For those that don’t read my company blog, I wanted to give you a heads up about a post I made there that’s going gangbusters.
The post is here: IDEas: Tools for Coders
Or participate (and upvote) over at hackernews
And stay tuned to hear more about the tool that I am actually building vs the ideas that I give away for free in the post.
The picture above is the top shelf of my desk. It sits above my computer screens at home and rightfully so. The things on that shelf are of higher importance than anything that transpires on the screens below it. If I may indulge, lemme explain what those items are from left to right. I’ll also cover who those items represent to me, the ideals those people helped build in me, and how that affects my professional life. Continue reading “A (Programmer’s) Life Shouldn’t Be Lonely”
The title should really be, “My Purpose in my Professional Life.” But that doesn’t flow as nicely or grab you buy the emotions, so I shrank it down to “My Purpose in Life.”
Some Background
If you’re lucky, you’re one of those people who’ve known exactly what your purpose in life was since high school or college. If you’re extremely lucky, you’ve known since you were a kid. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that way for me. I barely figured it out this morning, after a little more than 37 years of being me. That’s almost 20 years AFTER joining the workforce, where I was supposed to be executing upon that purpose.
For some, their purpose in life is wrapped up in a single goal or series of related goals. For example, “I want to be the best basketball player…on my team” then morphs to “…at my school” and then “…in the (W)NBA” and lastly “…of all time.” Now, for me, my purpose is not like that.
For me, my purpose in life is something that I’ve been hoping for to provide guidance. I like to do many things as evident in these two separate posts. A lot of different things make me happy. I have a ton of crazy ideas, and I get more ideas all the time. In fact, I just had a great new biz idea this morning. When the ideas hatch though, I invariably ask, “Will this make me happy? Will this be fulfilling for me in the long run?” Most of the time, I would answer, “I don’t know” because again, I didn’t know my purpose so how could I know if this would work towards it? Continue reading “My Purpose in Life”
I don’t get to travel to many conferences much these days. When I was helping run 360Conferences, we were always going to them because we were running them. 🙂 However, I find myself traveling less nowadays. April will be the exception though, I’ll be going to 3 conferences that I’m sure will be great!
First off, there is DevConnect, a conference dedicated to the future of the web: video and mobile. This one day show will take place on April 2 in NYC. I’m slowly becoming a pure mobile convert. Other than programming and blogging, everything I do on a computer I do on my iPhone. My iPhone is not only my primary internet connection, but it’s also my primary camera (for stills and videos). All of this points me to the fact that mobile is the future and desktop will be for the few heavy lifting tasks we rarely do. I’ll even go out on a limb and say someday, I’ll probably blog and program on my mobile device even.
There are many ideas being presented today. I’ll try to highlight a few and also add some personal thoughts.
The youth of today are important. It’s important to provide them the tools they need to express themselves, or else they’ll find other ways. To kick off the show with some of today’s creative youth was awesome.
Content is no longer one sided. One point hinted out early on is that content is no longer the domain of one group. Today’s web users are just as excited to create content as they are to consume it. You need to plan for that fact.
It’s important to not just build great websites or ads, but to also know how your customers think and behave. I know that I would like sites to be smarter about me. I’m tired having to re-explain myself to each website/company.
The next point is that full version Flash is coming everywhere: desktops, netbooks, smartphones and TVs. The biggest problem was RAM usage. It’s a true dilemma for Adobe and device manufactures. I, as a techie, realize that devices and computers aren’t equal in power and ram. However, my mom doesn’t understand that. Most of the public just assume that a machine is a machine.
Tom's Blog 