Stefan’s blog

What is relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well are they cooperating, not how clever individuals are. Matt Ridley

I adore a great food. And by great I do not mean expensive posh dishes. It can be simple and great. Now I made simple sandwich for my late dinner. Whole grain bread with lettuce and cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is blended with spring chives which gives it a slightly spicy taste. It’s just simple and delicious.

If I would not be a web developer I would be a cook. I think it is amazing to be a cook and have possibility to design and create different meals. I would apply all the principles from web development to cooking. Starting with my favorite - KISS :). Even Gordon Ramsay would be jealous. Bon appetite :).

Here is a realisation of last three days. Innovation is obsolete and waste of your time, focus and productivity. Farmers didn’t invent tractor. They were busy farming. Tractor brought huge leap in the productivity. Focus on invention, how to do things differently and better. You can not make it better improving on a current level. You have to invent and make it to the whole new level. That’s hard.

Following my recent thoughts about 80:20 rule I was looking for some online productivity tips and found that there are actually many clever companies online. At this presentation Juan from MindValley shares his interesting 4 step execution process:

• 1st find leverage points - what are 5, 6 most important things
• focus on these important leverage points
• simplify as much as you can (KISS?
• take massive action

Last week I started to work on semestr.cz, a portal for university students to share papers online and I split the features to four sets - user registration, user account, document feeds and relationships. These are four main important things. How much time I spent developing it? Document feeds - two days, user account - one day. User registration and user relationships needs to be developed. If this will work out, it will be my fastest developed portal in history. Though it took 10 days to set-up regioninfo.eu. This one will be done in one week of working time. I find it amazing what you can do with today’s technology if you choose right approach.

All the web development stuff is less and less about development and more and more about design and management.

There is a huge difference between IT person a developer and a business person a developer. A developer (IT educated, computer science etc…) lives in models, math, algorithms, develops and writes a lot of “perfect” code, right to the specification! He uses first, second, third framework on top of one another. He does things because they are supposed to be done that way…

A business person, a developer educated on a business school has completely different approach, he is lazy to write a lot of code. He uses just one framework. He plans, he analyses and than he writes 80% less of the code than computer science person. Instead of doing things “the supposed way” he challenges dogmas and finds different approach.

I know some IT people, they talk bullshit. I can not stand some of them. You meet such a geek and he will tell you how exciting that piece of code is. I know some business people, they are right to the core. How to do it the most efficient and easiest way, how to do less. Well it saves money doesn’t it? They will tell you how exiting is that they manage to set-up e-shop in a few days, how exciting is the outcome and how much they saved that way.

What is the fundamental difference? Business people even though they may not know the Pareto principle they employ it and behave by it naturally. That is that 20% of causes results in 80% of effects roughly.  So business educated developers focus on those 20% of functionality to develop which provides the highest 80% value. Computer science educated developers focus on 100% and they waste 80% of their attention to unimportant bullshit providing just 20% of value.

The drawback? You never get 100% from a business educated developer. The benefit? You get what will fulfill most of your needs, costs less and it is highly manageable in the future.

Did you get it? Big advice to all computer science developers: Your work will suck unless you focus on those 20% providing 80% of outcome. And advice for you? Why do you need 100% anyway. I am sure you will be much better off with a business educated web developer than with a computer science developer, because they can provide that cumulative magic.

Now when I told you golden rule of business educated developers, I am going to kill you :).

I am happy business minded web developer and if you need agile web development you can still hire me.

Last few weeks I am doing a lot of programming and I am getting sick of constantly writing array(…) to make an array. This is the data type which I use probably the most. From database result sets to function parameters. And you have to write this array word every time again and again. Boring and waste of time and keystrokes.

What PHP needs? It needs simple way to define an array - [like, this, way]. Simple squared brackets should be enough. It is done similarly in Ruby and despite I stopped using it, this is the think I really miss.

Last few weeks I have several doubts about my future prospects. I like my job, web design gave me freedom during my university studies, but now I feel reluctant to continue and even simple small development task causes me a severe pain. Taking Clever Leap meaning into account, I should better make the leap and reinvent the web so I do not need to code it or do something different. Surprisingly enough even with a great publishing system, the bar just get higher and more and more difficult projects are reaching to me instead of making money doing those simple ones fast and efficiently with existing tools. No. Simple web sites with CMS and even e-shops are available for free now and anybody can do them. This way only high quality, hard to do staff seems to be the only thing left in the web design industry. Or is it just my progression into wrong field? Or my blindness to see new opportunities? I am not an IT person.

