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UMBC’s 2013 Maryland Charity Campaign has launched. The campaign raises vital funds for nonprofit organizations that serve pressing community needs. Our goal this year is to once again reach at least 1,000 donors through gifts of any size.
UMBC has shown itself time and again as a caring community. In last
year’s campaign, UMBC had the highest participation by far among Maryland public colleges
and universities.
Make your gift today—your support is more meaningful than ever. Thank you.
Every Dollar Makes a Difference! $2 bi-weekly buys…
…that’s $52 a year.
$10 bi-weekly buys…
…that’s $260 a year.
$20 bi-weekly (Leadership Giver) a week buys…
…that’s $520 a year.
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Often times when I’m on Twitter or Hacker News I find my feed full of links about yet another startup failing. Success rates for startups are quite low but this seems to be a separate breed of problem. These startups aren’t failing because they had a great product or idea, but didn’t get the little things right, or because they were in markets with high barriers to entry. No, this seems to be a case where there was absolutely zero product market fit – startups pursuing ideas that didn’t solve any real or perceived problem, where customers had no interest in paying for it.
These failures, which may come as a big shock to the founders, don’t really surprise many. Sure, part of the problem is that “failure is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you in Sillicon Valley” but the bigger issue stems from an inability to solve a real problem.
That may sound like a simple goal, but the reality is that even finding a problem to solve is quite difficult. I’m sure these startups set out thinking they had a real problem at hand, but on further exploration nothing could be further from the truth. It’s hard to come up with ideas that people are willing to fork over their cash for (and then much, much harder to execute on these ideas).
Real problems do exist, though, and will always exist. In this day and age, with the relatively low barriers to entry in the tech industry and the ease of distribution, the chances of having a unique idea are quite low, but your ideas don’t have to be unique. You can take an existing idea and put a different spin on it or offer a more pleasant customer experience with better design, and chances are you can strike gold. Of course, you will have to get all the little things right, but that’s another story altogether.
One of my favorite examples of this is Nest. Thermostats have been around since 1883, yet Tony Fadell found a way to reinvent the device and find a niche in the thermostat market. Now they’ve moved on to tackling smoke detectors in the same manner. Another example that I recently heard of on an episode of Planet Money, is Fan Duel. Fantasy sports have also been around for a while now, the first official league being created in the fifties, but Fan Duel found a way to put a new spin on an existing product by offering single day leagues with smaller cash prizes. Apparently it works, because they awarded payouts totaling $50 million last year, and secured an $11 million investment from Comcast for revenues that are supposedly well into the $100 millions.
Now if you do a bit of research on both of these ideas, you will find that the founders were annoyed with the existing implementations and set about to solve problems that occurred in their lives. Unfortunately, finding these problems to begin with isn’t something we’re wired to do. Most people get frustrated with daily annoyances but move on. When we think of money-making startup ideas, we tend to think of the fun, cool and glamorous ideas like AirBnB or Pinterest, but there’s also plenty of money to be made solving mundane ideas like clunky and ugly thermostats. The key is to find the right problems to solve in the first place.
I propose we start an exercise to help us identify these problems. This is nothing new, and it’s been written about before, but as more people start implementing this idea, more successful startup concepts will start to emerge (or at least I hope).
Starting today, write down a problem that you would like to solve, a problem that you have in your life, or a problem you have identified. Undertake this exercise daily. If you are an iOS developer, be like Matthijs Hollemans and come up with a new app idea every day. Or if you are an inventor, like Meredith Perry, carry a notebook around, jotting down ideas of things you want to improve.
Carry out this exercise daily for a month. At the end of the month, go through your list of ideas. Discard the ridiculous ones (there will be plenty of those) and research the remaining ideas. If a solution already exists, note its shortcomings. Is there room for improvement and how would you make things better? As you vet each idea, your research will reveal the complexities of solving the problem and you will find that you aren’t as interested in it as you were when you wrote down the idea. That’s fine. If you’re bored by the idea already or the thought of tackling it, discard it immediately. Creating a company around it means being surrounded by the idea 24/7 for the foreseeable future. You have to be passionate about it and if it’s boring you now, don’t even bother trying.
At the end of this, you may or may not have a few ideas that you deem worth pursuing. If not, repeat the exercise. As Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Soon you will learn to identify problems, figure out solutions and carve out a market for it. Then you’ll be on your way to building a legitimate company, solving a real problem, that people are willing to pay for.
And then, hopefully, there will be a lot fewer of those “Help, my startup is dying” posts.
The post Solving Real Problems appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture invites you to the opening reception of Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen on Thursday, October 24th from 5 to 7 pm.
Visibility Machines explores the unique roles Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they seem to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed information, and places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of the media they are creatively working with, namely photography, film, and new media.
Admission to the exhibition is free. The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and is located in the Fine Arts Building. For more information call 410-455-3188.
