The Startup Grind

Just occurred to me that as one so academically inclined, working at a startup is "the grind", and working in a larger corporation just feels like retirement (been there, done that).

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Commercial co-founder: the manager that picks up shit strewn about by rock star subject-matter experts. :)

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All I want right now is a pen, a lot of paper, my maths textbook, and four months. One for housekeeping and three for hobbies.

But it seems more likely that I'll be stuck on the startup grind for a while longer.

:(

Should 18 Year-olds be Trusted to Plan a Life?

TBH, I specifically picked a lib arts degree (2001-2005) because I wanted four years to "figure out what to do," it was a funded gig, so I treated it as a first (and very cushy) job. I spent the first year in the basement of the arts building with an electric guitar, and the second year interviewing professors about why they did what they did. By the end of the second year, it was quite clear that we all had different interests, and I considered just dropping out and joining the workforce - but this was a good "gig," so I finished up the final two years and took the paper.
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My plan when I went to college was to stay away from Malaysia until the end of college for cultural anthropological reasons (I wanted to study Americans in immersion), before returning to Malaysia to plan next steps from the same environment where I had decided to go to college  (to minimise bias, in decision making). During my final two years of school, I decided to seek work in Malaysia, because I felt that I did not under stand Malaysia's political and economic environment. So I came back and ended up spending a coupla years in a government think tank, in a consulting firm, and in a bank. I had also intentionally avoided all commercial studies during college, because I had in mind that the best place to study commerce would be in the workforce.
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The entire period of study from 2001 to 2007 was very satisfying. Then I decided that life was too easy, and that I should learn about small companies. I also wanted to pursue graduate studies without scholarship or payments, so I used the startup/new ventures environment for this in 2007-2012. It was pretty messy, but it only got messier after that, because I'm dedicating 2013-2022 to the game of making money (even though I find it often, incredibly boring compared to reading math). After talking to many people who are "looking to leave their corporate jobs to work in startups," I feel that over 15 years, I've kinda gone the other way, from being more academic to being more corporate. :)
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Life is fun. It gets made up along the way.

The End of the SCRUD Kiddy

(Preliminary musings on an upcoming crunch, which will penalise developers at large.)

The transistor, a simple device, enabled the microprocessor and the ubiquity of electronic computers. The arrival of these in turn heralded the arrival of wide area networks until their densities resulted in the fabric of electronic data transfers over Internet protocol. This fabric, or landscape, or space was insecure. Much data came within the grasp of many individuals, of various skill levels. It didn't take much effort for anyone to acquire a few popular patterns of electronic instruction... and to blindly deploy these towards the loosening of data. Some called these exploiters, "script kiddies."

That cycle of events, brought great liquidity to the global interpersonal communications. The subset of these which was the global financial system, also, experienced a similar opening of access levels. Cash, came within the grasps of many individuals, of various skill levels. It didn't take much effort for anyone to acquire a few popular patterns of software development... and to blindly deploy these towards the loosening of venture capital. I got out of the shower one Saturday and decided that I could, for the purpose of a short essay, call these exploiters, "SCRUD kiddies."

This isn't the first such cycle for finance - as the telegraph preceded the WAN, the public stock market preceded the venture capital ecosystem of today. History proceeds in what some romantically call a helical fashion.

The security of financial capital is increasingly protected behind the guarantees of enterprise branding, which separates the confederated developer from the developer at large. Eventually, the CRUD app developer who is incapable of administering systems beyond his or her stack, faces eventual extinction. While SCRUD kiddies may rely on PaaS-es to handle scalability, this promises only long-term lock-ins with vendors. The only alternative to this appears to be the establishment of open source PaaS frameworks, or infrastructure stacks that provided standard, it-just-works scalability to the SCRUD kiddies. 

Such automation of infrastructure erodes not the value provided by the SCRUD kiddies, except when the automation of business logic-customisation becomes accessible by non-technicians. Already, the availability of drag-and-drop workflow design tools, and the subsequent application of code generators, provides a compiler front-end which may receive input from non-technical systems designers (read: business users). Should it become possible for this "compiler front-end" to seamlessly target the compiler back-end which is an open-sourced PaaS as described above, then the SCRUD kiddies are rendered redundant. This is the goal of software developers who sell application workflow automation tools at this point in time.

So where are our open-sourced front- and back-ends for such a compiler toolchain, that takes input from business users, and spits out scalable software CRUD applications? I suppose, this is a market I am studying at the moment, with the likes of Superails (http://github.com/jerng/superails).

(Perhaps, to be continued)

Done jotting down thoughts from this morning's post-shower... only had to postpone that by 11.5 hours...
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Next meeting in 12.5 hours. Erm. Heading home to rest. Perhaps some studying. But first perhaps a walk. And before that, perhaps some housekeeping. And before that...