Understanding The Market
Every time I talk to someone about starting a business or about my own business the central theme comes down to “market.” Market defined as a group of people that are your customers or your potential customers.
Fundamentally every business needs to understand their market in order to be successful. There also to be a sufficient quantity people in this market with problems. The problems need to be of sufficient pain and scarcity that your solution (product or service) to that problem rises to the level of profitability.
In the past I have created what I thought were great products, only to find out that, in the end, I did not understand the market all that well. I have found out that in fact I don’t understand a lot of markets well or re-phrased, I don’t understand people that well. I don’t know why they choose one thing or another. But I do know this: Understanding the market is the key to business, or re-phrased, understanding people is the key to business.
Florida Trip – Part 1
The drive down was interesting. We had to leave a day later than expected because of a snow storm in Columbus, and during the trip we encountered a detour because of a rock slide and a snow storm in South Carolina.
Night 1 – Gatlinburg, Tennessee
- Gatlinburg
This was an interesting place. I actually had no idea that it was such an active little place, kind of like a cross between Boulder Colorado and Orlando. I would not mind spending a week-end here at some point in the future.
Night 2 – Savannah, Georgia
- Snow in South Carolina
The drive in was a real POA. From Tennessee to South Carolina on I-40, we encountered a detour because of a rock slide. We did not realize this but thanks to my Verizon Air Card I was able to Google the detour and we managed to take the Dixie Highway down to I26 and onward to South Carolina.
While traveling through this state we now found ourselves outrunning a freak snow storm, yes a snow storm. This was exactly the reason we did not want to drive on Wednesday.
So when we finally made it to Savannah, the hotel was very understaffed and I waited about 30 minutes to check-in. I was in a terrible mood, but we made it to the room in time for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Days 3-5 – Casey Key, Florida
- Scott, Emily and Lilu
The drive down was great. It was in the 50’s and sunny. I was thinking to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if we had weather like this all the time.
The beach house is nice and the ocean is great. It’s been a little cool, but it’s sunny and not 12+ inches of snow like it is back home in Columbus.
We have just been relaxing and enjoying ourselves.
It’s about the Individual, not The Team!
I am so tired of late hearing about how it takes great teams to succeed. Whether it’s software development, starting a business, or football, the dogma is the same: “It takes a great team to win!”. That’s baloney!
The one thing that’s often overlooked by the people preaching this non-sense is Pareto’s Law (80-20 Rule). Which states that 80% of the results, comes from 20% of the effort. The numbers are often skued even higher 90-10, 95-5, but the general rule is that in no matter what system you have, the vast majority of the results come from a VITAL FEW.
Maybe the people preaching this are there to make others feel good, or they are selling something, because after-all, 80% of the people that contribute the least to things want to feel important.
Scott’s Bots – Back to custom code.
I enjoy WordPress for ScottPreston.Com, but for Scott’s Bots.Com, I’ve decided to go with my own custom version of the web site.
The reason is that I wanted to do too many things with the site and was forced to look for so many so-so plug-ins. So rather than do that I just coded what I needed and so far so good, it actually give’s me some practice with my PHP skills, which I enjoy.
The Resistance – The Reason Why You’re Stuck.
I recently read a post over at ZenHabits, that resonated with me. It was a guest post by Seth Godin which talked about a term coined by Steven Pressman, called “the resistance”.
The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head, the one that tells you that it will never work, the one that insists you check your email one last time, the one that worries that people will laugh at you.
What I’ve found very interesting about this article is that I’ve heard this voice. I don’t listen to it much, but it becomes louder when I talk to some people about starting a business or louder still when a business venture does not end up like I had hoped.
Programmer Productivity
What makes a programmer productive?
There are lots of ideas about this and I have a few of my own. I have read some interesting articles and books on Pareto’s Law (The 80/20 Rule) and am finding that most productivity comes from just a few things.
3 Most Effective
- The Language – The language you choose to do most of your coding is directly proportional to the efficiency of your programming (lines and quality).
- The Libraries/Frameworks/Resources Available – Depending on what you are programming, re-inventing the wheel is wasted effort.
- The Programming Environment – Text Editors, PC/Mac/Linux, Number of Monitors, Other Tools, Fast Internet Connection.
3 Least Effective
- Development Methodology – This only matters when projects are not well thought out and people don’t know what they want programmed. But for the programmer that knows what he wants to code, it does not matter.
- Unit Testing – I have friends that will roll their eyes at this statement, but I’ve written so many lines of code with no to little defects and I’ve not written one unit test or test case. In fact writing unit testing and doing testing on obvious stuff was the most wasted weeks I’ve ever spent.
- Anything that makes code more maintainable – Often you will hear about rules that are good for creating maintainable code, some pattern, avoiding some anti-pattern, lines of code in a method, or size of a class file, etc. These all sound good, but the fact is only a small percentage of code is ever re-used, so stop trying to make 100% of it reusable.
A Memory Leak Windows 7 – NVIDIA Drivers!
I have been seeing the memory in my system slowly approach close to 4GB while my Resource Monitory only has about 1GB in use as part of the “Working Set” I then saw a note that talked about the video drivers and I started to connect the two.
It seems that the NVIDIA driver for my Dell E6400 is slowly leaking RAM until eventually Windows just runs of of free memory. To fix this, I just re-installed the existing driver. When the computer screen flashes and the driver reloads, my memory is now down to a manageable 1+GB.
The current driver I am using in my DELL is NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M is 8.17.11.9562, (NVIDIA195.62) with a date of 11/20/2009.
CodeMash 2010 – Conference Wrap-Up
Overall Great Conference. Thanks to all those who organized it and all the speakers that volunteered to speak!
The only big downside was VERY POOR Wi-Fi and 1 Bar of Edge on AT&T. This meant that my blogging had to wait until after the conference.
The Thursday party was very cool, but it was a little disconnected with the tables and the band vs. the huge gatherings we use to have in the halls outside the rooms. Those seemed to be more social than this year.
I think that next year I want more intermediate and advanced talks, less beginner talks unless the amount of new technology is abundant and fun.
CodeMash 2010 – Clojure
Presented By Howard M. Lewis Ship
This was an OK presentation. I was a little distracted by the Neal Ford reference Ceremony vs. Essence. Perhaps Neal was not the only person to use it, but because I heard it a few years ago at a CodeMash keynote, it distracted me. I wanted to learn more about the syntax of Clojure, but it did not go into that. I did gain some insight into the functional aspect of the language, but not enough I’m afraid.
I did get a book on the language by Stewart Holloway, I hope to read that in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully to learn more about how I can use this language for my robotics projects.
CodeMash 2010 – The Mother Of All Bugs
Presented by Andy Hunt
It was a pleasure seeing Andy speak. He’s one of the co-authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and it’s nice to see his perspective on things. Today’s talk was a pleasant surprise. No talk about Java evils or process improvement, but a discussion on cognitive science and why we think the way we do and how this thinking (or sometimes lack of thinking) leads us to certain paths in our programming or our project management structure.
The talk included a number of examples, but some of the most striking were videos that were used to illustrate points on lack of attention or diverted attention. One example had us focusing so hard at a certain group in the video, that a gorilla walking through the scene was just barely noticeable. Other examples asked you to notice something different or something that changed. Again, I did not get most of them and it really makes you think.
The talk ended with a great quote, actually more of a conversation between himself and his boss. He was asking for something, (I don’t know exactly what), and his boss responded “What’s stopping you?” he said “Nothing” and his boss replied, “that get’s in my wall a lot too”.
Nice talk, hope see others at some more conferences this year!