When I started working in information technology professionally in 1989, things were pretty easy in terms of choosing a direction to head into. At least in my area (South Florida), you went into one of the following areas:
ColdFusion was my technology of choice and it too lasted me nearly ten years.
I took the software development route and for a very long time, it was easy to choose a programming language that you could base your career on. In my case, I started with Clipper (a dBase-based compiler) and eventually branched into client-server development using PowerBuilder, the latter being my goto tool for almost five years.
And even when I got into web development, tools and technologies were still easy to choose, primarily because the web was still so young and simple post-back, server-side page refresh style development. ColdFusion was my technology of choice and it too lasted me nearly ten years. And most recently, jQuery and JavaScript have been my focus since 2008.
There's a reason I'm telling you all of this.
I've been very fortunate to have chosen technologies that have had great longevity but of recent, I've noticed a dramatic change in the industry. The maturation of web development has led to an explosion of new tools that aim to help manage the complex process of building today's sophisticated websites and apps. This is actually a very good thing since for a long time, web development was like the wild west. The formalization of patterns, processes and best practices is certainly a positive thing and will invariably help to build substantially more stable systems.
And a lot of this explosion has been driven by the ease of access to sophisticated programming languages and tools, many offered for free via the open source community. This has enabled developers to rethink the way things should be built and empowered them to build amazing tooling.
This empowerment, though, can be a double-edged sword for the developer community as it feels like we're on a hamster wheel with no brakes that allow us to stop and take things in. It's a bit of a perpetual learning cycle where in many cases, not staying on top of the latest development trends can put you incredibly behind in terms of current development practices. I know I've felt it more than once and in talking with my peers, it seems to be a pervasive feeling.
I think it's fair to say that software developers have one of the most complex jobs in the world.
You'll hear constantly from others that our field is one of constant learning and that is so true. Developers are rockstars nowadays and it's because we work on cutting edge stuff that makes a tangible impact on large communities of people. And those communities are demanding more information via easier user experiences across multiple form factors. I think it's fair to say that software developers have one of the most complex jobs in the world. So constantly learning isn't a choice anymore; it's a requirement.
Which is why I was mentioning my career path to-date. I think it mimics that of a lot of my peers, where we could comfortably depend on knowing some "thing" for "x" number of years before we had to begin to retrain ourselves. If you're in the web development world, that's no longer the case and in my opinion, a career limiting move. I'm not saying that you need to go off and learn every new library that comes out. Honestly, I think many of the libs and tools being pushed out:
But there is a clear rationale for staying on top of emerging technologies especially when you see your peers chatting about them. And to be clear, I don't define peers narrowly as those I work with. I look closely at people on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs and forums to gauge where their thinking is at. If you're not doing the same, you're doing yourself and your career a disservice.
As you get older (yes I'm touching on age), for most, "time" becomes the biggest limiting factor to staying current. I can attest to this as at age 45 with a ton of family commitments, I have to be extremely regimented in order to dedicate the necessary learning "time" while ensuring I dedicate "time" to my family (which is my number one priority). And I'm confident I'm not alone in this conundrum. I think back to when I was in my 20s and used to write for print magazines (you guys remember those right?) and my colleagues would ask, "How do you have time to do that?". Well, it has come full circle and I find myself asking my 20-something developer friends the same thing.
The thing I've learned is that I can't compare myself to a 20-something because our priorities in most cases are different. A young buck will invariably have more time to focus on the newest stuff allowing him or her to tinker away and even build that next great tool. And that is awesome and I remember those days myself!
As you progress in your career though, it's important not to be lulled into complacency and develop a plan that will allow you to stay up-to-date by being selective of not only the technologies you choose but also the goals you plan on achieving.
As you look at the technologies that are currently available, it's easy to become overwhelmed at where to start, much less what to choose. I empathize with you and you are certainly not alone. Part of the problem is that as developers, we're naturally curious about new technology. I like to call it the "moth to a flame" syndrome:
The list could go on and on. What I'm trying to get at is that at times, we suffer from attention deficit and try to rationalize it by thinking it will immediately solve a non-existent or future problem for us. In essence, we're technology hoarders doing a "just in case". In reality, it's important to sit back and determine what you're trying to accomplish and how the current suite of tools solve your problems based on where you want to head to.
Part of the problem is that as developers, we’re naturally curious about new technology.
For example, I've heard so many developers say that they want to learn iOS only to find that they have no real plans for building an iOS app. If you have the time to do that for fun, more power to you but if you don't, that's time that should be spent learning things that are actually important.
For example, if you're a front-end web developer and that's what you plan on being for some time, I'm of the thinking that ensuring you're up-to-speed on things such as AMD, ES6, Sass and Yeoman is far more important than diving into IPTables, ActiveRecord, WebView or Amazon EC2. Before everyone loses their minds because of what I just said, let's be clear, if you can manage to learn all of these things (for example, a full-stack developer), more power to you because it will make you more valuable.
