Five Years’ Time
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Five Years’ Time
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Five Years’ Time
#2Where do you want to be 5 years from now?
Re: Five Years’ Time
#3I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#4I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.
That's a great point. In this case, he's in a completely different place and the goal was still applicable. That's great. I would tell you to set goals all the same. If you _don't_ hit them, figure out why. If it's because you are different, that's cool. You adapted.
Don't use goals to measure "Success" per se but rather, yourself. It's a great lens to see trends in what is important to you in thought and practice and where they diverge.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#5"One regret I do have: I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors. I found that once I started actually building, these things came naturally." --
I had this same experience. It wasn't until I pushed something live that those things/people just fell into place. Great article!
Re: Five Years’ Time
#6I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.
Agreed! I didn't set a goal that I held myself to. Rather, it's just a lucky coincidence it worked out so perfectly.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#7Rejection letter from YC:
> I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right beachhead.
Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people, not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?
Re: Five Years’ Time
#8This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he is making.
I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview, etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over, but having to re-do all the documentation from ground up is a bit of a pain.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#9I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.
"Five year plans" for my generation have a bad sound to them. They were the basis for planning in the Soviet Union and were kind of a joke in the '70's and '80's to mean "stuff that never gets done."
That said, goals aren't plans, and five years is a reasonable time-horizon for a major goal. He did a lot of things right in his use of time, including giving it a go too early, and then again getting sucked in to a startup that didn't really work out. There is nothing like seeing things fail to teach you the elements of success.
Part of that use of time should definitely be asking yourself "Am I pursuing the right goal?" as you learn more, but a fair number of people get it right.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#10> The problem is one of content generation, as opposed to lack of tooling.
I also have been pondering docs for many years and I agree with this statement. The core value I was going to build my solution around was by incorporating / generating examples from real code. Rather than being docs that were published it would almost be close to a code search engine. While the developers are lazy and rarely document you could bootstrap the documentation by finding example usage in the wild and presenting it and from there allow the users annotate it (and the developers if they ever get around to it).
There are many problems with todays docs, another one that is missing has to be analytics. If I own an API I want to know what users are constantly looking at and discussing so that I can make that part better, less confusing, etc. And conversely if there are no example usage and no one has ever looked at an API that would be useful to know too as it could be code that could be ripped out and no longer maintained. What api are users searching for, but never find? There is more, but these are just a few off the top of my head.
By generating content rather than relying on the developers to sign up and publish the site would explode in size and utility. Think Yahoo directory v.s. Google ala 1998.
The idea that someone would generate static html files and put them somewhere is almost barbaric compared to the richness that could be provided.
Unfortunately I don't really have a financial story to go with this idea. One was to be free for open source projects and charge for commercial. But honestly more likely would be that I would build it for a few years and then someone like Facebook would just call me up and buy it out to shut it down and solve their API documentation problems. Not saying that is bad, but I would have to make it until that would happen and I would prefer to have found another solution than a aquirehire end game.