I don’t like making decisions. It takes a lot of time and energy, and produces lots of stress for me. Yet, making decisions is a necessary part of life. I’ve found decision-making to be increasingly important as I grow older and my decisions affect not just me, but also my…

I frequently get this question from aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it is an innocent question, but one which is misguided. Here’s the bubble burster: ideas on their own have little to no value. So while you may be able to find a donation, you do not yet have something which…

I start each day nearly the same way. I’ve come into this routine over the course of the past decade, and pieces have come and gone. …

The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint. The greats were great cause they paint a lot The lyrics in Macklemore’s song 10,000 Hours promote quantity of practice over intrinsic ability. I feel the same about learning to code. While many great programmers got started at a young…

While the Learn To Code movement has certainly picked up steam in the past year, I think it’s interesting to realize that “code” is not something new. What’s new is that we have a strong incentive to learn a particular type of code: billions of people now have Internet-connected computing…

Why incremental progress takes us further than giant leaps I used to think that significant things in life were done in large chunks as sheer acts of will. Study cram sessions, Spring Cleaning, hackathons. But a single step doesn’t finish the marathon, nor does a single battle win the war…

Step 1: more programmers. Step 2: more software. What’s Step 3? I’m on a mission to help more people acquire software development skills. This has become a popular thing lately. It’s important for Kentucky, and important for America. Overnight (ie over the past 50 years), software has proliferated most aspects…

A few weeks ago, I actually played Minecraft for the first time. I had watched friends play the game a few years ago, before it was an iconic franchise and merchandising machine, but had never dug in myself. As I was preparing to teach the Week of Code summer camp…

Toward an understanding of why hard work brings enjoyment — I’m currently reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’ s book Flow, and wanted to reflect on a few of the activities that provide me with an experience of flow. If you have not read the book nor otherwise become familiar with flow, the concept is that an experience of enjoyment comes from being…