Filling The Resume Gap With Programming

August 18, 2009 by

So you got laid off.

It happens.

This is my 5th recession personally. I saved a bunch of money during the last boom, so I’m fairly well set for this one. I planned – in advance – to take some time off and sharpen up my writing skills… and learn some new programming skills.

Dig deeper into your current skillset

Now that you have a little time on your hands, you can dig a little deeper into some of the more obscure or powerful parts of your favorite programming language. For example, suppose you’re pretty good at C, but have only written single threaded applications. Right now is an excellent time to dip into multi-threading.

I’ve been digging a little deeper myself, poking at some of the object-oriented C code I have laying around. There are some blog posts under development on this topic too.

Learn a new programming language

Since most of my experience is with compiled languages such as C, C++ and Java, I decided when I finished my last contract I would learn a scripting language. PHP was an obvious choice. Given my interest in writing, learning PHP would allow me to do some WordPress hacking as well.

The project I chose was to modify an existing WordPress plugin for formatting reviews such that it could be used for formatting recipes. The programming has been interesting and rewarding, the hRecipe project has been successful in driving considerable traffic to There Is NO Box. It’s one of the most popular parts of the website, and I look forward to doing considerably more work on the hRecipe project.

It’s worked well for me: I have learned some PHP, and a little Javascript too, while working on my scripting language project.

Learning something new will work well for you, just jump in a go for it! If all you know is scripting, try out a compiled language like Java. It will give a brand new, and valuable, perspective on programming.

Bring some old code up to date

If you have been seriously programming for any length of time, you’re going to have to code in various states of maintenance. I look back over years and years of programming, and see code dating from the 1990s! Some of this code still interests me. Some of it’s still good. A big chunk of it could be brought up to date with relatively little effort. Build environments and Makefiles need to be updated. Dangerous or stupid code replaced. Poorly written sections rewritten.

Even better, some of this old sludge could be distilled into shiny new code, by porting to new, more modern languages. For example, I have a circular histogram generator written in C, which would be nice to have in Javascript for generating rose diagrams on the fly.

What do you have laying around that would be fun, educational and perhaps profitable to port forward?

Do some excavation in your code archives, let us know what you find!

Learn to be an MS Office Power User

Suppose you have no programming experience.

This isn’t necessarily a problem. You are using your computer for something besides surfing the internet, right?

Even if you mainly use computers for writing letters in Microsoft Word, or for computing your budget in Excel, or perhaps you’re a graphic designer using Photoshop, whatever application you use almost positively can be programmed with scripts. For example, all of Microsoft’s products can be programmed using built-in macros or Visual Basic. And surely there was something you could have automated at your last job, if you had only had the time.

Now is that time!

If you end up starting your own business, any office automation skills you learn are going to pay you back in spades.

Filed Under: Inspiration Tagged With: , , ,

Filling The Resume Gap With Blogging

August 10, 2009 by

Reuters just published an article entitled “The price of the U.S. recession is paid in jobs.” Some sad stories here. Looks like some jobs are gone forever.

I’m not sure I completely believe that… and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be that way… but those are discussions for another time and place.

My goal in this article is to promote blogging as way to fill your “resume gap” should you become unemployed for a significant length of time.

Blogging provides you with so many advantages:

  1. Keeps your mind sharp by posing intellectual problems
  2. Keeps you emotionally engaged with work
  3. Provides you with a sense of satisfaction when you have built a body of written work over time.
  4. Provides you with public visibility, if not outright fame and fortune! For free! The Wonders of Google!
  5. Provides you with a public track record of accomplishment. If you want a job, and future employers want to know what you have been doing for the last 15 months that you have been unemployed, point to your blog: “I’ve been developing my writing skills.”
  6. You establish yourself as a relative expert in a new field or promote yourself as an absolute expert in your own field. Read more about relative and absolute expertise.
  7. If you want to acquire readers, you learn about writing to an audience. Having an audience is always a great value-add for an employer. Not quite as good as bringing customers to an investor, but a great place to start nonetheless.
  8. It’s fun! Really, really fun!
  9. More! Much more! (An hour of free WordPress consulting to the first person giving another benefit for blogging. Offer expires August 14 2009)

Once you get rolling, you will be amazed at your ability to write.

