Sean Gransee @seangransee - Tumblr Blog

Recipes I Like

I live with four other hungry college students. I've been cooking for them (and friends that occasionally join us) about once a week. Here are some of my favorite recipes, along with some of my personal notes. I will keep adding to this list on an ongoing basis.

Swiss Chicken Casserole

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Swiss-Chicken-Casserole-II/Detail.aspx?evt19=1

I bumped the serving size up to 10. This, along with a side of steamed vegetables, made the perfect amount for a 9-person dinner party. Instead of using cream of chicken soup, I used cream of mushroom soup with garlic. That substitution added a great additional flavor to the dish. With the increased serving size of 10, it took about 75 minutes to bake and probably could have stayed in the oven a little longer.

Side of carrots and broccoli

This went perfectly with the chicken casserole above for a 9-person dinner party. Beware: it takes quite a while to steam enough vegetables for that many people.

I started by boiling a bot of water and putting a colander above it. This is where I put each round of vegetables after they had been steamed to keep them warm until I was ready to serve the meal. (I know this isn't a conventional use for a colander, but it worked great!) Then I put as many vegetables (baby carrots and broccoli) as I could in a steamer and steamed them for 12 minutes. After steaming, I dumped them into the colander that was above the boiling pot of water. I think I did this 5 times before I had enough.

After all the vegetables were steamed, I dumped them from the colander into a bowl, sprinkled in some freshly ground salt and pepper, and drizzled melted butter into the bowl. Delicious.

Cajun Chicken Pasta

Recipe: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2013/09/cajun-chicken-pasta/

This one was amazing. However, the serving sizes were totally off. To feed four people, I had to use two chicken breasts and a pound of pasta. I couldn't find fettuccine at the store so I substituted linguini, which was fine. I also used a bit more spices than called for to balance out the increased chicken and pasta. I didn't have cayenne pepper, so I used a teaspoon of crushed red pepper. That gave the dish a nice spicy aftertaste that wasn't too overwhelming.

Turkey and Spinach Pasta Bake

Recipe: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2013/11/turkey-spinach-pasta-bake/

I don't have much to say about this one, other than the fact that it was yummy.

Skillet Ground Beef Stew

Recipe: http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/skillet-ground-beef-stew/1fc970ea-5bff-4270-89d1-eff133c4214c

This recipe is the perfect amount for 3 people. Very filling and satisfying.

Pot Roast

I make one of these every week for all 5 of us.

I generally get about 3.5 pounds of stew meat (chuck works great) and throw it in a crock pot. Then chop up 3 carrots, 4 potatoes, half a large onion, 8 mushrooms, and throw that all in the pot. Mix 2.5 teaspoons of pot roast seasoning with 1.5 cups of water and pour into the crock pot. I usually cook on high heat for 2 hours, followed by low heat for 4 hours. This allows me to start cooking the roast at noon and have it ready by 6pm.

The great thing about this is that it can stay warm in the crock pot until everyone comes home to eat dinner.

Lunch salad

This is my go-to lunch. I add arbitrary amounts of the following to a bowl.

Chicken breast (which I cooks on the stove while I'm making the rest of the salad.

Spring mix

Slided mangos

Slivered almonds

Flax seeds

Crumbled feta cheese

Cucumbers (only occasionally, because they go bad so damn fast)

Vinaigrette dressing

Mix and eat. Yum.

Television As A Shared Experience

This post might seem like it's about Breaking Bad, but it's really about television as an art form. There are no spoilers until the end where it's clearly marked, so most of this post is safe for anyone to read.

I haven't felt this way in 6 years, 2 months, and 8 days.

I remember the weeks leading up to July 21, 2007. All the theories. All the speculation. Who will live? Who will die? It was the topic of most of my conversations for a brief period of time.

And then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published. After investing hundreds of hours reading and re-reading the books, watching the movies, and talking about what had happened and what might happen, the series ended. And I, like everyone else, experienced that ending alone. Because that's how the medium works. With literature, everything surrounding the story can be a shared experience, but the story itself is a personal one.

It was a similar, albeit condensed, experience for me leading up to the finale of Breaking Bad. I started watching the show about two years ago, at which point I binge-watched the first three seasons on Netflix in three days. And, just like when I started reading Harry Potter, I didn't know many people who had experienced this story yet.

But then, as the series started wrapping up, that all started to change. Many of my friends caught up on the show over the summer and were ready for the final eight episodes. Those people experienced the same thing that I had experienced years before.

And then we talked about it. We speculated. Who will live? Who will die? It was the same thing that happened 6 years ago. I've had many conversations about Breaking Bad with people I had just met. One of the best ways to start getting to know someone is to use a common bond as the starting point. With anyone who watched Breaking Bad, this was that common bond between us. We were on the same ride together, and we were equally excited for the rest of it.

And then the show went out in one glorious finale. But this time it was different. This time I wasn't alone. I was surrounded by at least a dozen of my friends. We were eating fried chicken, which we pretended was from Los Pollos Hermanos. There were moments when we gasped. There were moments when we cheered. There were moments when our hearts stopped.

