Fake it till you make it
A journal about how I’m going to deal with a project-driven life
The back-story
I’m a Computer Science student in Mexico, right now I’m in the second year of my career and as to this day I have hated every single day of it.
Three years ago I met Diego who would become some kind of a mentor for me, when I met him he already knew a few things about programming and he is the one who introduced me to the magical world of web programming. Since then we have teamed up for many projects and suffer together the slow and out-dated curriculum of our career.
We got used to learn things by ourselves and to learn them fast
The thing is, school isn’t teaching us the things we want to learn and is not giving us the abilities required by the fast evolving world of startups and tech based companies.
This semester we wanted things to change, inspired by entrepreneurs and Internet personalities like Joshua Topolsky, Alex Bloomberg or Alejandro Garcia Romero we decided we wanted to start creating things people would like to use.
You need a diploma to be successful
I firmly believe that the sentence above is bullshit, I’ve grown up with the Internet, I read stuff and I know that there are so many people out there that have build small empires with our without a diploma. I personally believe that in order to be successful you need two things:
- Passion
- A lot of hard work
So it’s been really difficult for me to adapt to a world where people tell me to stop dreaming, work hard and let my brain be filled with the things I’m supposed to memorize in order to be able to get a good job. But the truth is (and this has lead my to many discussions with my parents) I don’t want a good job, I don’t want to wake up every day to go to work somewhere just to get payed and live a good life, I want to work at a place where I know I can make a difference, somewhere I will work as hard as I can and love doing it because I’m helping to build something far greater than me.
The challenge
So, as I mentioned, this semester we decided to start building as many things as we can to challenge us to be more productive, to see what our limits are and also (and read carefully cause this is probably the most important cause) because we’re bored. Bored of waiting till we finish school to get to the fun part, bored of following the script and bored of being “educated” (turned into a robot) either by school or our society.
That’s why I decided to write a journal, to document and also to help me organize my thoughts about the 6 projects we’re getting into apart from school to kickstart our portfolio and gain experience. I will be posting updates of our what challenges we face and how things are going as much as I can so if you feel interested or at least a bit curious feel free to follow or contact me through the comments or my Twitter @FernandoS_12
Oh and…what are these 6 projects I’m talking about?
1- Fundación Ataxia: This is a project that we’re doing as part of our social service, Fundación Ataxia is an NGO that provides support for people with ataxia and their families. Among other students (not all of them from computer science) we have to build their website from the ground up.
2- Redesigning Moco-Comics: Ok this one isn’t really our project, it’s for our Databases class but I think is worth sharing. Moco-Comics is the independent comics startup of one of our teachers 2 years ago we redesigned his site from the ground up but this year we’re going to do it again using what we learn in class and all the other things we learnt since the first time.
3- Coco-Game: A Duolingo for maths and physics. This is an idea of the same teacher of point #2 that is being developed by our school and is going to be programmed by 4 people, two of which are us.
4- Soluciones: A project for the government to which we were invited to participate (more on this later).
5- A video game: This one is also a school project … but hey, we’ll be working with digital animation and design engineers so that’s a new one for us! (Apart that I’ve never donde a video game before)
6- ITESM on Rails: So our career has some sort of association but the truth is that they haven’t donde anything interesting (or useful) so we will be trying to change that by forming a “mini startup” that helps our campus to connect better (we still need to plan this through, we’ll see)
And that’s it, sort of. Apart of all of this we’ll still have to deal with homework, other school projects, friends and family while keeping our mental stability so…you know, it sounds interesting doesn’t it?