That’s all well and good you say, but “What’s the downside?”

Frankly, I can’t think of any that matter to me. Here’s a few that might matter to you

  • Opportunity cost: you might be using the time you spend blogging to “find a job” or “make money.”
  • Potential for RSI. Wait… you probably already have that potential in your previous job!
  • More? I can’t think of any. Then again, I’m biased. I love to write whether or not anyone reads!

Get your own blog and get going

Now that you’re ready to start your own blog, head on over to Website In A Weekend, where you’ll find everything you need for blogging.

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , , , ,

The Conundrum of Massive Opportunity

July 26, 2009 by

One thing is really clear: no matter how bad the economy gets, the amount of opportunity for technical achievement is stupendous. Programming languages continue to evolve to better solve new problems. Bio and nano tech are advancing… in ways you and I could hardly understand. Web applications get easier and easier to develop.

But where’s the market opportunities? That’s the $64,000 question!

One vastly simplified way to answer the question “Where’s the opportunity?” is that it depends on the scale of the enterprise. Bio-nano-related technology will require large corporations, VC backing, probably government funding to get started, before real market opportunities emerge. The so-called wireless sensor revolution of a few years ago is a perfect example of this. The technology for cobbling together small wireless sensor networks was fairly easily created by small research groups. But getting the reliability and scalability necessary for first industrial then consumer level deployment took quite a bit longer. In fact, it took long enough that the newsworthiness of the industry faded before the really interesting applications were developed! Which won’t change the fact that wireless sensor networks will become ubiquitous sooner than later, however invisible they may be to consumers.

On the small scale, consumers will never tire of products that 1. make them money, 2. save them money, or 3. provide cost-effective entertainment. Web applications are a perfect platform for delivering consumer products and services in all 3 areas. And web application development has never been easier. These days, a small team of college students can quickly develop applications of surprising complexity and utility. I’ll have more on one of my favorite web applications in the near future. It’s good. You’ll like it. It will help you save and make money.

Here’s the challenge: How are you determining where the market is among all this opportunity?

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , ,

Two Traps For The Technicals

July 17, 2009 by

I just left the following as a comment on Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick, as a response to his article on success and motivation.

Many of us on the technical side have a build it and they will come mentality. This works once in a while. But not very often. It´s probably a result of sticking with what one knows best, rather sticking your neck in areas you don’t understand. In my case it’s sales and marketing.

Another trap for the technically-minded is the notion of being so good at what you do, you don´t have to look for work. The work finds you. This is true for an extremely small number of people… who, perhaps not coincidentally, are extremely well-networked. The networking, essentially, is the sales and marketing.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to introduce to you the new noun “technicals.” Ordinarily I loathe nounification (and verbification) with a white-heat passion. But with all this bandying about of the word “creatives” I have to admit… I’ve been feeling left out and lonely… isn’t programming creative? I think it is. No, I feel that it is. Sadly, those who cannot program don’t feel the same way. Since I can’t be a “creative,” I’ll just have to be a “technical.” Booyah.

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: ,

Internet Marketing Is Hard to Master — So is everything else

June 30, 2009 by

This article comes as a response to a comment on Erica Douglass’s forum.

Dean, a commenter, notes he seems to be missing something something with respect to success in Internet Marketing.

I’m missing something too, but I think I know what it is.

Successful internet marketers are marketers first, and internet second. If there was no internet, they would still be successful marketers.

