dcolgan

Wow this is beautiful. The opening captured my attention well and it guided me through everything so that I knew exactly what was going on. I love the little story at the beginning. The site engages me emotionally which is something that a generic goal tracking site wouldn't do. I'm going to give the site a go around to start some habits I've been wanting to start and see if it helps.

As an aside, do you have a monetization strategy for this site?

This seems like a really clever solution. I remember trying to set up nailgun a while ago back when I was experimenting with Clojure because the startup time for running a program was so long, but I could never quite get it to work. I missed being able to run python myprog.py and getting instant feedback.

Bad formatting aside, this is an important insight. When I first started working at my current job, a young consulting firm, we took a client that nearly killed me for about a solid month. The thing is, we hadn't even launched their product, a test taking app, to the general public yet. There was always an air of urgency, of "if we don't get this feature done RIGHT NOW there will be trouble." I've since learned that there really wasn't as much trouble as I thought, since we didn't even have users yet, and if the feature had to be put on hold for 3 hours to spend time in the evening with my family, the world was not at all going to end.

I think I'm getting better at work/life balance, but when I first started, it was nonexistent. Makes for an unpleasant lifestyle.

SEEKING WORK - Remote only, since I'm currently living in small-town Indiana. Available for part-time work or one-off projects.

I do all parts of creating your website except for the design. Give me a mockup and I can do the frontend HTML, CSS, and Javascript (jQuery), as well as your backend in either Django or Wordpress. I can also host your site on my Linode if desired.

Some sites I've built: http://crankshaft.net - Wordpress backend, I created a custom theme given a mockup.

https://rushlocksandkeys.com - Custom Django ecommerce site using Stripe as payment processor.

http://demanda1.com - Django site with product catalog.

I also enjoy doing smaller sites, like http://personalizedpm.com (simple static site with minimal PHP backend).

I currently host three of these four sites on my Linode along with about 10 others.

If interested in working with me, send me an email at dvcolgan@gmail.com.

I recently discovered Less (http://lesscss.org/), a CSS preprocessor that adds support for variables and many other features, like nested rules and mixins.

Using Less has been one of the most profound upgrades in my use of programming techniques in quite a while. Hopefully browsers will eventually support even more Less-like features.

Ah, sorry I misquoted him. He said that given 10kg of inputs, you can get 1kg of cow meat, or you can get 9kg of locust meat. My bad.

I saw this TED talk a while back in which the speaker argues we should lower our meat consumption by increasing our insect consumption. He says insect meat is just as nutritious as mammal meat (if not more), and it also takes a lot fewer resources to produce it commercially.

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.ht...

I believe he said it takes 10 kg of feed and other resources to produce 1 kg of cow meat, while it takes 1 kg of inputs to produce 1 kg of grasshopper meat.

I ordered some canned mealworms off of Amazon the other day just to try them, and they actually weren't that bad with some butter and spices.

I'm pretty sure you just described me to a tee. I completely understand how it is to hop from hobby to hobby, trying to find the next new novelty.

In high school I spent a lot of time learning tools but never really made anything with them. I must have started 50 games, but would always throw them away at 300 lines of code because they were not interesting anymore. One time I got the idea to make a Flash cartoon website like HomestarRunner.com. I learned the Flash IDE, and the time that I started to get good at it was when I started losing interest.

In college I discovered that there are better tools out there than the ones I had been using. I traded Windows and Gamemaker for Linux and Python. I still never finished anything, because I kept finding new and better languages. For a while there I tried out almost every popular language there is, including Haskell and Erlang.

Once my friends and I decided to make a game, and as the "lead programmer" on the team, I wanted to use the best language there is for making games. I started on Python, then switched to Perl (yes, Perl for games!), then C (because the others were "too slow") and finally back to Python because C was too hard.

Some things that I have noticed include:

-Perfectionism is a nasty beast. Are you a perfectionist too? I will go back and forth between things because I want to find The Optimal Way (TM), but after a certain point you can't really find a better way that helps more than the cost of changing. My dad, a mathmatician, once told me, "Life is not an optimization problem." I am coming to see that he is right.

-You mention that you do well in college even if you can't stay focused on your own projects. I have found that true for myself as well. I think the structure helps to keep us on track. Personal projects and side hobbies have no inherent structure, and all it takes to give up is to just stop working on them. I have found success when my hobbies and side projects intersect with each other. I finished a Flash animation when it was for a class project. I actually did learn a Haskell for Great Good when I made my senior research project "An Investigation of Lesser-Known Programming Languages." Then learning Haskell was not just a thing that might be cool but rather a school project that I had to finish. I recently finished a three year long programming project with a professor advising me. I wanted to quit several times, even though it was a great project, but my advisor half convinced/half forced me to stick with it, and I am glad that he did now that it is done. If something like school motivates you, then use that to your advantage!

-The biggest thing that gives me motivation to do anything is the people who will benefit from it. After thinking long and hard about the meaning of life, I have come to decide that love is what is most important. As such, I can turn away from the most interesting project in the world if I am just working on it for myself, but if I know that people are really going to benefit from it, that provides motivation. I think of all of the times that I have failed to complete a side project like a game or Flash website, I failed because they weren't really helping anyone, and as such they weren't really worth doing to me.

So, I suggest that once you leave college, find a lean startup that fulfills a need you care about. Maybe you wouldn't do well founding a startup, but you could work as an employee at one. Then you have structure similar to what you have in school, only this time with an employer, but you don't waste away at $BIG-CO. (I too have this dread of $BIG-CO!)

Do note that knowing a lot about a little does give you some unique advantages. If you ever do need to really learn something for a job or school project, it will be much easier than if you knew nothing about a subject. You are also more aware of what tools are available for various projects, and you can select the right tool for the right job.

As a final thought, I notice that you have been registered for 250 days or so and have 5 karma. That is almost the same as me. I usually don't say anything because I don't feel like I have anything to add, but I've been trying to comment more recently. Lurking allows me to just be a passive observer, but I take in less when I'm actually invested enough to comment.

If you'd like to talk, send me an email. Info's in my profile if you are interested.

I have reduced a lot of unnecessary hand movement by moving the Control keys to either side of the space bar where the Alt keys normally are, and moving the Alt keys to the keys next to those where the Windows keys usually are. With this I can hit all of the modifier keys with my thumbs.

I also have CapsLock mapped to Backspace, and use the Dvorak keyboard layout. All of these combined minimize strain on my pinkies and the rest of my fingers, reduces the need for hand contortions, and lets stronger fingers do more work.

I've been taken aback by some of the concepts of Haskell recently as well. Hooray for obscure but insanely powerful languages!

I was originally met with opposition when I told my family about wanting to do freelance programming out of college. They wanted me to get a "real job".

I think this article describes the situation well. At first I was annoyed with them, but then I came to realize that the reason they were saying this was because they didn't understand what I was getting into, and from their perspective it really was impossible.

I have come to appreciate that they are not out to rain on my parade for the sake of being mean, but because they actually do care about me. I suppose that as with all criticism, discernment is needed.

Fixed. Thanks for the heads up!

Here is a rebuttal to that article by a prolific polyphasic sleeper:

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...