of these courses was PHP and I had heard about it before. Wasn’t that the thing that made websites *dynamic*? I was eager not to rely on the proprietory shopping software I was using and I was determined to create a webshop from scratch with Alex.

Turned out Alex wasn’t particularly driven in developing applications either (he later changed direction and he’s now finishing up on his construction studies) so I was basically stuck in using that crappy software.

On a rainy afternoon I took matters in my own hand and started reading PHP tutorials online. Surprisingly I was able to apprehend it quickly and had a basic CRUD website with MySQL running after 2 days.

This was awesome!!

I was finally able to build everything I ever wanted. I felt that the sky had no limits. I was able to transform my (plenty) ideas into something tangible within moments thanks to PHP.

Of course, my code looked horrible. It was quick and dirty and I totally didn’t put any efforts in creating a sustainable code base. I stumbled on every project I did and I gradually improved.

Eventually I dropped out of business school and interviewed for my first fulltime PHP job at MediaMedics. They liked me and my drive, but they were worried about my skills as I had no clue about any of the OO stuff in PHP5. I said: “give me 3 days” and I learned everything I needed to know about OOP that weekend and showed off a OO-based numbers game on Monday. I got the job and it was the beginning of an even steeper learning curve. After 2 years I was running my own startup and now here I am in San Francisco with a funded startup and all.

PHP is awesome for me. It isn’t considered a “real” language by many and it’s full of API inconsistencies (why the hell doesn’t implode() has the same needle haystack order as explode()..??) but you know, I really don’t care. I get shit done in PHP. I guess my lack of interest in general Computer Science is the reason why I’m not really interested in the “Art of Programming” itself, I just use it as a tool to ship, which is ultimately the most important thing for me.

So here’s to the PHP Misfits. The pragmatic ones who would pick up anything – even double-clawed hammers - to build their own future. Often ridiculed and belittled by the hip guys in class who write cool code in ruby or python, but always the ones who just *get shit done*. They are many. You can’t ignore them, they’re determined to change the world. Even if it means writing in PHP.

In a world where Agile Development is considered a religion by many developers, we decided to do something blasphemous by whiping everything “agile” from our Trello board and building a new methodology from scratch: Continuous Development.

You see, I’ve never been very charmed by the whole Agile movement. It’s either that I never got it (it’s also hard to get it, considering it’s very vaguely defined) or never wanted to get into it. Not to say we haven’t tried; in any case, I always ended up hacking it until it fit our way of working. We used sprints of 1 week and every Monday, we would discuss last week’s sprint. Uncompleted tasks of last week were discussed and moved to this week’s sprint. Needless to say, these uncompleted tasks used to pile up until a point there wasn’t any time left to add new features to it.  There were also a lot of negative side effects to this weekly planning: developers who were quick on their sprint didn’t have much incentive to work down the list and waited until Monday for new tasks. Discussions about new features were often postponed to this Monday meeting as well which resulted in that a lot of features were not defined/designed well enough for the designers to start off with. In other words: it slowed down overall development; despite using these fancy ‘agile’ terms.

Now, I don’t want to blame Agile Development for all of this. I’m not even sure if we used it the right way. But whatever it was, it was clearly not working for us. 

So instead of taking a look at more fancy methodologies we took a look at how we ideally wanted to organize our project. To start off with, we didn’t want to use time as a major driver anymore to prevent procrastination and overplanning. Which means no time-defined meetings and no time-defined task lists. We identified the different processes of our development and whoever was responsible for it. We wanted to be flexible enough to add new feature requests in the queue whenever we wanted, fix critical bugs when it was needed and still have enough flexibility to keep working on our ‘big features’.

In short these processes can be summarized in 6 words: Want, Discuss, Design, Fix, Finish and Test. We’re heavy users of Trello (when are they finally going to start charging us for it?) so every step consists of a Trello list with strict rules for the cards in it. You’re welcome to steal our Trello template.

1. Want

This is the feature request area. Have a new idea or got some customer feedback? Create a new Trello card, fill out the description and always start your sentence with “Want:”. Be concise and to the point.

