Chris Wanstrath, one of the authors of github, spoke to end the sessions today.
- Serious full time projects such as Rubinius and Merb started as side-projects
Started working for trucking logistics company, which had no version control, no configuration, but thought that he could use yaml. But there was no PHP parser for yaml, so he wrote spyk – yaml parser in php. Which helped him get a job at GameSpot, which, with recognition from other side projects, got him a job building Chowhound in Rails.
Get rid of time sinks – stop wasting your time reading RSS
- take a month off from rss reading
- let other people do the filtering for you
- the big stuff will find you
Don’t bother with books on practice and theory
- apply the Jerry Seinfeld calendar theory
- just do a little a day
- you want to see that x in the calendar because you worked on your side project for a while week
- now you can’t say that you don’t have time because you have plenty of time
You don’t need a good idea
- play with a new framework, like sinatra, rhino or johnson, or master your editor, etc.
- vi users, learn why people love something like emacs and use that information against them
- alternatively, do something hard.
- github started as a side project they worked on, only on sundays.
- scratch your own itch
- github took 3 months
- used github to self-host github and their ‘day job’ git repository.