Ben’s Five Keys to Creating a Successful Side Project

I enjoyed this article by Ben Halpern, plus all the associated discussion.  I always find myself trying to hold on to a project that just sort of slips away as my passions change and new work crops up, both personal and professional.  You can dig around in this blog to find examples where I couldn't stick to my ideas for a Unity app and more (where I drifted away from geocaching for instance, although you can't quite grasp how much I shifted toward playing Ingress).

My favorite advice is constraints.  I've often found that to be the best way to keep myself engaged.  Knowing exactly who's involved (just me?), and a firm, but flexible, deadline (yep, both), and what I'm willing to spend personally, and what my expectations are...and they better be tight, manageable, and focused.  As soon as the constraints are loosened and I think "maybe this is something that should be bigger" it goes all cattywampus and drifts away.  I was impressed at Minndemo 25 with the devs who had spent three years working on a pet project.  That's amazing focus, particularly as they have working software to demo after that time for a crowd of 600+  Seems like a good goal - demo at Minnedemo 28 for instance - but that's a lot of pressure.

https://dev.to/ben/bens-five-keys-to-creating-a-successful-side-project

Minnedemo 25

I went to Minndemo with Erik the Hairy Swede last week.  There was a good selection of presentations packed into about an hour.  Damn is that event ever busy now.  Despite the 600+ people crowded into The Minneapolis Depot, I still managed to bump into Jen the contractor placement rep I've known for a long time.  She switched firms recently, so it was nice to bump into her. I preferred her understanding of my contractor needs over her replacement.

TroutSpotr was pretty wild.  It was a pet project to overlay public lands (in Minnesota), roads, and streams, so you could pinpoint where bridges where and where public land access was from the bridge so you could find new places to fish for trout.  He used QGIS and he certainly built something it looks like the DNR might buy off him.  Very funny presentation.

Player's Health was also pretty exceptional.  The developer was trying to create a space parents owned where they could log specific health data for kids in sports so that it could be shared with teams/coaches they invited in.  It would then serve as a place for coaches to capture injuries and receive doctor signoff and then future coaches could see a history of injuries for the purposes of knowing what to watch for.  Reminded me a bit of Concourse that I worked on for my company where lawyers invited other lawyers and individuals into their spaces/matters to share docs and info, but with more concrete form-based interfaces built around aspects of it like injury logging.

Talkative Chef was also interesting - hands free recipe recitation using open source text to voice in the browser.  Clever idea if Alexa/et al don't parallel develop the idea.

Minndemo 23

I went to Minnedemo (#23) downtown on July 14.  It was at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis.  I wasn't so sure I wanted to go because it was closing in on RAGBRAI, but I finally decided I enjoyed the presentations enough I'd make it work.

Presentations included Toursler, which is a cool use of virtual Google-map style functionality to allow tours of high end houses synced to floor plans.  The dev presenting is obviously into the tech as he was already playing around with VR and demo-ed how they'd used a bit of machine intelligence training to get the computer to identify rooms by aspects of the photos (toilet = bathroom) so they could eliminate a lot of the manual tagging. Gave me some ideas I need to explore.

I found Townsourced less interesting.  The point of a local board, such as you find at your coffee shop, would seem to be that it's local.  By allowing individuals to cross post to multiple community boards, that breaks the metaphor (in my opinion).

Genovest is a stock analysis (but not purchasing) tool.  I think the crux of it is visualization meets investing.  There's a lot of math under it as well, but the output seems to give you visualizations you can use to investigate.  This got me to wondering whether there are investment tools/games for kids.  There does appear to be an official app - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-market-game/id702878174?ls=1&mt=8 - although I haven't used it so I don't know whether it does some of the same visualization tech that's part of the newer app experience.

HabitAware is AMAZING.  You can smell the clever idea w/o significant complexity in their application.  They've taught a bracelet to record gestures.  Then, when you repeat that gesture, the bracelet will give you a warning.  Don't like a particular way you gesticulate, you'll get warnings.  More importantly: nail biting, skin picking, hair pulling.  The inventor created it to help his wife who had constantly removed her eyebrows via plucking.  Now she has eyebrows.  

DiviUp - you buy a coupon/deal and you get savings, a charity gets a cut, and the business gets a little more business.  Groupon with a conscience.  It's a good idea, but those sorts of coupon/rebate/deal apps wear me out.

Kinetic Data.  Well...if you understand this diagram you get it.  It simplifies a lot of backend processes with an easy UI.  We considered variations on the same process for some contract handling work I reviewed.  Their reference to Salesforce and LDAP makes this very much a similar architecture.

And the best...Chicken Scoop AI.  These two came out on stage and gave a presentation on training cameras to identify chickens and present charts/data/visualizations on their activity for purposes of tracking the chickens' behavior, eggs, etc.  Very interesting where they pointed to a chicken that was probably dead (yes sad, but interesting from a data tracking perspective).  Here's a slide that gives you a small sense of their humor.

