

What to do when you are waiting - luccastera
http://www.businesspundit.com/50226711/preentrepreneurship_what_to_do_when_you_are_waiting.php

======
nostrademons
I did some of these, wish I'd done some of the others, and have one more to
add:

12\. Hone your technical skills, particularly in the area you hope to be
working in.

When I joined my employer, I figured I'd make sure I gave them 2 years of
solid work, then I'd start doing side-projects and if it looked like one of
them had promise, I'd quit and pursue it. So I purposely did my best to work
on absolutely commercially useless stuff for the first year. I learned a whole
lot about compilers, a whole lot about type systems and purely functional data
structures, a whole lot about Haskell and Scheme, but very little about
dynamic languages or the libraries available for them. I got some practical
knowledge from my job, but it turned out to be less transferable than I'd
hoped for.

As a result, when a friend came knocking with "Hey, you wanna start a startup"
after only a year, I was far less familiar with the technology we'd be using
than I would've liked. I was pretty fluent in two webapp technologies (PHP and
JSF) that I knew I _didn't_ want to use, but didn't have much practical
experience in Rails or the Python frameworks that I _did_ want to use. And
knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too much
good when you just want to use one.

~~~
far33d
>And knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too
much good when you just want to use one.

Knowing that stuff is always useful.

