One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but there's a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now, farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what-have-you. They have to spot check, because some of these farms are so large that it would take a prohibitively long time to check everything. As a result, a small patch of plants that might need more water might get some water, but the nearby plants that are already well-watered might get too much water. With these drones, the farmer can wake up, hit a button on their computer, go make coffee, and by the time their coffee is ready, the drones have uploaded photos of every square foot of the farm onto their computer. Software can analyze it to see what needs watering and fertilizing, what's ready for picking or for planting, etc.

That's the kind of thing that gets me excited about the future of technology. How could we automate or ease the jobs of farmers? How can we automate going to the DMV? How can we streamline flu shots? Can we write software that can organize resistance to Ebola outbreaks or malaria? Is there some software that can get the people of Flint access to clean water -- or can we write software that will prevent a Flint-like crisis from happening again? Can we identify bots that might be trying to affect our political processes? What about making sure kids in schools are well fed, since we know that hungry kids perform worse in schools? Can we solve that somehow?

I don't have answers to any of those questions. They are what I call "Epic Problems," and I think about them all the time. Unfortunately, the solutions are several orders of magnitude more involved than a standard CRUD app.

One thing to do is pick an Epic Problem, then work in an Agile mindset to tackle it. That's what Planet Labs did when it came to satellites. They have hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites in space, putting them up there at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of what it takes to put a traditional satellite in orbit.

What else could you do that with?