Comments on: How to work on cool stuff

By: Luke Shepard

Luke Shepard — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:45:55 +0000

That’s great advice, Yariv, I’m glad you did it so you could spend the last year+ on our team :)

By: Wenew Zhang

Wenew Zhang — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:59:26 +0000

great ErlyWeb,hope erlang-mysql have new update too

By: Yariv Sadan

Yariv Sadan — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:07:50 +0000

testing facebook connect

By: jason

jason — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:33:03 +0000

I like you. I think you are smart. More people should subscribe to you.

I can’t dwindle my savings, unfortunately. At least, not without MAJOR life changes :0

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:34:08 +0000

Best thing to do is save enough to live for 6 months (assuming you have neither house nor significant other to support) and have a plan for something cool. Build it, open source it, then look for the opportunities the community find for it. It may turn out to be a business or not but it will be a great experience that you can only do when you are young and unencumbered. Carpe Diem!!

By: Nathan Youngman

Nathan Youngman — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:40:37 +0000

Thanks for the well-timed inspiration, I’ve been thinking of something like this, and my current employment contract ends this week. Also reminded me that I still need to read Hackers & Painters.

By: Yariv

Yariv — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:36:18 +0000

@Anonymous That’s a good point. I was lucky to have had some savings and no debts or dependents. I was also 27 at the time and living by myself in a small studio. It would be much harder for people with more obligations.

The main thing I would do differently now is to have a cofounder and be more focused on creating a real product that could reach ramen profitability relatively quickly (this is essentially Paul Graham’s advice to entrepreneurs). This was too hard to accomplish by myself.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:42:03 +0000

Just wondering: when you say “a few months off”, how many months are we talking about? I’m guessing that some people can take one or two months off and work on something that they really enjoy.
However, not everyone has this freedom.

It would be interesting to hear how you (or anyone else) accomplished this, and anything that you would do differently now.

By: Jeremy Kunz

Jeremy Kunz — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:31:04 +0000

I use ErlyWeb and love it. It lives on here.

By: Loreto Parisi

Loreto Parisi — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:58:42 +0000

Absolutely right!

Working on boring things, doing something unuseful stuffs will bring you nowhere.

You have to risk to make on your own, but this risk is the due to pay to achieve success.

PS. CouchDB was a great idea (I’m working on it for mobile devices light databases), so this is a lesson to learn from!