Likes & Launch
Month
Peter Thiel Opens Application Period for “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowship - MarketWatch
Encourage any entrepreneurs you know under 20 to apply. I’m a Thiel Fellows mentor and the impact these fellows will have is incredible!
You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make.
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.
”—Steve Jobs (via victura)If you would’ve asked me 5 weeks ago the importance of a Boolean variable, the reason to install rvm or even what MVC is - I would’ve assumed you were speaking a foreign language. And you were. Thanks to an incredible instructor, classmates, mentors and more, I now understand the fundamentals of Ruby. I’ve even started building! (a task that seemed extremely daunting a month ago).
I’m proud to say that on a flight from Chicago to LA on Thursday I installed the latest version of rails and ruby, built a few business cases and built my first functioning app. I’ll be spending the next two weeks making it pretty and will hopefully have it good to go by Thanksgiving. Programming is awesome. I have a long way to go but having the confidence to start is well worth the classes alone.
We’re encouraged to write about what we learn each week. This is being posted in week 5 but the lessons still apply.
I felt like a marketing kid in a candy store when I learned about rails g Mailer. Rails makes it very simple to send emails for user actions. At gtrot we’ve found email as a great communication tool that when use effectively can drive a lot of engagement. I’m excited I now hold the keys to put this into my CA project.
Week 4 was also the start of building our own Airline website. From the looks of the current UX on most airline sites this seemed like a big challenge. We had to think about airports, flights, customers, and making reservations. By writing out our user cases first it made the problem much more approachable. Learning about belongs_to and has_many relational databases also helped. Within one 10 lab we built all the relational databases and had a working prototype. I think we should send our notes to United as inspiration for a simpler booking process.
Code Academy continues- more blogs soon.