The ironic thing is that I wrote this months ago, but it never made it out of draft mode…

Blogstipation is what happens when you hold all of your ideas in for too long. When they come, it often isn’t pretty. And while it’s a relief for you – to get unblogstipated – for those in the general area its not a fun thing to watch.

So I’ve been severely remiss in my maintenance of this blog. And all the while, great things have been happening, and I’ve been coming closer and closer to realizing my dream job.  And as I write other things – business plans, corporate missions, operating procedures, etc – I realize that I have been mentally constipated. I’ve been holding on to my thoughts, letting them steep in my mind, waiting until they felt ready. But what I should have been doing is articulating them here.

It used to be that when something caught my attention, I’d study it for a while before making a commitment. I’d read about it, look for docs and skim, poke around, etc.

But these days in the age of ‘free everything’ (btw, nothing’s really changed – there are no free lunches now, or ever) it seems more and more sites force a signup before giving up the goods on what’s in the package. This used to be (and probably still is) commonplace for porn sites  - ‘age verification’ is a convenient ruse to justify hiding the goodies until you’d paid your dollar-now-plus-45-more-rebill-just-give-me-your-credit-card-numbers-now. The psychology here is that they know there will be a segment of the population that will, knowing the risk of crappy content, will commit anyway because the promise/potential is so attractive. It’s a mechanism that works only because people ‘really really want it’.

So now it’s really common to go to a site that may be the answer to a problem you’re experience. For example: “wow, I really wish there was an easy way to get constructive feedback on my app at no cost and no investment of time on my part!”. Now when I see a site that claims to provide that, but offers no details on how, but does make it really easy to signup (who needs password validation – typing is hard, I don’t want to do it twice..), I do – hoping that it can. 

Needless to say, I was disappointed. Now if there was some more explicatory material I’d have saved somebody a MySQL row, and myself yet another marginal spam exposure risk.

I went back to my project the other day after an almost week long distraction, and found it surprisingly difficult. I didn’t remember things like API class names and even some syntax rules without looking them up. This is, of course, in Python. My development pattern has been intermittent, and that’s not apparantly a good way to really (at least for me) acquire a level of facility with a new language. I kind of need to be immersed.

I’ve been lamenting the lack of a good IDE for Python for a while now. I’ve tried a few – PyDev and Sun’s Python version of NetBeans, and a couple others. None was able to hold my interest for various reasons. One critical feature of an IDE is refactoring support, so I’m looking again with that specific criteria in mind. So far here’s a list of python IDE’s -

• ERIC
• SPE
• emacs w/ROPE
• PyDev
• eclipse
• TextMate
• Coda

This list will evolve – so far that’s off the top of my head, with the tools I’m least familiar with at the top.

I see opportunities everywhere. Every few days, I think of something interesting enough to record as a possible business or product. These days I make a point these days to write this stuff down in my ‘Projects’ list and periodically review this list for stuff to explore. I keep my project list prioritized by a combination of obligation (stuff I’m committed to do), viability (can I do it), profit (how much is it worth) and cash flow (when would I get paid) potential. I’m usually working on a couple of things at once, and one of my biggest daily challenges is to stay focused on the predetermined priorities and not spend time on the new, interesting opportunity I just thought of.

The problem is, when I look at my list I inevitably feel strongly that some of the stuff needs to get done sooner than I’ll get to it given current plans. I usually respond to this perception by trying to do more – adding a couple of extra hours to my day, for example, to research or prototype the new idea. And of course I always feel overloaded or behind, because even if I’m in a good place with my current project(s), I’ve got all this pressing stuff to do later on in the list. Complicating this is the fact that while most of my ‘pet projects’ are independent ventures where I am the sole beneficiary, most of the stuff at the top of the list are things I’m committed to do for other people  – my clients. I need to service clients to maintain current cash flow, whereas all of my pet projects would, if successful, provide passive income. So I’m spending my energy generating short term rewards at the expense of potential long term independence. That doesn’t seem right.

So maybe I need to change how I think about all of this – particularly about the things on my list that are good ideas for passive income generation that I don’t have time to do personally.  Outsource.  If I didn’t have any programming skill or experience, this would be a no-brainer. I have two ideas that are each fairly simple to implement, but potentially very useful within their niches to help small businesses make money or satisfy customers. Instead of letting them languish until I have ’spare time’, I should probably pay someone else to build them. My problem is that I like to program, I’m pretty good at it, and I’m cheap. But in this case these characteristics are counterproductive.

While it feels riskier to spend money on development (rather than do it myself), in fact it’s probably the opposite.

Ok. For what seems now to be a stunningly obvious collection of compelling reasons, I need to blog. Of course, I knew this before but seem to have forgotten. I need to blog often. Certainly as a self employed individual, a blog provides an excellent way to market yourself, express your values and ideals, and to add substance and credibility to your sales presentation or elevator pitch. This is what I tell my clients, and this is what I believe. But I’ve been remiss.