2. Discuss

Move a feature request to here if you want to look into it more seriously. What are the requirements to complete this feature? What is the best way to approach this? How is it going to affect x and y? What is the preferred workflow? Use comments to discuss all this stuff with your team members.

3. Design

After defining a feature in Discuss, the designers need to get to work to design the feature. Upload your designs as attachments so everyone can find the designs related to this feature easily. Label your card with green to let developers know you’re ready.

4. Fix

This is the place where we report critical bugs that need to be fixed asap. The Fix list has the highest priority, developers shouldn’t work on anything else until this list is empty. It’s important to note that bug reports don’t need to follow step 1-3 to come here. They can just be reported in this list directly.

5. Finish

No more bugs to fix? Good, let’s take a look at which features are ready to work on. Pick a feature with finished designs and start itemizing your tasks in a checklist. Check off your tasks whenever you finish them and complete your tasks by checking all tasks (the check list icon turns green at this point). Deploy your code into staging and drag the task to Test.

6. Test

The QA team should test all deployed features in staging and report bugs in Fix. If everything works OK, archive the cards and deploy to production.

Results

We have this method in place since 2 months and it seems to withheld all our quirky behaviors so far. It’s concise, easy to remember and easy to manage. The biggest benefit is that you can see at a glance at which phase a feature is in. The only thing we are still weak in is actually enforcing all the rules on all the team members, but it’s definitely an improvement of our previous workflow. This seems to works for us and I hope it works for you too! Let me know what you think of it.

Update:

A couple of friendly Twitter commenters pointed out that this method has a lot of resemblance with the Kanban method. I might have reinvented something that already exists but to my defense: I’ve never heard of Kanban. That’s why I’m going to read the free e-book that’s kindly provided by Kanbanery, another productivity tool. You should too!

After spending a lazy Saturday morning in front of the television Veronica and I decided to do something worthwile of our time and so we decided to visit one of the beautiful nature resorts that surround our little town.

We had our mind set on Mt. Diablo, a mountain that’s known for allegedly having one of the largest viewsheds of the world (they say you can see Mt. Shasta from up there!). It was only a 20 min drive so we could make it easily in time to catch the view before sunset. We got to the entrance of the park and after grudgingly paying an unexpected fee of $10 to the park ranger to enter the State Park we could finally start our mountain journey. Except, after doing 5-10 sharp turns, Veronica (of course) got car sick – and we had to turn back after having spent only 5 mins in ‘wild nature’.

This wasn’t the first time she got car sick (I honestly think it’s a Colombian thing) but I got fed up with it because I had my mind set on reaching the top and enjoying the view. And I had just wasted $10, you know. It just made me angry for a small moment.

It’s funny how these details seem so irrelevant as I’m writing this up and I really don’t get why I was fed up (even though it was only for 5 mins), but that’s the point of my story.

We often tend to get caught up in the minute details of the moment and can’t seem to relate our experiences to something bigger and more important in life.

I used to have a lot of anger and frustration because a lot of things didn’t go how I wanted them to go. We get so fed up when we miss the train even though the next one gets there in 5 mins and we start cursing when that guy in traffic doesn’t pull up as fast as he should, even though it doesn’t get us home faster.

We often want to succeed so bad, that every time we get a setback, we get to the point that we’re almost borderline depressed. And in retrospect, there’s almost never anything that we can do about it; it’s almost always external factors that render you powerless. And feeling powerless is the most fucked up feeling of all.

But what we’re not aware of is that what we intend to do is often not what we’re supposed to do. I know, this is touching the subject of compatibilism but realize for a moment that every time you forget something when you leave the house and lose a couple of seconds – enough to miss your train – this unexpected deviation of your daily routine has changed your future. You may have avoided an accident or you might have run into someone that you needed to see.

I realized this myself only a little year ago and since then I decided to appreciate every little annoying negative thing in my day. I was grateful for every change of my day, regardless of how annoying it was – and it has helped me become a much happier person. I quickly noticed that fretting over these little things takes up a lot of your energy – energy that’s better spent on things that actually do progress you in life.

So yeah, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to my wife for getting car sick, because who knows, maybe a guardian angel tried to protect us from falling off a cliff.

Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is pick up my phone and check the articles on Hacker News. When I’m done with that, I check my Facebook status feed. Not satisfied yet? Let’s check the Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper I read. Then, I turn to my wife and kiss her goodmorning (I know, it should be the first thing on my mind).

Then, I take some quality time in the bathroom for about 15 mins to detox myself (here, the iPad is perfect). I take a shower, get dressed, eat something for breakfast and head to work. While I’m on the BART, I pull up my iPhone again and do the same thing as I did a couple of hours before.

I get to work and need to wait until my VM boots up. Check HN. Check FB. Lunch time. Check HN while eating. Look up strange words in Wikipedia. Ok, time for work. Oh wait, it’s already 4:15pm. Lost half my day doing nothing. Luckily, I often get work done quickly and work until late. Go back home again with BART. Pull up iPhone and do the same shit until I fall asleep.

This was me up until last week. It hasn’t been always like this, I tend to switch my infobesitas (yes, information overconsumption is like a disease!) to other websites at a time, some weeks I’m more motivated and can only think of work and some weeks I experience a dip and fall into these bad habits again.

The thing is, I hate habits. I think people who smoke and can’t quit are weak. But habits creep up from behind and take over your life slowly. As always with addictions, the first step to recovery is recognition. You can only change yourself if you’re able to see your habits are wrong.

What’s the best way to destroy habits? Creating anti-habits in place of bad habits. I’ve recently diagnosed myself with a BMI of 28.5 so me and the Mrs. started working out. We do a variety of stuff every morning (swimming, gym, yoga, jogging) and so far I’ve never felt better. I’m even thinking about following the Slow-Carb Diet ®, so I can obsess myself over food instead of stupid shit I read on the interwebs.

Another anti-habit I’m creating is writing articles for this blog. My goal is to write an article every day which forces me to put my thoughts on paper and improve my English grammar and writing skills.

More anti-habits todos: cleaning up, spending more time outside and actually, enjoying life. Never again will I forget what water is. Oh and I’ll work on the Evan Williams’ one:

I stopped sleeping with my phone beside my bed about six months ago, because I wanted my wife to be the first and last thing I looked at in the day, rather than my iPhone.

While some were more bullish than others, the consensus around the Facebook IPO seemed to be very optimistic. In fact, there was so much demand for the stock, that Facebook easily got away with pricing their IPO at $38 (up from $24-$35). By doing so, they’ve been able to happily raise $18.4 bn in the process.

Nothing seemed to stop FB to become the biggest IPO story in history, until, you know, it actually opened to the public. While showing some 10% upticks it fell mostly flat during the rest of the day and closed a mere $.23 higher, thanks to heavy Morgan Stanley bodyguards who bought LOTS of stock to prevent loss at the first day.

As we all know, imposed market interventions don’t play nice with basic equilibrium laws, so predictably, FB started to tank on Monday. While FB closed on Tuesday at a -18.75% loss since the first day of trading, people already started to look who to blame.

NASDAQ is seen as one of the top suspects. By enduring technical difficulties in processing orders, and delaying the IPO by 20 mins, investors have been shouting and cursing that this is the reason why the IPO flopped. Talks about class action law suits have already emerged.

And the second suspect was the P/E ratio. Oh what a talk of the day the P/E ratio was. “I’ve heard that their ratio is way too high!”, all of a sudden, everybody knew what a P/E ratio was and how Facebook was massively overpriced. “Did you know it’s going to take Facebook 107 years to pay back their valuation? That’s just sick.”, one guy told me. (Wait, are these signs of a bubble?)

I personally don’t think anything is wrong with their P/E ratio. The only thing was that their IPO price was on the high-end of the P/E ratio – in other words, I think Zuck priced it just right. They simply didn’t leave much room for growth. Also, they didn’t woke up one day and decided to have a $100+ bn valuation. This valuation was carefully build and sustained over the last 5 years and it seems highly unlikely, that their intrinsic value is up for grabs in 3 days of trading.

So, if their P/E ratio is not what’s causing the downturn and we can attribute it to external factors like NASDAQ  and negative press, I assume it’s only a matter of time before the market starts to readjust and build towards $38 again (I don’t expect it to become any higher, not until I’ve seen the first earnings report).

