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@Ixiaus, are you on twitter? Would love to continue reading how you're doing. Your homepage link works as well of course.

Feel free to drop me an email (vp[at]dinhmail.de) when you're traveling to Germany. Beers on me :-)


I'm also intending of following down this path. There are so much things that I want to learn that I neglected to do when I had copious amounts of free time (hint university). I would also like to know how you're handling this.


It sounds easy to do so. Too often however, I find myself reading how-tos and copy-pasting tutorials while building stuff...and forgetting everything after I finished.

I have the feeling that google has significantly changed the way I store things in my head (for the better or worse). Instead of remembering how things are done and why so, I at best save a mental hyperlink to the information or worse, I just rely on google to be available and give me the tutorial/code snippet I need at that very moment (and again forgetting all afterwards).

Being forced to reproduce what you've learned at least once without having google is actually useful (at least for the way my brain works).


Read a book on Zen.

Approach everything with a "beginner's mind". Never blow through a new tutorial cutting and pasting even if you are very experienced in the area. Take your time, learn as a beginner, but leverage your experience to instantly jump from beginner to expert once you have the necessary domain knowledge.


Is there a specific book you found helpful?


I enjoyed http://www.amazon.ca/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu-Suzuki/dp/08...

A well written combination biography + philosophy book on Zen.


My solution is to make my first project in a language too complicated to be able to search around and find code snippets to incorporate. That's not to say I don't spend a ton of time searching around for tutorials or things like that, it's just that most of the things I find are at best tangentially related to what I'm doing, and just copy/pasting isn't enough to actually help me: I need to adapt what I find.

When I do this, I find I get a better understanding of things faster and also retain it for a lot longer.


Then find out why these snippets work better than you're doing.

Favor books over the web. Books generally have better exposition.


The trick is to not use the How-Tos.

Build something you actually care about. You can refer to the tutorials to get the basic skeleton up, but fleshing out the details is where you'll learn and retain.


Ok, seems like I'm the only one with googlelitis.


Here's haystack.com couple of years back: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://haystack.com

I wonder how much they paid for the domain?



Looks like that hasn't been active for a long time: http://twitter.com/haystackmusic


"More than half of fliers report some level of anxiety before boarding a plane, and 5% of the population refuses to fly at all."

Where does this data come from?


...even if you only weight 80 pounds.


I've always wanted to weight -40 pounds; where do I sign up?


You might be interested in Tony's startup2startup talk: http://startup2startup.com/2009/03/27/tony-hsieh-zappos-in-t...


It might just be a mistake on apple's side. They have and will probably continue to revoke apps which have previously been accepted to the App Store.


I doubt it's a mistake. The fact the BBC and Wired have reported this so quickly to me indicates the hand of Apple PR, slowly working to turn the tide of negative App Store stories.


... Or the hand of Spotify PR working to try and make it really hard for Apple to remove their app.


even with as little confidence in apple that I have, there is no way this is a mistake, its a high profile case and an application that apple have no doubt had their eyes on for a while


I wonder how they measure happiness in those trials. Is there some kind of 'Happy Unit' metric to measure happiness?


They probably used the distance-from-lip-edge-to-ear metric.


I wonder who one feels like as a CEO if customers wish you so much well (assuming the people at Scribd actually read things like this).


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