Here’s a few other things to keep in mind:

  • All marketing of any product anywhere is essentially a pyramid scheme of who can get in first and either lock up the market, leaving the crumbs for everyone else, or commoditising the money completely out of it. You can see this in IM with stupendously valuable products now being given away for the cost of monthly memberships. But it works the same way with laundry detergent, etc. (Think about starting a new laundry detergent company)
  • Related to the previous comment is that there is an implicit MLM — multi-level-marketing scheme — built into all of this. The first person that gets ahead, stays ahead, everyone else falls into line behind them, getting a radically smaller share of the market at each step.
  • The rich get richer. The internet is just exposing this at a much more rapid pace. This includes things like blog links, they all flow pretty much one way: from the lesser to the greater, or sideways to peers. Very rarely will someone “bleed their link juice” to an unranked or unknown blog, no matter how technically good the content. I link to provide value to readers, and as far as I know, there is not one single contextual link to any of my blogs anywhere on the whole web. I don’t worry about it, and I don’t attempt to trade links with people.
  • Quitters never succeed. If you’ve only been doing this 2 years, you need to listen to Brad Fallon on one of Eben’s videos: “We’ve been working on this almost 20 years… it’s nice to finally see a payoff.” (After a $13M launch IIRC).
  • EVERYTHING is difficult to master. If it wasn’t difficult, anyone could do it.

I’m in it for long haul myself. All of my blogs exist primarily as advertisement providing me with technical credibility.

Feedback welcome, let me know what you think.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Absolute vs Relative Expert… Which are you? Which is better?

June 10, 2009 by

Are you an expert?

You might be.

You’re almost certainly an expert in something relative to most everyone you know.

As an entrepreneur, you better darn well be an expert at something!

What is an expert anyway?

With the amount of raw information flooding our brains over the last couple of years, the meaning of the word “expert” has to be extended… from someone who has vast in-depth knowledge about a certain narrow topic, to someone who simply knows more than you about a subject.

That is, there are two kinds of experts:

  1. absolute experts and
  2. relative experts.

Let’s dig a little deeper…

Absolute Expert

It’s a little known fact, but I am a world authority on a certain type of implicit discrete element schemes. If you don’t know what that means, that’s ok. It’s not a very big market. While it’s terribly interesting to me and approximately one dozen other people, it’s not much of a basis for making a living!

The focus required to become an absolute expert are often blinds one to the “ground truth” of their subject matter. In numerical modeling using discrete or finite element methods, the danger to the expert is not calibrating the numerical results with how material actually behaves in the real world.

For another example, the current global depression is being marketed as a “Black Swan” event, something no one could have foreseen. The fact is many people saw it coming and took active steps to protect themselves financially. Most of these people, including myself, are not economists. We just looked at fundamentals, looked at our life experience, and knew something was very badly wrong!

Relative Expert

This means simply that I know more than you about something. Or that you know more than me about some other thing.

“Real” experts often develop a considerable amount emotional distress when faced with relative experts, who from the “real” expert’s 10,000+ hour perspective are little better than charlatans.

The problem that real experts have is that their knowledge is often too erudite or too specialized to have much practical application. Relative experts, being much closer to the ground truth, don’t have this problem.

Should Expertise Imply Instruction?

In my opinion, being either sort of expert, relative or absolute, should imply the capability of communicating or teaching what you know to other people, such that your instruction encourages useful and immediate action.

Transmitting simply the information isn’t all that valuable, people can read about almost anything for free on the internet. Enabling people to take action, to acquire knowledge from such information, is much more difficult.

Your Expertise

Do you have an area of absolute expertise? Is it rare? Esoteric? Valuable? Interesting? Post a comment, tell the world about it!

What about relative expertise? Make a list of those things you know that you could teach others.

It should go without saying—but I’m saying it anyway—that someone in a position of relative expertise should not present themselves as an absolute expert on a subject. In fact, this article was inspired by the following tweet from Kathy Sierra:

Wondering if people who dislike/distrust “so-called experts” have been burned by those who mistake experience for expertise.

To be fair, being an expert without experience is not very useful. An old saw states A good theory is a practical man’s best friend.

When you’re just starting out

When you’re new to a subject, most everyone with experience has more knowledge than you do. Incrementally acquiring knowledge should not be expensive. Learn by doing, and do a little every day.

After you accumulate some experience, you become more knowledgable than an increasing number of people. Acquiring deeper or more useful knowledge becomes more personally time consuming, or more expensive to purchase… but the value of your knowledge to others goes up as well.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , ,

The Small California C Corp — An Infinitely Deep Well of Cash

June 6, 2009 by

Among my many absolutely fascinating activities, such as watching exotic tropical milkweeds attempt to take over my apartment, I own (and have owned) in part or in whole a couple of small businesses, including sole proprietorships, LLCs and California C corporations. It’s been fun and interesting, and definitely an education.

