Recent experiments

[caption id=”attachment_714” align=”alignright” width=”240”] Experiments are cool![/caption] I’ve always been curious about the world around me. And now thanks to reading a few great books I understand that I can easily do experiments on the world around me to learn where I can push the boundaries to learn new things! Framing these things as experiments is a powerful mind hack: If an experiment fails, that’s ok! It was just an experiment. Keep that in mind the next time you find yourself pausing before trying something new or scary. Let’s take a look at what I’ve been up to!

Successful experiments

• Stoic Emails -- Every weekday I send out stoic quotes to an email list. It is a small list, but I am learning everyday
• Redacted Tweets -- This twitter bot that I wrote is a source of great amusement to many people. That makes me very happy.
• Nose Randomize -- Ok, this was not an experiment per-se, but I did go out on a limb and do a lot of new things. This my biggest open source project. It was being pip installed a few hundred times a month at one point.

Less-than-successful experiments

Of course, with the good comes the “bad”. These were failures, but only in the sense that I’m not driving a Ferrari now. :) Each of these were a learning experience, and I’m glad I did them.

• Developer Mastermind -- As a part of my resolve to take action faster, I put together an ad campaign and a survey in an attempt to form a Developer oriented Mastermind. 4 people did give me their email addresses, but my pitch was not very compelling. No one wanted to move forward with the mastermind.
• Rate my resume -- I set very high expectations for myself with this project. And that is the only reason I’m listing it as a “less-than-successful” experiment. From scratch I designed and created a tool to help job hunters find the perfect job. Ambitious? Absolutely. Perfect? Not even close. Educational? In every way possible.

Experiments I’m still trying to figure out

Sometimes I’ll have something that isn’t a success but also isn’t a failure. Maybe it changes over time, sometimes something completely unexpected pops up. Here’s a selection of things that have me scratching my head.

• Developer Interviews -- This is a small ebook that I wrote about to help developers with interviews. The book isn’t intended to be a replacement for some other books out there (particularly the ones about interviewing puzzles), but rather as a soft-skills approach to interviewing that so many developers seem to be missing. It hasn’t exactly sold a million copies, but I think that might be because my marketing of it was pretty weak.
• Setting and tracking goals – Every week I sit down and review my week and try to determine if I’m getting closer to my goals. I have evolved the way I do this over the last few months, and I have achieved several goals. But… I keep feeling I could be doing this differently/better. Overall I think this is a success, but I also think this time next year I’ll be doing it very differently than I am now.
• Anything to do with sales – Sales are how businesses make money. I obviously need to do more work on this one. :)
• Starting a business – Stay tuned on this one, there’s more coming. ;)

The future!

More experiments to come! The only true failure in my mind is to quit. Even with failures, I still learn lots and have lots of fun. So I predict that my experiments in the future will be more ambitious, and the source of many more blog posts.