This is a great life story. I had similar beginnings as a curious child but no PC Magazine Product of the Year! I'm sure you'll find many people here who also started curious and with no friends who cared or had even seen a computer.
Is there an equivalent to that today? As soon as a cool technology appears, there are startups selling something within a few weeks. What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Well, hitting the first home run took about a decade full of base hits and more than a few strike-outs on the way to figuring out what I needed to know to do a tech startup well.
> What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Over the last decade I've spent increasing pro bono time trying to 'pay it forward' talking to classes and groups of erstwhile entrepreneurs, so I've heard versions of that question a LOT. It actually took me a couple years before I realized there is no 'right' answer because the right thing for each person differs depending their unique personality, skills, interests, context and life journey.
The most helpful thing I can share isn't a guess about which target you should aim for but rather some advice about how to approach your journey. First, I hope you want to be a tech entrepreneur because that's the only thing I know about. I have no idea what skills will be in demand to get a high-paying, secure job or how to get promoted. I had to become an entrepreneur because I was terrible at being an employee.
I never aimed for my guess at what would be "hot" next and I doubt my guess would be right anyway. Every time I found success it was by starting with a real problem some customer actually had. Initially that customer was me or a friend but it doesn't matter. It just has to be a serious enough problem that motivated customers are actively looking for new and better solutions than what exists. Then figure out a way to solve their problem better enough that they'll actually buy it. It doesn't have to be perfect in every way, just better enough in most ways and perfect in at least one way.
In fact, some of my best products became hits by cleverly solving one part of a problem SUPER well, but only did so at the cost of some odd downsides in other areas. Here's a generic example of the pattern that worked: my friends and I all desperately wanted a Zig-Zag Widget but good ones were stupid expensive and the ones ordinary schmoes like us could afford Zigged and Zagged like shit. But while we were bitching about this sorry-ass state of affairs over pizza and beer one night we theory-crafted how it might be possible to make a Zig-Only Widget ordinary mortals could afford. The dumb idea was by not Zagging at all, it just might be able to Zig even better than the best. Since we all had no Zig or Zag, that seemed like a trade-off we might be pretty okay with. Turns out other people were too... especially after we worked on adding some 'pseudo-Zag' features that worked around the worst parts of not Zagging. And that's how we came up with the world's best Zig (but no Zag) and sold it at 1/4th the price of even a half-assed Zig-Zag. Not really new technology, just a very clever mixture of the exact right old tech with a little new stuff, some clever UX innovations and cool workflow integrations. Blam! First Product of the Year.
If prototyping dozens of different iterations and trying each one out with real, live problem-having customers and listening empathetically for hours to their constant complaints, ridiculous demands and occasional awesome suggestions sounds like fun, then you may have found your calling. If you just want to write great code for a good paycheck and be left in peace, then, my friend, run the other way. :-) It's ironic because I got into making products because I loved programming but after the first few years, I wasn't writing much code anymore. It was invaluable that I'd learned the business by starting as a self-taught, down-to-the-metal, assembly language, real-time graphics programmer because I was able to identify and hire programmers far more skilled than I'd ever been but after the first million in revenue and 20th employee I personally spent more time writing or reviewing ad copy and legal contracts than code. But that's also invaluable because as the company grew and various fires flared up in every part of our business, I got pretty damn good at doing marketing, sales, PR, finance and even legal stuff myself when necessary. And all that was the best prep ever for being able to run the place when we hit a hundred million in sales and hundreds of employees.
I used to hate the constant looming threat of existential doom always hovering over our tiny startup. Then one day I finally understood that the constant stream of scary new challenges were there to force me to keep growing and learning new skills. not only survive, but to level up and feel the satisfaction of summitting ever higher peaks. I hope you'll find the same on your journey. The best part is now that I'm retired, I'm back to programming in 8-bit assembler and 4K of RAM, except now I have a rather expansive collection with every model Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and Amstrad ever sold. :-)
Roku 4K with HDR10 and Dolby Vision is going for $53 on Amazon. A tough sell for Apple, to say the least. I use Roku for Apple TV (the streaming service) and works great.
I partially agree. Coding is not the hardest part for a large portion of indie games. You can in theory build an AI-coded game that sells well if you have the right art and gameplay.
But many top games have complex engines and online services that require technical mastery beyond the current AI capabilities. For those genres, engineering is a huge barrier of entry.
For a not so extreme example, you won't vibe code Cyberpunk 2077 while just taking care of art and gameplay ideas. Gosh, humans could barely pull that one off!
I don't know why colleges get so much hate. My college wasn't a party school and yet I remember that time in my life very fondly. I couldn't have achieved what I did without college.
This comment has me confused. The first sentence reinforces my point, the second one contradicts it (and isn't true in my experience, many companies want a degree, any degree). Say more?
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say, especially after your reply.
Here's what I am saying: most top companies require degrees but will only take a degree from a select list of colleges, while government jobs that require degrees will accept a degree from any college.
If Safari worked in all major OSs like Chrome, Brave and Firefox, I could consider that. I own a Mac but didn't switch to Safari because I use multiple OSs for my work.
I suspect that was a legacy from when they planned for iOS not supporting any third-party apps. If they want to force devs to target mobile Safari, the least they can do was to provide the desktop version on Windows.
Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.
That shouldn't have been a problem given that AI can fully replace talent. The whole company should in theory only have needed a dream and an Anthropic subscription.
I'd have preferred 1 good answer to 9 speculative and poorly thought out answers.
I think AI is reshaping the industry but it's still far from the promised benefits. But the Silicon Valley hype machine isn't happy with "reshaping" because that's not enough to attract trillions. It needs to be "redefining the meaning of being a human" and garbage like that.
The reason we're not seeing a lot of good software is because the current AI tech can't (yet?) deliver that by itself as advertised.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
This is it exactly! I wrote this back in 2019 on my "Back To The Floppy" post[1]:
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.
It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.
That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible.
Is there an equivalent to that today? As soon as a cool technology appears, there are startups selling something within a few weeks. What is the "weird" kid doing today?
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