Three years ago, I set out on an ambitious mission: to create a mobile app that would teach anyone to code from scratch, right on their phone. Today, our learn-to-code app Grasshopper has been downloaded by over 1.5 million aspiring coders around the world. The journey from idea to successful product has been filled with…
If you‘re an aspiring developer, you may view hackathons as intimidating, highly-technical events reserved only for seasoned programmers. I know I did. Even as I became more curious about these sprint-like invention marathons, I always had a reason for why I wasn‘t quite ready to participate. I assumed my jack-of-all-trades background, with almost no true…
In the world of technology and innovation, few figures have captured the public‘s imagination quite like Elon Musk. As a full-stack developer and professional coder, I have watched with fascination as Musk‘s ventures have pushed the boundaries of what is possible, from revolutionizing the automotive industry with Tesla to his audacious plans for colonizing Mars…
As a full-stack developer with over a decade of experience in the startup world, I‘ve seen my fair share of equity dreams shattered by the cold hard reality of startup economics. Like many of my peers, I was once seduced by the promise of owning a piece of the "next big thing" and cashing out…
You‘ve likely heard of companies like Trello, Craigslist, Unsplash, AppSumo, Twitter, and Gmail. What do all these successful companies have in common? They all started as side projects. A side project is something you work on outside of your main job – a website, app, service, or product you build in your spare time. While…
As a veteran full-stack developer and tech consultant, I‘m often approached by friends and acquaintances who have a "revolutionary app idea." They‘ve got it all figured out – features, monetization strategy, growth plan. The only missing piece is someone to actually build the thing. And guess who they turn to first? "You can code it…
"You‘ll never succeed as an entrepreneur." As an engineer, you may have heard this kind of discouraging advice before from well-meaning friends, family, or colleagues who think your coding skills won‘t translate into starting and running your own business. But here‘s the thing: some of the most successful and impactful entrepreneurs of our time started…
As a full-stack developer and startup founder, I‘ve spent over two decades in Silicon Valley in the hunt for world-class engineering talent. I‘ve come to appreciate the Valley as its own unique tech ecosystem. The greatest density of skilled programmers on earth can be found within a sixty-mile strip of land between San Jose and…
The concept of a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, has become ubiquitous in the worlds of software development and entrepreneurship. But for a term that gets thrown around so casually, there‘s still a lot of confusion about what actually constitutes an MVP. Is it just a fancy name for a prototype or beta version? How…
On the evening of November 18, 1987, a devastating fire broke out at the King‘s Cross St Pancras station on the London Underground. It started around 7:30pm when a passenger discarded a burning match that fell through a gap on a wooden escalator leading down to the Piccadilly Line. The match ignited a pool of…