To be more educated or not?

diploma

…That is, more educated in the formal sense. I think nothing can replace real world experience. However, one of the questions that have been on my mind for the past year or so is if I should be going back to school. I’m 24 and I got a couple of years of work experience under my belt. I recently got engaged. If there was ever a time to go back to school, now seems like as good of a time as any.

If I decided to go back to get more education, should I go for a Masters of Science or an MBA? In the industry I’m in, I find that a Masters in Computer Science or Engineering is not really rewarding as it was for my dad’s generation from a career perspective. Today’s smart IT employers focus on what you’ve done, created, or built more than what you have studied in a classroom or years of work experience (which I think is great). I think if I go back to school for a Masters, my reasons for going would be to surround myself with smart hackers and really dig deep into exciting research. I strongly believe that to get the most out of Masters program, you need to be there for the right reasons. Go back to school to learn more, not to get ahead in a career.

On the other hand, an MBA seems much more of a career booster and would give me the businessy-types of skills that I haven’t been formally trained with. The part about this that doesn’t excite me is all the finance and accounting kinda courses that I don’t seem myself really leveraging in my career path. That side of things doesn’t really get me excited. Plus, all of my friends that are taking MBA courses say that it’s nothing special. It’s just going to be another thing you put on your resume. Which might not be such a bad thing, but for me it doesn’t seem to make sense right now to pursue that avenue.

I would love to hear from people on their reasons for choosing to pursue higher education or choosing not to or choosing to postpone it until further notice.

As for me, I think I’ll postpone until further notice. There’s so much more for me to learn through real work experience and my natural curiosity of emerging technologies.

To be more educated or not?

Worst Movie Title Ever?

I’m currently reading Why Smart People do Dumb Things. The premise is pretty much what it sounds like. It investigates how some smart people ended up making some bad decisions and how it all could have been prevented. Granted, it’s not totally obvious sometimes when you don’t have a good idea or not making the right choices. But some ideas and choices are just BAD.

Whoever decided to go with this movie title needs their own special seat in the class.



The worst (funniest?) part is I first saw this trailer in the movie theaters. The music and suspense builds up and the voiceover finally announces the title of the movie. Half of the audience bursts out laughing, the other half sits there wondering what they missed.

Worst Movie Title Ever?

In search of a back up solution – Mozy.com

I am in search of a good automated backup solution for my personal computer(s). Previously, I’ve just uploaded important files I want to keep onto my slice or some web hosting site. I also use a 250GB Western Digital External HD to backup pictures and mp3s.

But now, I want an online solution. I want a service where I can “set it and forget it” to back up any or all the files on my multiple computers. My first stop was at Mozy.com. I downloaded their Mac installer, which had the BETA description next to the download link.

The install and setting up it to start backing up some files was easy. The free 2 gigs for MozyHome is great. But when I really got into customizing what I wanted to back up, I was disappointed. I could not easily place rules to ignore certain files and folders. It was all or nothing. Also, Mozy takes the term “backup” very literally. If you delete the file off your local machine, Mozy will delete the file from their backup servers in 30 days. It is not intended to be used as a file repository. You can’t easily share your backup files either.

mozy-1 mozy-2


For $4.99/month, I can get unlimited backup space. But without being to easily exclude certain files and folders like .DS_Store and .svn folders, Mozy is a no go for me.If anyone can recommend something better, that would be super.

In search of a back up solution – Mozy.com

Finishing strong

Usually, if you are about to leave a job, it’s hard to stay motivated. Other than tying up any loose ends, it’s probably not a good idea to start something you can’t finish.

As my final days with kajeet approached, I seem to be more productive than I think I was in awhile. I really was in support mode so I didn’t have a large number of tasks on my plate. I used this extra time to do some engineering-inspired projects (as opposed to business initiatives). In something that reminds me of Google’s 20% time, I was able to work on projects that meant something to me personally.

I prototyped a single-sign-on application. I built an application based off an idea our engineering team had months ago but never had the time to act on. It got demoed and was received well by the company. It took less than 16 man hours to build and business saw value in it. Hopefully, it will be officially launched.

After doing this, I am a fan of the 20% time. Being able to work on things you’re passioniate about and sharing it with others is, well, the whole idea, isn’t it?

I hope to see more companies, especially startups, adopt this practice. The engineers are happy and the return on investment is tremendous. Of course, this only works if you have an awesome engineering team, people that truly love to code. That shouldn’t be a problem though, you don’t really want the other kind of engineer.

Anyways, back to the point of this post. Leaving jobs is a stressful time. You worry if you are making the right decision. You worry if the relationships you’ve developed are going to continue. You worry if you will get to play ping pong at work..oh wait, we’re talking about startups right?

 

Mortal Kombat - Finish Him

 

Regardless, I think it’s important to finish strong in everything you do. I took it as a challenge to see how much I could accomplish in my last two weeks, committing code up to the last day of employment. It’s a great feeling when you know you leave a place better than you entered.

Finishing strong

Next move.

Today was my last day with kajeet. For a year and a half, I’ve been a part of a rock star engineering team, experienced the start-up life, launched a number of services, and most importantly made some really good friends. It was cool to see our product on the shelves on Best Buy and hearing from real customers how excited they were about the service we built. It was hard to say good bye but I thought it was time for my next adventure.

I’ve taken a job at Clearspring Technologies. They support syndication and tracking of widgets or, to describe what they do technically, apply the “Write once, run anywhere” slogan of Java to the web and widgets as “Write once, embed everywhere”.

I start this Monday and I’m excited for the opportunity to be working in this space and with this team.

Next move.

Where is my sequel sock?

I was looking for where mysql.sock was since running rake db:bootstrap was complaining with “No such file or directory – /tmp/mysql.sock”. Rails looks for the mysql.sock file under /tmp/mysql.sock by default. Ubuntu using an apt-get install of mysql puts the mysql.sock file at /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock.

I always forget where it is. So, I’m writing it down.

/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

You can also grep for it from mysql like so

>>  mysql -? | grep mysqld.sock
socket                            /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Where is my sequel sock?