I should know of course, that as someone who endeavors to build an organization from scratch, it might be a good idea to capture, incrementally, your beliefs around how such an enterprise might be created, how it might be run, and how it might provide value and become successful. A great resource when you need copy for your website or content for your employee manual. And yes, doing it in public where people (hopefully) can see it and comment might reinforce your good ideas and expose the bad ones – before the market does.

Oh yeah, also it’s clear that talking about your ideas in public is good if you want to solicit advice or support – and plenty of both will certainly be needed.

So it’s funny that my best excuse for not blogging had been that I didn’t have anything to say. The truth is that I’ve got plenty to talk about – creating a new business generates a lot of ideas, a lot of questions, a lot of requirements for the development of and articulation of positions, policies, procedures and guidelines – all of which are clarified and solidified by the writing process.

So I’m back on the blog.

I’m giving Blogo a try. We’ll see how that goes. One immediate consequence is that I installed Growl – probably not a bad thing. Otherwise it seems like a good idea to be able to post without opening WP up all the time.

And oh yeah – Happy Holidays!

I can understand why a site might ask you to type your password twice – after all, it is (typically) obscured so you can’t sight verify what you just typed. Plus if you did mistype it’s pretty close to a disaster.

But why do I have to type my email address twice? You don’t trust me to look at what I just typed and correct it? So, ok I guess I should type everything twice then – my phone number, address – even my name.. Hell, I am an idiot after all that a) can’t type, and b) is too lazy/arrogant to look at what I’m writing.

I think this convention started with email marketers who feel your email address is the most important piece of information about you. I hate to see this idiotic convention spreading now as a sort of standard UI rule.

If anyone has a good reason to justify this I’d really like to hear it.

I haven’t taken a serious look at my resume in years. I know you’re supposed to update it every few months, and while I’m sure that’s a great idea, it’s one that I never managed to implement. So every time I have to update my res it’s a painful process.

I had sent out my res a while back and the recruiter told me that contrary to the common advice of ‘keep your resume short’, that mine was in fact too brief and needed to be filled out. Apparently brief is good early career, but if you want to apply for an executive type gig, it needs to have some weight.  So now, not only do I now find myself adding my most recent history (the last five years, basically), I also get to embellish all the stuff I did in the previous ten. Cool, huh?

But here’s the funny part. When I went to describe my next to last job, my responsibilities and accomplishments, I found it quite easy. In fact, it was much easier than the same task for my most recent gig. Why is that? I think it’s because I was so much more engaged in that job six years ago. I really liked what I did then, I liked who I was doing it with, and I thought it was important stuff to do. Not that I did it perfectly, in fact it was a new set of responsibilities for me and I had some real challenges. Nonetheless, it’s clear to me now that I was a much better technology manager then than the one I became in my next gig. I accomplished more, had a greater (positive) impact – all that. There are some other factors that I think contributed – truly enlightened management, a brilliant technical lead, and plenty of dot com dollars, to name a few – but they can’t explain the breadth of the difference.  And it’s not like I got nothing accomplished in the last five years either. In fact I think I did pretty well. But there is a difference in quality that is striking.  And I think a lot of the difference is just the difference between being ‘engaged and driven’, versus ‘trying to make the best of it’. 

Funny what you learn when you take a long deliberate look. 

Maybe I should update my res more often…

I’ve been working on a demo site using web2py for the last week and a half. I think this really has a lot of potential to make me a productive web app developer – which is especially impressive given that I was never a) a web app developer, really, before, and b) I never coded a line of python before starting this project. Now, I did read a Python book, but that was a while back and if you don’t mix book learning with practice it tends to fade.

As great as web2py is I’m finding that I’ve been hampered in my progress by the combination of it’s ease of use and my ego. It’s easy enough to grasp that you can really look at a fairly simple example and use it as a template to do your own fairly straightforward stuff. For example, data modeling and getting data into your new tables, setting up domain lists to drive UI elements, etc. is really really straightforward. A lot of stuff just works (once you see the general pattern) like you think it should. But when this experience is filtered (or magnified) through my ego I start to think that everything will just work like I think it should, and then I spend a lot more time than necessary testing, poking and prodding before retreating to the docs, code or mailing list (usually in that order) to find an answer.

So for me, web2py is actually too easy to use. If I were an experienced web developer, and had some working experience with python I think web2py would be dead simple, delightfully simple. But I need to remember that not only am I moving to a new type of app development, but also to a new language – a language which has it’s own idioms and natural ways of expressing things that I don’t quite grok right now.

So to be more efficient, I’d be well suited to go back and review some fundamentals before heading recklessly into the bush (so to speak). The problem is, it’s more fun the way I’m doing it. I really prefer discovery to more methodical alternatives. The joy is in the journey. Also, I know from experience that these lessons I’m learning more painfully than necessary will stick more because of the effort. I wonder if that last bit qualifies as ‘irrational justfication’…