Minnedemo 22

I went to Minnedemo 22 last night at the Depot in downtown Minneapolis.  I tried to have dinner at Zen Box beforehand, but I was looking for food prior to 5:00 p.m., so it was a no go.  I ended up over at the Crooked Pint eating a peanut butter juicy lucy.  Good.  But not as good as the Blue Door (Longfellow) which, I have to say, is my favorite (and Eryn likes their wings; and it's close to guitar lessons) after Chetek, WI.  But that just might be sentiment speaking.

I will admit, I didn't stay for the whole thing.  I got downtown too early, so I was getting squirrely after a few presentations.  I watched Who's Driving, an app for coordinating car pools if you have kids in extracurricular events.  My sentiment was I'm really happy I never have to carpool and even consider using that app. I see the happy people on the app website and think, "They're so happy they're f***ing over their friends."

I watched Twistjam, which involved an Asian guitar player (does his race matter?) sitting on stage not really playing guitar for 7 minutes.  The app is cool, but Mike and Eryn told me you have to enter your own cords which is a pain in the ***.  They're playing with it to see what the limitations are.  It's a Rock Band style guitar-learning app.

Litejot.com, notable for being presented by a U of MN student.  Dude.  Come work for me.

Homi, which I shared with Charlotte because it was created by a Carleton econ alum.  She helped me interview an intern last week and right afterwards I talked to a Carleton intern candidate.  Most of the Carleton folks I've talked to are above average.  Which is strange for a college known for liberal arts skills.  But I've found a good prof or two with real world experience makes all the difference in the world.

And YouAreHear.org.  Well.  I played with that all the way to Izzy's where I had a bourbon izzy on a scoop of Zin chocolate ice cream.  The presenter was particularly funny and joked that he was the only person not to use the word monetized.  More of an art project than anything else.  But fun if you're wandering around downtown and paying enough attention that you're pretty sure you won't get mugged.

Vidcomet and Aurelius.  You're on your own.  Although Aurelius sounds particularly interesting to me as a manager, so I'll be checking it out.

Minnedemo 16

I didn't get to go - it's Eryn's acting class night.  But a reminder to myself to watch the videos out at TECHdotMN:

http://tech.mn/news/2014/02/14/video-minnedemo-16-presentations/

Minnedemo

Friday night I went to Minnedemo with Erik. I've been a couple of times and space is always tight. This time it looked like there might be fewer people in the Intermedia Arts building. However, we straggled a bit getting a last beer, and the next thing we know, the place is full back to the edges of the bleachers in the standing room only area. Looking back over our shoulders at empty space, we wandered back into the entry way where there was a wall projection, assuming Minnedemo would display there. After ten minutes, we realized it just wasn't going to happen.

This was the first time Minndemo had an annex, so we bailed, figuring paying for a few beers was a small price for watching on a screen that was actually displaying something. When we got to the bar, there were about eight to ten other people (more much later)...and an open bar. Comfortable chairs. A sofa if you wanted it. Appetizers. Sake nuts (Developer: "Are they called sake nuts because they're dipped in sake?" Waitress: "Um....no. They just go well with sake."). (Free) Surly Furious and an offer for a sake martini we passed on because of the volume of Surly Furious. And a large screen playing the event that was easy to hear and that you could talk to the developer next to you over without being rude. Best Minnedemo ever.

Here's the whole event, courtesy of Tech.MN, although you have to pay for your own Surly. I thought PedalBrain and MinuteBids were both intriguing.

MinneDemo

On Friday night I went to MinneDemo with Erik and Ming at the Intermedia Arts theater. I'd never been to a MinneDemo before, and if you haven't either the rules are that the presenters have to present on working software, have approximately seven minutes to complete their presentation, and cannot use a PowerPoint slide deck.

In addition, there's tons of networking with developers from around the Twin Cities. We bumped into Alan from work there, a friend of Erik's who used to work at Thomson, a guy from SAS who said I looked familiar (e.g. I look like my brother), Ed Kohler of The Deets (a real pleasure to talk to), Peter who used to work at Findlaw and was at CodeFreeze, and some guy who was sort of dressed as a poor man's ninja with a straw hat. For some reason that last guy focused on Ming, so the rest of us didn't have to deal with him. I'm not sure if he's the reason Ming snuck out later without telling us goodbye.

There was also free Surly. A lot of free Surly. I had the coffee and the Furious. The beer alone makes it the best developer event I've been to in a long time.

The presentations were good, at least the first four I saw. There were so many people at MinneDemo that only about 3/4 of them fit into the little auditorium. Even for the first four I was sitting on the stairs. There was a big screen in the entry way, where Erik and I stayed for the second half so that someone else could get a shot at the seats, but it was a bit fuzzy and impossible to hear. Fortunately, you can see them all at Minnov8. Re-searchr looked particularly interesting, albeit a bit slow. But they were streaming the presentations to the entry area, so it might have been a bit congested.

After the beer and the presentations, Erik and I went out for a late dinner at Fuji Ya Sushi on Lake. When we bellied up to the sushi bar, the place was packed. Two hours later we were completely alone. I hadn't been to Fuji Ya before and I strongly recommend the tuna flight (six pieces) and the tobiko wasabi roll that left little fish eggs all over the place. We were there long enough that the sushi chef prepared us a pineapple/strawberry/chocolate-raspberry sauce dessert as a free treat. Just a great evening.