We were together through the weeks of endless anticipation, and we were together for the ending.

That's something you only get with television. Books can certainly build up anticipation, but everyone experiences the story by themselves. Movies certainly have that whole "shared experience" thing going for them, but there's no way to talk about it throughout the story's progression.

With television, you get both. I've probably spent close to a hundred hours watching the episodes, re-watching them with friends who need to catch up, talking about the show with friends, talking about it with strangers, reading forums online, and coming up with my own theories about what will happen.

Spoilers ahead

And after all that, I watched the finale with people I care about. And we shared the experience together. We gasped as the machine gun in Walt's trunk killed Jack's gang. We cheered at the TV as Jesse strangled Todd. Our hearts stopped as Walt fell to his death surrounded by the meth lab that Jesse had built.

Those moments, moments that we all experienced together… that's what made it all worth watching.

To Vince and the entire cast and crew: Thank you for giving us this shared experience.

A Recap Of My Summer Out West

I wrote this on a plane a couple days ago but forgot to post it until now. Enjoy!

The greatest adventure of my life thus far has come to an end. And with nothing to do for a couple hours in an airplane on its way to Chicago, I'm going to attempt to distill the most amazing thirteen and a half weeks of my life into one blog post. Here we go…

The story begins almost a year ago. I had just gotten back from New York City (where I lived and worked most of that summer), fully intending to return for another round in June. I had just started my junior year at Northwestern, and I wasn't even close to thinking about which company I was going to work for next summer.

But then, a random email from an NU alum in October 2012 led to a conversation with the CTO of a small startup called Ribbon. I decided to talk to him on a total whim. At the time, it was a three-person company and I knew none of them. They barely had a product and didn't have much funding yet either. After talking to the CTO for about an hour, I got the sense that they were a bunch of really fun guys who were building something that interested me. They asked me to join the team for the summer, and they offered to pay for my housing in San Francisco along with a pretty nice paycheck. Not a bad deal at all.

Even though summer was 9 months away, I took the offer immediately. I had a good feeling about it so I acted on impulse. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Now, let's fast forward to the summer.

Week 1 - Arrival in San Francisco

I arrived at SFO on a monday afternoon. Hany, the CEO of Ribbon, picked me up from the airport and drove me to the office. It was beautiful. The office was in the penthouse of a 5-story building with a nice outdoor balcony area and easy access to the roof. I also briefly met the team for the first time… a team of people who would quickly become some of my best friends.

This week wasn't extremely eventful. I spent most of my time getting situated with the team and the product. We actually started building a new product during my first week, which was exciting. Most of my free time that weekend was spent walking around and exploring the city.

One thing I learned this week is how much I suck at ping pong. Everyone in the office takes it very seriously, going so far as to have an entire whiteboard devoted to ping pong wins and losses. My area of the board, even at the end of the summer, mostly represented losses. Oh well.

The roof of the office.

Week 2 - Getting settled

After living in a hostel for a week, I moved into the house where I'd be staying for most of the summer. It was a house in Chinatown with 11 other interns from various companies all over the city. My roommate, Connor, was also an engineer (at Twitter) and we got along really well.

I won my first game of ping pong at the office. Woohoo! I also got stuck in an elevator when the power went out in the building. Boooo! Good thing that day was followed up with some of the best sushi I've ever eaten at Sushi In.

That weekend was the pride parade, which was the craziest urban celebration I've ever experienced. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Pride parade.

Week 3 - 4th of July weekend

All the eventful stuff here took place during the long weekend. I spent most of 4th of July afternoon at Fort Mason with part of the Ribbon team, and then spent the evening walking along The Embarcadero, looping back to Pier 39 to watch the Fireworks.

The next day was quite possibly the best day of the summer. My roommates two friends from the University of Michigan were in town, and I joined the three of them (along with another housemate, Steph) as we biked across the Golden Gate Bridge and had dinner in Sausalito. After taking a ferry back to San Francisco, we stopped at Trader Joe's to get a case of Two Buck Chuck. We drank at our house until shortly before midnight, then headed to the bars on Polk St. to ring in my roommate's 21st birthday.

About to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Week 4 - Lake Tahoe

During the week, I spent most of my time at the office. I started becoming really invested in the project I was working on, to the point where I would lose track of time quite frequently.

I also decided to extend my stay in San Francisco by an extra 3 and a half weeks, mostly because I enjoyed working with the Ribbon team so much. And also because San Francisco is pretty fucking sweet.

That weekend, I rented a car and a bunch of us from the house drove up to Lake Tahoe for an insanely fun weekend. Some others joined us the next day, and we ended up fitting 16 people in a beautiful resort house by the lake. We spent the day at the beach and spent the night partying. (Did I mention that the resort house came with a complimentary bottle of wine?) We also spent a good portion of the night drunkenly singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs in a hot tub. It was a weekend well spent.

