I attended this year’s Startup School - and all eight of the talks were really awesome. I got to hang out with a ton of people who had either already started their companies, or people that were looking to do so. The energy and the buzz was fantastic. Most importantly, however, I got to see three of my heroes -

Paul Graham - talking about the idea of being a benevolent startup.

Jeff Bezos - talking about Amazon Web Services as a way forward for startups.

Peter Norvig - talking about extracting data from the web, and leveraging it in startups.

I’m a book lover - I own nearly a thousand books now, and I even read many of them. I think that since there’s just so much to do and learn, and so little time, books are a fantastic way to know about things we might never get a chance to actually experience. Television can also be educational but I dislike it because it takes too much time to get through things - you can read at a much faster pace.

However, if there are times when you’re sitting in a train while commuting, or just driving to some place, podcasts can be absolutely fantastic. I love that the Economist has audio editions of their magazine (absolutely true to the printed form, and very high quality, btw). I haven’t missed an issue for nearly a whole year.

I want to share another great podcast resource - from The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar series at Stanford. I’m hugely thankful to my good friend Adrian Wible for telling me about this and his persistence in asking me to listen to them. Almost each and every one of them is like listening to a precis of some really important and interesting business book. Most are by very successful entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists, or professors from Stanford. Brilliant material.

They’re also available from iTunes; and I highly recommend them.

I overheard an amusing comment in my team-room the other day, I think it might have been Kris Kemper who said it - “Anyone who knows Ruby On Rails has a half-done personal project that’s going nowhere”. How true. I have at-least three.

The thing is, in my mind I’m always envisioning these grand cathedrals, and even when I do start work on any one of them, I never seem to quite finish them. Or I don’t complete everything properly (or quite enough to be production-ready), and the application is never quite done.

I think it has to do with a lack of focus. I find myself thrashing between the hundreds of things that interest me, and I end up with a ton of unfinished work. I’m very much into lean software methods, and I know that all I’m doing by operating this way is creating a lot of inventory. I seem to be able to use lean and other workflow management techniques at work, but in the world of my personal projects, I seem to be at a loss.

Sometimes, it has to do with trying to get everything perfect. After all, since it is a personal project, I feel like I don’t have a delivery dead-line, so I can take the time to get it right. Which leads me down the rabbit-hole of perfection and cathedral building, with no real end. Cause there probably ain’t anything called perfection.

When consulting for our various clients, I’ve a clear idea in my mind about the compromises and trade-offs needed between design, architecture, refactoring, and delivery. And I aggressively do whatever might be needed to prod the folks along (be they developers, or product-owners) to get the thing done and into production. After all, there’s always another iteration coming up, and there’s always a next release.

So why the heck can’t I seem to do the same thing when I’m working on a nights-and-weekends project?