akrish

Up until now I’ve been writing articles directly into my XML files, but last night I spent a couple hours trying to get an online upload form working. I wrote a xml writer, and a password-protected page on the site. The form on the page takes in the text of my blog post and adds the proper xml tags by just doing some simple string processing.

I’m actually writing this post in that form. It’s kind of a test to see how well that works. I also have some aspirations to allow for more tags (such as images, links and code tags) but I think those will have to be manually entered into the online form. I don’t intend to make the writer search for and interpret those tags.

I’m going to be spending most of today working on the site too. I hope to have all the back-end stuff done by tonight, so I can just focus on writing articles and design.

It’s probably obvious, but I’ve been working on UI design for this site, and I’ve uploaded whatever I’ve done so far, hoping that the site can go live ASAP. I’ll be working on this for pretty much the rest of the day (it’s 10 AM) so hopefully I’ll have some additions to this stylesheet or something new altogether. All I did was create the banner image and mess with some font colors in CSS. Let me know what you think please.

A lot of people seem to have hopes of starting their own company. What could be better than being your own boss, doing exactly what you want, and all while you still have the opportunity to get rich really quickly? It’s really common for engineers to want to start their own companies because they’re really smart and innovative, and because their fields usually allow for a lot of new ideas to proliferate. Maybe I’m just going along with the majority here, but recently I’ve thought a lot about starting something on my own hoping it’ll take off.

In my free time I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and articles about entrepreneurship and I like to think that I’ve learnt a bit about starting my own company. One thing that’s repeatedly discussed is the issue of dropping out of college to start a company. I don’t have any experience on the issue; I haven’t tried to start a company, and I haven’t even gone through much of college. Yet I feel pretty strongly that most kids shouldn’t quit school to start a company. Rather, they should take the time to work on their own projects, prepare themselves for their company, and meet people (some who may become co-founders, angels, or just really good friends).

So what if you have a really cool idea that no one has thought of and time is of the essence? You’re probably the type of person who’ll have other great ideas too, so there’s really no need to build a company around this one. There will always be ideas floating around; it’s no big deal if you don’t graduate in time to build this one. To top it off, Paul Graham, a former entrepreneur and now Venture Capitalist, points out that your idea doesn’t matter much at all (See 7: No idea). Most start-ups change their ideas anyway, so you probably won’t even execute this really cool idea.

One way that a lot of students decide to start their own company is when one of their side projects turns out to be really cool, so they decide they can build a company around it. Say you’ve designed some product, and have a pretty devoted user-base. It’s seems logical to turn it into a full scale company, right? Maybe you can (it depends a lot on the product), but do you actually have so much to do that you (and maybe a few other people) can work on the product for 40 (or more) hours a week? In my experience, I could build any of my college projects in less than a week if I worked full time. This may not be the case for you, but I feel like most college projects can’t be scaled well enough to become a company.

What about experience? It’ll be really hard to start-up a company if you have no experience building production quality stuff. Paul Graham claims that one of the biggest problems with young founders is that “they build stuff that looks like class projects” ( See Minus). Young entrepreneurs have little or no idea what separates robust products from the stuff they’ve built for school ( not to insult anyone, but it takes some experience to figure it out). But there is a solution here: get some experience. Get internship positions early on and see what having a real job is like. They’re not really the same as career-jobs, but it’s close, and you’ll start to understand what it takes to build production-level stuff. Without at least some experience under the belt, it’ll probably be hard to start your on company.

I realize that this article is really negative, but I do feel that kids shouldn’t give up their education without having some idea about what they’re getting into. Just having a college degree makes it so much easier to get a job, so you really need to decide if starting a company is that important to you? And there definitely are a kids out there who do make it big and never end up needing their college degree (Bill Gates for example), but I’m sure there are at least as many kids whose companies don’t make it.

I’m not really trying to be discouraging, but I’ve picked up most of what I wrote from blogs and articles that I’ve read (Paul Graham’s site is a great one) and I’ve added some of my own thoughts. And there are plenty of reasons to start a company when you’re young (for example, you don’t need to support anyone, you can work really long hours, and you can live really cheaply). If you still want to try it, you should, and I wish you all the best.

Yesterday, I had my first encounter with songwriting and it has given me some new appreciation for the music I listen to. On one hand it wasn’t that difficult for us (I was working with a friend) to come up with some guitar and drum riffs or even some vocal lines, but it was pretty tough combining the different parts so that the end result actually sounds good. It got me thinking about some professional bands (or even some of the composers for orchestra) and how they do a really good job of arranging their different so that each line compliments the others.

My friend (let’s call him Jason) and I have had this dream of starting a band since around our junior year of high school. We even had a couple of practices our senior year and played a couple of Beatles songs for that year’s Homecoming, but we’ve never really tried to write anything before, so it was exciting to finally give it a shot and actually come up with something.

