Build Your Own Web Application: Education

Untitled, Haden Nicholl, 2007

This is part of a short series I’m putting together about building your own web application/product.  This is for the average person who gets an idea, and then wants/needs to act on it.   Mark Suster has an great series on his blog about what he looks for, from a VC’s perspective, in an entrepreneur.  I encourage you to read all of it.  But this is a more practical take.  These posts will concentrate on the process of going from idea to live product, from the perspective of a non-techie.  The four categories I’m currently centering on are education, experimentation, team building and patience.  These will be written over time and I’m allowing myself the right to change them at will.  (I’ve already changed waiting to patience.)

So once an idea erupts from within,  either in your dreams or while conscious, how does one go about building it?  I’ve grown up on some form or another of the Internet.  Back in the day my family went from GEnie, to Prodigy, to AOL, and finally to the browser thanks to Netscape, opening us to a world with Yahoo and everything else.  I would say for most people with an idea, user interface intuition is already present.  You know roughly how you want your application to look and function.  But technical understanding (nuts and bolts) is usually lacking.  Before I started DoDont I didn’t know the difference between API or Ajax.  Many people still don’t know the difference, which is fine, but in this field you have to be able to at least dip your toe in the deep pool of technological jargon if you are at all serious.  So I began a self-taught online course primarily utilizing two separate applications.  The first was Google’s Reader and the second was Twitter.

Utilizing RSS feeds, Reader pulls in content from web pages and blogs, so you don’t have to go to multiple sites to see content you deem important.  (See the icon next to “Subscribe To Our Blog”?  That icon is your key to any site having a feed option.) So I started by joining a core set of tech blogs.  Then I started aggressively following links the tech blogs mentioned, and I followed that new blog as well.  This gave me a massive amount of tech information to analyze, cross reference, and digest.  As a result Reader has become my morning paper.  I read or skim well over a hundred articles almost everyday.

Reader has folders and tags.  I have three main folders: Art, Architecture (which is also design) and Tech (which I call My Face).  The folders contain the blogs I follow.  The tags are how I categorize the blog articles I find useful.  If I find something interesting I tag it, and then that tag forms its own tag ‘folder’.  As my information gathering progressed, I quickly realized that I was over zealous and oversubscribed.  I was reading way too many blogs and websites.  Many were redundant.  Some were catty and abhorrently subjective.  I had to widdle it all down.  The cutting actually became rather cathartic and enlightening.  I realized that I’m in control.  If someone is writing nonsense…they get cut.  If I find a new blog that I like, I add it.  It raises the bar for quality.  To this day I am always playing with my feed preferences.  This isn’t TV or even email.  Here you’re in charge of what you see.  It feels perfect.

My Twitter entrance was a bit slower.  When I started reading tech blogs, Twitter was written about to death.  Still I wasn’t able to find value until I found @vctips.  This was before lists.  @vctips follows a handful of VCs who are active in the tech world.  So I followed all of them, and from there I curated who I followed more or less identically to my Reader curation. Some people claim  Twitter killed RSS, which powers Reader.  I find this silly.  I read Twitter on my phone and do Reader on my desktop.  When a person I follow links to a blog I read, I immediately go back to the Twitter stream.  I will read that later.  That is not what Twitter is about for for me.  Twitter is a place where the people I follow give me new information.

I learned about APIs and Ajax.  The biggest thing I learned had to do with the tech community.  I was and still am blow away by the resources available to any entrepreneur, enthusiasts, and industry insider.  Regardless of motivation, people in the tech industry are willing to educate each other.  This includes open-source, blogging, lecturing, and putting everything of value on the web.  Want to know what was said at that conference that was $500?  Well, save some money, wait a bit, and it’s up on the web.   This openness is a smack in the face to my previous field, fine art, which is incestuous and highly secretive.  I’d like to write more about the culture of continuing education present in the tech industry, but that is another blog post in and of itself.  Bottom line is there are a wide variety of resources available.  You just need to engage.

My final point is both obvious and difficult; asking questions when you don’t know something.  This is one of the most important skills out there.  But the fact is, asking a question about something an entire room knows intimately can make you feel, well…stupid.  And you can’t always pull out your phone and look up something if you’re in the middle of a long conversation.  So ask.  Just ask.  A few years ago I was in job training for a position in the mental health field that involved working with troubled teens.  The word cathartic came up.  My new colleagues were psychology majors, recent masters in social work graduates, and career mental health professionals.  I was new to the field.  Everyone kept mentioning cathartic, but I couldn’t contextualize it.  This was week one of a new job.  I didn’t know anybody and my learning curve was definitely steep. We were all sitting in a circle, and cathartic this and cathartic that.  No one was able to have a conversation without saying that word.  I couldn’t take it.  I had to ask.  I knew everyone else probably knew the word, but I also knew I wouldn’t know what was going on in the conversation if I didn’t speak up soon.  Did I look stupid?  I probably felt more stupid than I actually looked.  But once that kernel of information was transferred I was better able to  participate, not just in that conversation, but in overarching concepts related to the mental health field.  In the tech field with a mountain of tech specific terms, you can’t hesitate.  Just ask.  Otherwise you’ll be behind, uninformed, and less effective.  Remember, this is part of your education.  As with everything, the more you put in the more you’ll get out.

After a few months of this, I had a basic understanding of the tech world.  After two years, I’ve become much more confident.  Once a level of comprehension is achieved your mind can wander towards meditative thinking, where solutions lie dormant.  If your application is trying to solve a problem in a specific industry, you have to sponge up every piece of information related to that industry.  Only then can you think outside the box and find unseen answers.  Education is magnetic because it pulls you to new discoveries.

Thanks for reading,

-brent