What I'm trying to convey is that instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with the thought of learning "the full stack", narrow down the scope into easier to manage goals. Determine where your career focus is, pinpoint a handful of key technologies you should be up-to-speed on, and focus on those in order for you to stay relevant within your career focus.
The front-end developer tract, for example, is involved enough and staying current will keep you busy for a long time. Lou Lazaris wrote a post back in 2011 titled "Skills for Front-end Developers" and in many cases he's spot on. If you look at his list, he's specifically targeted front-end technologies that are important to that role. It reinforces my thinking that it's better to narrow down the scope of what you're learning into manageable chunks within the role you're in. But it's also important to filter down lists like these even further. Do I think that CoffeeScript is critical to my success as a front-end dev? Absolutely not, which is why I've purposely not dedicated time to it.
Again, I'm not advocating not learning as much as you can. Despite me clearly being on the front-end side of things, I'm currently working on learning Ruby and Rails because I'd like to learn a new server-side stack to round out my skills. For me, it means sacrificing learning how to use something like Yeoman but I've taken the time to determine the value proposition of going down this route and I think it's worthwhile for me.
Learning comes in different styles. I learn best by:
Others prefer to simply dive into something and learn by the school of hard knocks. Whichever way you learn, having good resources available is a critical part of the equation.
More and more, I've been leaning towards online courses because they've matured to a point where in many cases they're comparable in quality to their onsite brethren. They also afford the flexibility of allowing you to do things on your own schedule (almost always) and to focus on the technologies that are important to you.
In my case, I recently signed up for One Month Rails which offered me the following:
Regardless of what learning options are available, if you don't set aside some dedicated learning time, it's all irrelevant.
I see this as a jumpstart opportunity that will be complemented by sites like Nettuts+ and Tuts+ Premium as well as books and my community contacts. But ultimately, the flexibility and pace of the course is what I feel will allow me to learn something new in a timely manner. Cost is certainly a factor which you need to weigh versus the anticipated learning benefit and resulting updated skill.
The fact that there are so many online learning options available (many of them free) makes it substantially easier to keep your skill-set current, especially if you're methodical about what you want to learn (for example, don't be a moth).
But you need to carve out the time to learn. Regardless of what learning options are available, if you don't set aside some dedicated learning time, it's all irrelevant. I've personally found that spending one to two hours, two to three times a week immediately after work seems to work well because my mind is still in developer mode. I recently chatted with a friend who finds it better to wake up very early (6am) and focus on learning during the first few hours of the morning before starting work. That way, he's fresh and focused, free of distractions or concerns about his job.
My good friend and badass developer Joe McCann offered this great feedback:
“The one bit of knowledge I'll add is that the number one thing I learned studying philosophy in college was not what I was learning, but how I in fact learn things. Truly understanding how one learns, understands, etc. is key to learning a new skill or enhancing current ones.
If someone learns by reading a book or writing down notecards or hearing it via lectures, all of these are available to use now online. It's a matter of understanding how you learn and then going and seeking the proper medium to do so.“
Well said.
It goes without saying that I think Nettuts+ and the various Envato properties offer some of the best online learning options around. In addition, here are a couple of learning sites I've used and recommend:
If you want something a little more structured and hardcore, a new trend are onsite bootcamps where you will invest a considerable amount of time learning how to use the newest technologies. Just note that many of these require you to move to where the bootcamp is being held and commit full-time to it for a number of weeks. Also, these courses are pricey running into the thousands of dollars in exchange for the more personal learning experience. I've personally participated in the Bloc.io bootcamp but didn't require moving. While I wasn't able to finish it due to time constraints, I would recommend it. Here are some of the bootcamps that have received a lot of positive press:
The site BootCamper has been aggregating a list of the various bootcamps that are available and providing information about them in a searchable fashion.
The main thing is to keep learning and do it at a manageable pace and in a thoughtful manner.
I've been wanting to write something like this for awhile. It's a bit self-serving since it helped me jot down feelings I've had about being overwhelmed with the hamster wheel of learning. Over time, I've been looking at ways to ensure I'm staying on top of things while not burning myself out and I've come to realize that it's impossible to stay on top of everything, even in my own niche. There's just too many devs building too many cools things and not enough "time".
So I've resolved to focus on things that are timely and relevant but may not be bleeding edge and the newest cool toy. I find this to be a much more manageable way of learning for me. And I also think it's important to revisit the tried and true stuff that may not be the latest model car but may have some great surprises for you under the hood. I look back to Jeff Atwood's great post "Why Ruby?" where he discusses his choice for using Ruby to build Discourse and specifically touches on Ruby's maturity and lack of coolness.
The main thing is to keep learning and to do it at a manageable pace and in a thoughtful manner. Really give thought to where you're heading in your career, outline the key things you should be good at within that scope and work towards developing a plan to tackle staying current. There are plenty of flames out there and you don't need to flap your wings to every one of them.
I'd love to learn more from you guys how you stay up-to-date so please be sure to offer your suggestions in the comments.
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