First C corporation

One of the most interesting aspects of owning and operating a corporation is that the state of California apparently regards corporations as having bottomless pits of cash. As if “corporation” were some magic utterance by which cash magically appears. Thus, we got offers from various state agencies boasting “opportunities” to learn more about how to better comply with various regulations (that means sending cash or paperwork to the state). Such workshops have both direct and opportunity costs associated with them, over and above the regulatory compliance.

Then there’s whole notion that businesses pay taxes. They do not. They collect money from their customers, then give part of that money to the government. C corporations are taxed as an entity, then disbursements to the owners or shareholders are taxed again. At the small business level, this proved not viable, and when that corporation was dissolved, I went forward with an LLC. If the LLC really takes off, where “Eye Pee Oh!” makes sense, it won’t be that expensive to restructure the business appropriately. Sarbanes Oxley compliance will be the much greater expense in that case.

Business spam is still spam

We also got a phenomenal amount of business spam. Business spam is similar to regular spam in two ways:

  1. The spammer obtained our email address from a third party list which we were most likely involuntarily listed. That is, we gave some company your email address (so a salesperson could call, perhaps), and that company sold, traded or otherwise monetized our email address as a prospect. Exactly like all those “enlargement” (!) or “make money fast” schemes in your personal inbox. Completely and totally unsolicited.
  2. Getting off such lists generally requires doing more work than the common double optin marketing lists. You may need to call, log in, or otherwise alert the spammer that there’s a real live person at the other end of the email. Whence, they have a qualified prospect to move to a different list, and the spam continues. Since these outfits aren’t running confirmed optin marketing lists. I just report them as spam. I haven’t checked, but I suspect that “legitimate” advertisers got themselves exempted from CAN-SPAM because they had the lobbying muscle when the CAN-SPAM act was proposed, and email marketing was “new.” The immediate effect, of course, hammers the email marketers. The long term effect is blow back on business spammers hard, as all consumers become much more aware of the much higher standards required for email and internet marketing. As I said, any email I get not coming from an opt-in list I report as spam.

The difference between business and personal spam is (supposed to be) that business spammers actually represent real companies selling real products and services. I wouldn’t know, we didn’t use any.

But I really don’t know how the business spammers can be in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. Can anyone enlighten me here?

Employees… not a chance!

The biggest eye-opener was the cost of employees. I now know why companies lay off instead of reduce salaries: it’s cheaper to lay off or fire. When you lay off an employee, you get rid of all the state and federal overhead costs associated with that employee. Those costs run about what salaries cost. That is, if your company pays you $75,000/yr, you cost them at least $150,000/yr.

For larger companies, this isn’t that much of a problem. It turns into a problem when you want to hire someone unskilled to lick envelopes, and it costs you $30+/hr. That’s untenable. Which is unfortunate, because my intellectual time is worth a lot more than that. And if the envelope licker cuts his or her tongue, there’s whole ‘nother can of worms I don’t want to deal with.

Which small business type for you?

Choosing the structure most suited for your business can seem challenging, but it’s much easier when you have the right information available. I used several of the great business books from Nolo Press to help me decide. Here’s a couple of things I would do different had I known (this is not business or investment advice):

  1. Consider making an agreement with your partners to use the cheapest business service you can find to handle the incorporation details… such that when you find you need to dissolve or start over, you’re only out $200, and you can try again with more knowledge for another $200. With my first C corporation, we hired a lawyer, and it set us back a large chunk of change. We could have have experimented with a dozen different ways to structure the company for that cost.
  2. If you’re physically mainly in California, feel free to incorporate anywhere, but you are going to be taxed as if you were incorporated in California. It’s kind of a racket, but it works well for the state: we incorporated in California instead of elsewhere.

Currently, no more C corporations. I’m staying strictly with LLCs and sole proprietorships.

What’s your experience?