I don’t know much about how other people write songs (except for what I’ve read in some forums) but we started out by coming up with an instrumental part and then trying to add a vocal part to it. Ultimately this didn’t work out, because it turned out to be a lot harder for us to shape lyrics and melody around the instrumental parts. We did come up with some cool riffs that we may end up using later, but we couldn’t find a way to meld our ides into a coherent song. Finally, we scrapped this approach and decided to start afresh.

This time, we focused on the vocals first, coming up with some pretty sweet lyrics and melody for a verse and chorus. Writing lyrics was tough, but Jason thought of a catchy melody that we just hummed while thinking of guitar and drum parts. I came up with a simple chord progression to play under the melody and after some tweaking, it started to sound ok. Jason incorporated a drum part and everything came together into a pretty mediocre song (honestly…). It wasn’t fantastic, but it was definitely a step in the right direction, and for just a couple hours of work, I’d say we did a pretty good job.

Anyway, somethings that I learnt from the yesterday are: keep it simple, go with whatever works, and be patient. I realized that the reason we couldn’t line up vocals with instrumental parts in our first attempt was because our instrumental parts were way to complicated. I know it isn’t fun to play boring riffs, but it makes songwriting a heck of a lot easier.

Go with whatever works means that if you can come up with lyrics, write lyrics. If you’re creative on the guitar, write guitar licks. But keep in mind that at some point you’re going to need to do the harder stuff and that the end result is a layered song in which all the parts need to be good. Nobody listens to songs that have insanely cool guitar work if the vocals suck. If you want to write good songs, the way everything comes together is all that matters, but at the same time, when you’re starting out keep track of everything you come up with, and do the things that are easiest for you.

Finally, be patient. Not that I have any experience to be saying this, but good things take time. I’m pretty sure pro musicians can’t write a good song in an hour. I was really surprised with how much Jason and I did yesterday, and I’m sure we’ll have practices where we make no progress, but if we keep at it, eventually we’ll come up with something good. Along these lines, remember that it should be fun. If I’m stressed out, it’s a lot harder for me to be creative.

Again, I have barely any experience with this stuff, and this is just what I picked up from a couple hours of playing yesterday. If you disagree, feel free to let me know.

Every so often, I’ll get a phone call from one of my friends inviting me to come over and watch “the game.” If I’m not terribly busy, usually I’ll comply, not because I enjoy watching sports, but because I enjoy hanging out with my buddies. Recently, I only watch sports when I’m with my friends, in which case I view it as doing something with my friends rather than just killing time watching TV. So when I do watch sports, I don’t get very emotional about the game and I don’t really care about the outcome. That team X wins this championship really has no effect on my life, so why do I really care?

Almost all of my friends have a completely different take on spectator sports. They have favorite teams and favorite players, and are willing to defend their favorites from any attack. I just don’t understand where this fierce loyalty comes from. What have these players and teams done that merits your support? They haven’t protected and cared for you like your family, friends, and maybe even politicians or soldiers. They typically aren’t even people who you’ve met and found warm and friendly. They’re pretty much complete strangers who’ve miraculously earned your unconditional support. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.

What’s worse, is that people are (for some reason that I can’t grasp) emotionally attached to their teams and their moods change as their teams win and lose. I was with my friends watching when the L.A. Lakers lost in the playoffs of the NBA championship earlier this year. A lot of them are Lakers fans and they became pretty depressed for the rest of the day. It was really strange to see how my friends could get so affected by something that (in my view) meant nothing to them. However, there is the flip side, where my friends will be excited and energetic when their team wins, which is definitely a postive of watching sports. But I don’t even understand how someone can feel so close to people and things that they’ve never actually seen in person.

At any rate, I’ve never been that loyal to any particular team. I’ve never considered myself a devoted fan to any franchise or club. I’ve come across athletes that I enjoy watching but it’s mostly because they’re talented or fun to watch (i.e Rafael Nadal). When I watch sports, I enjoy the competitive atmosphere and the high level of talent in the players. I don’t really care who wins or loses, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good game.

When I was playing soccer competitively, I used to love watching televised soccer games. This wasn’t because I felt attached to any team (I would watch pretty much any game shown on TV regardless of who was playing or even what language it was in) but because I felt like I could actually learn about the game and become a better soccer player myself. To some extent I think this actually worked. I found myself trying to play like the athletes that I’d seen on TV, and in some aspects my soccer game improved. This made watching sports not solely about entertainment but also about self-improvement and gave me a motivation to watch.

I find it ironic that among my friends, I’m one of the more athletic ones, but one of the least interested in watching sports. I find it really strange how some of my friends will put off playing basketball until after the games over, when I’d much rather be playing basketball than watching other people play basketball. When I do watch sports, It’s usually not entirely for the entertainment, but also for the social experience or educational experience that comes with it. Either way, I’d much rather be doing something than watching other people do it for me.

Added: July 23, 2007: Prashant wrote a response to this article. Read it here