New Year’s Gifts!

How we celebrated the new year’s at our nascent bootstrapped startup.

I have seen some of my peers who work for funded startups and bigger cos, get some really snazzy new year’s gifts from their employers.

Being a bootstrapped startup, we do not have that kind of nondiscretionary luxury. Our CEO though wanted to do something for us, something more productive than a gadget. Incidentally, we came across MIT Professional Education around the turn of the year.

That is what was going to be our new year’s gift. All of us in the founding team signed up for a course on it called Internet of Things: Roadmap to a Connected World.

It was a great course which featured some truly amazing people who worked on building the Internet (like Tim Berners-Lee), built RFID tags, among a host of other technologies that we take for granted all around us.

It gave us a great world view of how the IoT landscape has evolved to be where it is right now and where it is headed. Had some really practical tidbits that can help you wade through the noise and give some structure to this really fast moving field where you have to cut the hype from the substance at times.

It was a back to basics type course, covering fundamental paradigms of technology, architecture along with a lot of useful case studies of technology evolution like RFID. The course was very descriptive with a few prescriptive things thrown in between to contextualize put a structure to the whole thing.

It surely is one of the best gifts I have received in my professional life till date.

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