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , , , ,

Speed of Implementation: The #1 principle determining business success

January 23, 2009 by

From inspiration to implementation, people who take action now succeed much more than people who postpone taking action.

We all have a story where we hesitated and lost, and sometimes lost big. Here’s mine.

Snoozers Are Losers

I used to do a lot of caving. I got pretty good at it. My ambition was large, larger than my capacity to achieve. Once, back in 1983, I was visiting some friends who were caving near Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was winter and I was fleeing an Austin cold snap, and recovering from flu. Now, the caves near Huautla are deep, really deep… but not the deepest… the discussion went more or less like this:

Dave: “So, where are there other areas that have deep caves?”
Gerald: “Look over there” (He points to the south) “You can see the mountains over there are higher, and it’s all cave country.”
Dave: “How far away is it?” (What a wuss I was, already looking for excuses!)
Gerald: “You have to go back down the mountain from Huautla, than back up further down the Tehuacan Valley. You should go over there.”
Dave: “I guess so…”

And that was the end of that… for me. A total failure to take action!

Two years later, some adventurous cavers from Los Angeles did walk up there… and found Cueva Cheve, potentially the deepest cave in the world!

That Was Then, This Is Now.

This morning (January 23, 2009), I had an idea: post 1 minute action items to my twitter feed, little tasks that everyone needs to do but procrastinates away. 30 minutes later, I launched 1-minute-do-it-now.com.

I have absolutely no idea how much traction 1-minute-do-it-now will get, nor how long I will be interested in pursuing it, but being able to move quickly from inspiration to implementation allows me to “fail faster” in the worst case. And that’s a good thing!

Fast Implementation a Critical Factor

In his Altitude marketing course, Eben Pagan notes that most successful entrepreneurs share an ability to rapidly execute, to take an idea from inspiration to implementation very quickly. This can be thought of as a “Speed of Implementation” strategy. Since strategy is useless without tactics, here are some tactics:

  1. If you don’t have a business yet, implementing better marketing or more efficient fulfillment doesn’t really apply. What you can do instead is “take the next step.” If you can’t implement the exact idea you have, implement something that takes you in the appropriate direction. For example, you can’t change the copy in your newsletters if you aren’t sending newsletters. So purchase an account from aweber.com and teach yourself to write newsletters.

    Tactical principle: Take the next step (Inspiration from Dan Simmon’s fantastic Hyperion novels).

  2. For some things, for example the “business instrumentation dashboard” advocated by Eben may not fit your business directly. You may not need daily balances because you take in revenue 1-2 times per month. Expenses the same way. However, just implement the dashboard exactly like the example and use it until you can figure out something a little more relevant.

    Tactical principle: Do it anyway.

  3. A personal example: my motivation for purchasing Eben’s product was to learn more about creating and operating a internet-oriented business. At the time, I was really busy doing something else for a client as part of my consulting business. However, the marketing principles from one business venture can be modified to apply to another.

    Tactical principle: Move in a parallel direction.

Adopting a “speed of implementation” strategy with the above tactics allows building a general infrastructure as you go. Very likely, whatever the original idea was, may never actually be implemented. And that’s fine. Because I am anticipating a point where I have enough infrastructure built that implementing a good idea requires no more than an evening’s work.

Some links

  1. John Furst provides more tactics for fast implementation:
    • You don’t have the skills to implement it?
      Find someone who has.
    • You don’t have the money?

      Improve something you’re already doing. Little improvements add up to some respectable results.

    • You don’t have the time?

      Learn more effective time management.

  2. Cheryl Clausen provides unique perspective on speed of implementation:

    The best time to take action on something that will move you closer to success is always now.

  3. Erin Blaskie credits Eben in this post on her secrets to success.

And here is Eben’s speed of implementation video, hosted at youtube:


httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C488d_tCrc

What about you?

Do you have a horror story to share? A story that wasn’t a story because you failed to take action now? Share it and let’s all learn!

What about success? What are your secrets to fast implementation?

[Published: Mar 27, 2008]
[Updated: Jan 23, 2009]

Filed Under: Marketing, small business Tagged With: , , ,