Teaching programming

A few days ago, once my business plan was completed, I have met a friend of mine, who was StarCrafter in my clan for about 4 years, and is eager to become a programmer. He's still a student actually, though they don't get much of an education here anyway. That was the prime reason I have left the university myself - it's been a waste of time for most part.

Anyway, we had a meeting, and came to an agreement concerning his participation in our project. I'm going to teach him the things I know myself about being a programmer, and in about 2 or 3 months he will start his actual work on the project, with myself giving him a close look and support. I won't be able to leave my current job any sooner, so the project won't start until that time anyway.

Yesterday we had a 2-hours teaching session, where I have introduced C# .NET to him. He did learn some Basic, C, Fortran, and SQL in the university, though he had never took part in any serious project yet. As I already said, they don't receive much knowledge there, so I'll have to teach him almost from the start, including some stuff like coding conventions, clear code rules, refactoring etc. I wish someone would teach me that at the time I have started my programming career.. :)

Well, what can I say after the session we had.. guy does have a head, though he'll need a lot of practice to become of any use to us. However, I am pretty optimistic about him, because:

- He does want to learn, and this is the major thing;
- I do have some teaching skills, being a programming teacher for some schoolboys during my summer holidays at 2nd grade; later I've been a StarCraft teacher for many young fellas down here, adopting new strategies and teaching them how to use them properly;
- He respects me a lot for myself being both a programmer and a progamer, and he's always open to my ideas; actually during these years I had a few guys I had to teach who didn't respect me enough to listen carefully. I either earned their respect in some way, or dropped the teaching, because it won't be very useful in such a situation.
- I trust him a lot, because I know him for several years now, and because.. because I know him for several years know. I mean, he's a rare kind of a person, a person who can be trusted. That said, I'm willing to make business with him. The main thing I have understood about the business is that you don't have to start anything with someone you don't like or you don't trust. Even more, starting anything with such a person would be a disaster. Someday somehow it will pose great problems. And you can't be sure you will be able to recover after such kind of a problem, a problem coming from inside of your installation.

So, I'm glad the boy's with us, basically there have left only two more people to settle down things with: our graphics designer, and our investor. Both are my long-known friends, so I think we'll come to an agreement one way or another, without much arguments and give-me-more-or-I-won't-participate kind of stuff.

8 pages that make a difference

So, the business plan was effectively done by today morning. Actually, I was pretty flattered by how little time it took. Of course, it surely needs some enchancements in several places - some rephrases, mostly, to make the text flow through one's mind without gripping his attention with those little obstacles like badly formed sentence, unusual word etc. Anyway, I'm pretty good with my native language (yes, english is not the one), so that won't take much time.

Actually, I have thought about writing a business plan earlier when I was thinking over several ideas for shareware products. However, it always scared me - come on, how can I write a business plan if I don't have any economical background and if I even don't know how to do that in the first place? So these thoughts got me scared enough to write completely nothing. Sometimes I even didn't bother sitting and writing a product overview and a functional specification - the tasks I feel myself pretty confident at. And I have dropped several ideas without giving any deep consideration to it - I wonder whether there were potential bestsellers among them.. :)

..well, that was not the thing I was going to write about, anyway. :)

And what I was going to write about is that it's strange how my attitude has changed once I put all my thoughts and considerations on the virtual paper. First of all, I am now much more confident that the product will be a success, to some degree. Earlier I hoped it won't be a failure, so that's some difference.

Second line of my confidence is that I'm not bound to my may-be-investor friend anymore. I would be glad to make business with him, of course, but if we won't come to a mutuall acceptment - I will take my business plan and go to someone else. I am pretty sure now that I have a detailed business plan, I will find funds to make it work, one way or another. No more "I need a sum of money, but where can I get it" whining. No more "aw, he's interested in my idea, I should stick with this person whatever the price" anxiety. I have a busness model to show to potential investors, and it's up to them to decide whether it interests them or not.

I certainly don't think that my plan is ideal, I'm sure it will change its shape (and perhaps even some basic ideas, who knows) as time goes and as experience stack up. But it is a platform that gives me a solid ground in the field I'm intending to start my career at. And that's just great.

However, I have already felt the side effect of being driven by my ideas. Today, when I came to my day-job (having just recently finished the plan at home), I was so excited that I couldn't get myself sit and start some work. I felt that my job is pointless now as I get a new path to follow. That was really hard to overcome, though after about an hour of fight with myself I finally sat and lauched Visual Studio. I have a project to finish before I can leave peacefully, so I'll have to take the pain of working at my now-hated-day-job. Of course, I can leave at once with a bit of a scandal, but I don't feel that would be right to leave my work unfinished. Damn my "do-good" attitude. :)

Considering a career switch

To tell you the truth, I'm tired of my current career already. Programming for yourself is nice, and programming itself is a lot of fun.. while you don't have to make a living out of it. Even more, when you have to sit at the office for 8 hours a day, pretending to be working hard - now that's not a lot of fun anymore.
For me, that is not.

I understood that long ago. Actually, almost a year have past since I gave it my first serious consideration. And while I think of myself as of a conscious person most of the times, I still haven't decided to make a switch. There are many reasons - on deeper thought, many of which are mere excuses anyway - but the most big single reason is: i make quite a lot of money from my current job position - about $550. Not much compared to any developed country, still that's quite a lot down here in Kyrgyzstan. For example, a normal salary for a developer here is about $250-$350. So that really made me think thrice whenether the idea of leaving came to my head.

Anyway, Steve Pavlina have wrote an article lately, divinely driven to help me sort this out, i suppose :)

And here I am, writing a business plan for my first shareware project (about 20% complete), trying to weight up the funds and time needed to launch it. Fortunately, a friend of mine is interested in this, too. Actually, he's interested in good investments, and that's exaclty what my project lacks at the moment.

Hopefully, we'll be able to launch it in about half a year from now. And hopefully we'll make enough profit from it in next several years to stop this project peacefully (and making the 80% failure statistics look even more discouraging) and start another one from scratch.

I haven't left my current job yet, however, once I make sure I will have a stable profit - about $200, I suppose - from either my friend's investments in me, or from any other side job I would take to feed myself, - I shall leave at once, and will hopefully forget my current job as we tend to forget nightmares. Slowly, but inevitably. :)