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful – Warren Buffet

I hear you thinking, “Okay Melvin, makes sense, but why should we buy today? What happens if the stock falls again??”. This is the crux of investing. It doesn’t help to have doubts when to invest because you’ll never know what stocks will do in the short term. It’s very simple, when the stock price drops after you’ve bought it, and you know it’s going to do well in the long run, don’t panic and buy more! If it’s going up, don’t just grin and stand there, buy more!

Disclaimer: I do not own or trade in Facebook stocks nor am I intending to give any real life advice. I’m simply tracking this stock in my virtual Google Finance portfolio. Consult your physician before trading. 

When I finally made the decision to drop out of college 3 years ago, my pursuit of success – and with it, the life of uncertainty – had begun. I chose to work fulltime at a young internet company. It was the best decision I ever made, the last 3 years have been the best of my life. But I had to give up a lot of things.

I had to give up the idea that I was going to be the first one of my family to graduate with a Master’s degree. I’ve said “no” to lots of social gatherings, because I was always working around the clock. At one point, I even gave up my job at that internet company – because I was working on something more exciting. From then on, I couldn’t promise my then girlfriend (and future wife) that I was always going to be able to provide food on the table. After I raised my first round of funding, I had to leave my family and friends to pursue my dream at a place 5,000 miles away from them.

Why did I do that? Why do I keep choosing for a life full of stress and hard work with no certainty that I’m going to be successful, ever. It doesn’t make any sense.

And then today, I came across this quote:

If you want to belong to the top 1 %, you have to take the 1 % chance of success.

It’s a bold statement, but yet, it doesn’t end there. Since the launch of Gmail in 2003, Google has proven to be also capable of conquering other existing markets by developing (or buying) superior products and offer them for the best price: free.

Because of the superiority of their products and the free availability, millions of users (and even businesses) rely now on Google for a lot of things they do online. And they keep relying more and more with Google releasing successful products like Chrome and Android as well. Google is, intentionally, increasingly becoming a part of our lives beyond the internet.

Browser Wars

Flashback to 1998. With 95 % marketshare at the time, you can safely say that Microsoft’s Windows was synonymous to a computer back then – and Netscape was synonymous to accessing the internet. But not for long.

Microsoft needed a way to win the browser wars and decided to ship Internet Explorer with Windows, and made sure it was very hard to remove. Of course, they’ve been sued with antitrust cases for years for this aggressive campaign, but in the end they won and that’s all what mattered. This looks familiar, doesn’t it?

Implicit Monopoly

Of course, people say now, the situation with Google is very different. With Google, you have a choice. You can either use their products or not. But it’s not that simple when they offer superior products for free. You rely on them, because you often have to use one of their products, because Search, Maps or Gmail, to name a few, are all far more superior than what other competitors have to offer. And if there’s a new kid on the block they can’t compete with, they simply (try to) buy them to maintain their implicit monopoly position.

Facebook

Contrast the position of Facebook to Google. Sure, they’re able to tout to have 750 million users and ‘own social’ – just like Netscape did in their heydays. But are people relying on Facebook? No. Can you make money with Facebook, like you can with Adsense? No. Can you optimize your website, like with Analytics? No. Can you live without Google Calendar, the app that synchronizes the calendars of your entire company – and your iPhone? No. What does Facebook actually offer anyway that makes you rely on them for any important aspect of your life, other than holding your social graph in hostage? Nothing.

The Real Deal

But Google’s products, where Google+ is going to be baked in, is not even Facebook’s biggest problem. Welcome to the world of SEO, where Google is lord and master. Facebook isn’t very willing to let Google index their data and think they can overcome the power of Google’s position by asking people to make Facebook their homepage. But Facebook can’t provide answers to real world problems – let alone any other kind of problem – in the way that Google can provide them so it will take Facebook a very very long time to convince people of the benefits of their “social search” engine.

Until that time, Google+ is already being favored in search results over Facebook. If you search for my name for example you’ll see that my Google+ profile stands out from other results already:

Google+ is Google’s Internet Explorer move to win the social wars with Facebook – and, believe me, the GOOG is going to put her $ 172 bn weight into it.