On Hobby Startups and such..

You know, an odd thing has been happening to me recently. I've been drifting away from hobby programming, and drifting into hobby startups. For folks who've known me long, most projects I do (outside of work) are hobby projects. Programming and tinkering around has been a dominant theme.

But this is different, it feels different, and I'm suddenly getting yanked back to the unsureness I had back when I was a teenage programmer. I'm now a total newbie and beginner in a world of suits and businessmen, and wondering what I'm doing here. For starters, I'm currently totally immersed in this - I've taken a break from Amazon and am learning how to start a company. It sounds quite loopy (probably is), but in the university of life that's the learning I'm seeking. And as usual, I prefer the practical approach of doing it and make up/learn theory along the way, and iterate.

A good number of people start companies to promote their vision of the world, which I've heard is the right way to start a company. But the hobbyist/tinkerer itch I've had for a while is to actually learn how to start a company, just for the sake of that. And learning to do so much like how I learnt how to program - by just programming a lot (really, a lot). It was through lots of fun projects, painful hours of debugging and figuring things out, years of constantly realizing what I was doing wrong and in the process learning better things. It was fun, it led to a brief career as a programmer solving somewhat interesting challenges, and a countless series of hobby projects I loved.

Now this new branch of learning - of building a company to "program" your vision is turning out to be quite fascinating. This involves newer aspects of learning, where I'm learning (through repeated reality checks) the simple yet complex interplay between a customer, his/her problem, his/her solution to the problem through the purchase of your product, which in turn is your solution to how you understood the customer's problem, and improving the overlap in the two. There are other equally interesting aspects like keeping the company afloat, and dealing with the new, unexpected reactions from the people you interact with. If you aren't confused yet, good, because you either got it or your eyes glazed over.

But yeah, it does feel at a fundamental level like programming, except you're dealing with an extremely complicated analog system, and I've never programmed analog systems. Like my post above, logical contradictions are part of the whole deal. And you need patience, tonnes of it. There's no point getting frustrated with a computer, and there's no point getting frustrated with humans.

I'll try to post more on this as it goes, but I'm usually quite lazy in matters of posting :)

Cheers
~Shashank
PS: The thumbnail pic is the Antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest analog computer dating back to ~150 BC.

The Creativity-Killer : Office life

Don't get me wrong. Its not because I'm really unhappy at the fact that my vacations are getting ruined as I have to "WORK" in the office 10 hrs a day everyday (read) but truly a realisation that I came about due to this effort.

The "office life" destroys your creativity, forcing you to do continually work piecemeal on mostly dumb projects that you know will never revolutionize anyone's life, but basically does the routine that people need. Yes, this kind of routine work has to be done by someone, but if you're like me, you will not be the one to get stuck in this zombie culture of waking up in the morning, slaving for 10 hours, and then returning towards late evening, too tired to do anything but slouch on a chair drinking tea and writing about how dumb you feel. One simply doesn't have the time or energy to think about ANYTHING else after returning from office. All one seeks to do is to relax and sleep soon. Gotta sleep early.. office in the morning remember? In short, even if you are good, the routine office life will bring you down to its levels of mundaneness and dumbness and make you feel generally really stupid and out of touch.

This is the typical routine every office worker follows, and my statements are meant for those select few who desire to break away from the system and be different. If you are fine with serving people's routine needs, that is perfectly genuine too. Do not mistake me. I am talking about those people who can be intensely creative, know that they can do better things for people, have confidence in themselves that they can create things that will make better and revolutionize the life of others as well as theirs. The first casualty when you get stuck in the drill of conventional life is your sense of Independent thinking.

A matter of bread and butter, some would say. True. You've gotta do what you've gotta do. However, when there is an opportunity, grab it. Risks are meant to be taken, some big and some small. When you have the chance to some radically better stuff, do it. I have been in IEEE Students' Chapter for the past two years, and was the Secretary at last count. But I felt that it was time to move on and do other things, even though I appeared to have a very good chance at the top job. However, it was a risk nevertheless, leaving IEEE to get back the time to do bigger things, develop new ideas that could potentially be the next big things. I feel I can do it. So risk I must. Risk the general "social standing", risk the chance of not having any work to channel one's energies. This is an example of a small risk, almost negligible. But the basic point does not change. If you want to be different, don't get stuck in any kind of routine. One must follow for a while, and move on to other things to remain fresh and dynamic.