School was always my refuge. While others drop from the university to start-up their companies I was turning to the university to be able to work on that mine. It is not possible to work on your own. Freelancing and outsourcing to clients from whom 90% you didn’t meet in person, without going out into real world, between real people and have real fun, is extremely lonely job otherwise. School was a refuge from this environment full of abstract objects and models. I really enjoyed my studies and took out the most I could.

In my stupidity that perfect balanced life style will continue I joined PhD program, just to my surprise to find out later that it is completely different. You don’t get as much interaction doing PhD. It is very individualistic work, same as freelancing is. Now I found myself going from one empty room to another empty office. Most of the last weeks instead of working I am trying to fill the day by traveling around, attending lectures which interest me and trying to do some crazy things which I never did before (like handing out flyers to people to promote language school, just for the sake of experiencing it).

Self-diagnosis? Cabin-fever and burn-out. Terrible.

It would be all perfect if PhD would be more active. However this is difficult as most of the people on the faculty consider this just a warm seat, while others are just finishing their lives in there. But I do not want to die with them! I am young and I want to live and living doesn’t mean sitting in the office “doing nothing”. Don’t blame me, I know I am supposed to do research :). I like university environment very much. This is where Ideas should happen and sprout. Where new things should be developed. I considered this to be an active role. But nothing is happening. It’s quiet. It’s dead. Or I didn’t get it, yet.

And it seems, that it’s just me who wants to bother. I don’t care about the destination, getting paper and getting it the easy way does not fulfill me. The journey and the experience does.

Solution? Change of the environment always helps. Maybe even employment for some time. I start writing copy for Ideacamp - a networking club which I want to set-up. But overall, I don’t know what to do, and I feel lost as never before in my life. Someone could start research about postgraduation syndrome. You could easily call it by my name.

The most important thing is to start doing something. Immediatelly. Something local, with real people in real world. I have to find my future direction. I’ve learned my voice, now I have to use it.

Economical growth doesn’t always transfer into social or human growth. Excellent talk from Geoff Mulgan with notion of social entrepreneurship.

One more time I am angry on a bank. I opened Passport account last year with HSBC UK. It was perfect as the account would automatically close after one year if I will not decide to prolong it. Good opt-in feature. But now HSBC decided to change the contract, so my account will automatically prolong until I decide to close it. They changed their services from opt-in to opt-out and locked me inside.

Now staying in Slovakia I have difficulty to close the account. Not to mention that there is £6 monthly charge.

HSBC sucks. Never open a bank account with this bank. Loyds TSB will give you current account free of charge.

I am looking forward to future encounters with banks cheating on me. This will never stop. I wish you fast death greedy banking institutions. Good luck financial crisis, you are doing good job hitting the right ones.

If you study abroad or work abroad and travel back to your home town regularly you may observe something interesting. People are very different. I do not mean it just culturally, but rather that they have different needs and wants and different perception of life, success and everything.

I study in Brno and travel regularly home to north east slovakia. During my studies I spent a lot of time studying abroad. Always when I came back to Brno I experienced some kind of culture shock. Even now when I go home from my university town, I experience slight culture shock.

By living in the new environment you are alienating yourself from that old one. Than when you come back you suddenly miss the new environment to which you have adapted. People you know lived through different experiences than you did over the year you were abroad.

When I go home to north east slovakia I have to become suddenly used to jealous gossips about neighbors in the village, and reality TV shows which are popular in Slovakia and everybody is talking about while I haven’t seen any episode and I am not even eager to waste time watching it. On the other-side suddenly nobody knows what The Apprentice is. It seems like there is nothing to talk about. Even though you speak the language it is hard to find common language and common topic to speak about.

People tend to search like minded people. I can tell that in the cities people tend to be more open-minded than in the villages. There is also huge difference between different working environments. Universities, international corporations or local companies each have distinct cultural traits.

So this way I start to think about “social clusters”. In today’s mobilised world people can move to locations which will best fulfill their personality and give them opportunities for future development. Such a clusters of certain mindsets can boost productivity. This however creates big cultural differences not just between countries but even between regions in the same country.

Ok enough. Too much thinking. But what I am curious to find out are the answer to few questions. Is it better to adapt yourself to the environment in which you are? Or to move to the environment which best fits your personality? Is it wrong to have a differed mindset than most people in the environment you are currently in?

Time for more thinking