Hot tub at the house we rented.

Week 5 - A big decision

Shortly after I got back from Lake Tahoe, Ribbon gave me an enticing job offer to stay with them full time. So enticing, in fact, that I almost dropped out of school to stay with them.

Not much happened during this week, as I spent most of my free time thinking about this decision I had to make and getting advice from others.

Week 6 - All around The Bay

I finally made the toughest decision of my life. I ultimately decided to ignore most of the advice I had been given and return to school. I still second-guess myself every day, but I'm starting to feel a bit more comfortable with my decision as I get closer to starting my senior year.

I spent my saturday with my friend Travis driving down Highway 1 (along the coast). We drove down to Santa Cruz, then looped back up to San Francisco.

That Sunday, I went paint balling down in San Jose with most of the Ribbon team. Then we had some amazing fried chicken at Bon Chon Chicken in Sunnyvale. Then ice cream sandwiches at CREAM in Berkeley. Then Taqueria Cancun in The Mission. So much food in one day that I couldn't keep it all in. Literally.

Paintball with the guys from work.

Week 7 - Salt Lake City

I discovered an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant called Sushi Hunter in North Beach. I set a personal record by consuming 55 pieces, and the only reason I stopped was because they were closing. Don't worry, I'll be come back to this later…

Saturday afternoon, I flew to Salt Lake City to visit my good friend Brian. We spent the night hitting up the bars, and spent the next day hiking on an island in the middle of The Great Salt Lake. It wasn't quite the land of paradise described in The Book of Mormon (which happens to be my favorite musical), but it was still fun as hell.

On an island in the middle of The Great Salt Lake.

Week 8 - Las Vegas

My roommate moved out to go back to Michigan, and I got a new roommate named Thomas. Also an engineer. He's doing Dev Bootcamp, which was really interesting to hear him talk about.

Thursday night, I consumed 80 pieces of sushi at Sushi Hunter. A record that I haven't managed to beat yet, although I did try.

The next night, I flew to Vegas to spend a weekend with Brian (who I visited the previous weekend in Salt Lake City), and two other good friends from college. We ate, we drank, we gambled, and I lost way more money that I wanted to. But it was totally worth it.

Vegas, baby!

Week 9

Nothing special. Spent the week making cool shit at work, and spent the weekend hanging out with the team plus my friend Jen from school. Had bottomless Mimosas for lunch one day, and watched a ton of Breaking Bad. Also played basketball and ate more fried chicken down in the valley.

Week 10 - Los Angeles

First Giants game! And they won against the Red Sox! Fun experience, even though I'm not super into baseball.

Towards the end of the week, I had dinner with half a dozen of my friends that I met last summer in New York City. It was really great catching up with the cool thing they're doing with their lives, and also sharing my stories.

I spent the weekend in LA with my friend Taylor. We had some great French food, Mexican food, Korean food, and Cajun food. We walked along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, saw The World's End in the nicest movie theatre I've ever been to (they have assigned seating!) and hit up the bars downtown.

I watched the latest episode of Breaking Bad on the plane from LAX to SFO. Best plane ride ever!

Right next to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Week 11 - Northwestern football

I tried breaking my record of 80 pieces of sushi. The friends I was with said they would pay for my meal (which cost $50, so that was kind of a big deal) if I managed to break my record. But I couldn't do it. I only made it to 79. Bummer.

On Saturday, I headed up to Berkeley to hang out with over a dozen of my friends from Northwestern and watch the Wildcats beat the Golden Bears. It felt pretty awesome to wear purple again.

My friend Laksh came to visit the city so I spent a lot the three-day Labor Day weekend with him. I also spent a fair amount of time hanging out with Gabe and Kashif, two friends who just moved to the city and started working at Google and Disqus, respectively. Gabe lives in The Mission, which is definitely somewhere I'll consider living when I'm here more permanently.

Northwestern wins!!!

Week 12 - Seattle

My housing in the intern house ended since I wasn't originally supposed to stay this long, so I moved in with Hany, the CEO of Ribbon. The house in Chinatown was a ton of fun, but it got a little cramped after a while so it felt good to move into a more spacious place.

That weekend, I went to Seattle to visit Mo and Natalie, two friends from school who are working at Boeing. I ate at Paseo, went to the top of the Space Needle, saw the Chihuly glass exhibit, and partied all night long. I also read a book (All My Friends Are Dead) to a bunch of drunk NU alumni in a Gilbert Gottfried voice. The next morning, a bunch of us made brunch and built IKEA furniture.

Then, it was back to SFO for my last couple days out west.

Outside Pike Place Market in Seattle.

Week 13 - Farewell

I only worked Monday and Tuesday. Most of that time, I couldn't stop thinking about how difficult it was going to be to leave this job, these people, and this city. My biggest consolation is that I'm not leaving. Not really. Even though I'm spending the next 9 months near Chicago, I decided to keep working with them from Chicago until I become too busy to do my job effectively. And even after that, I fully intend on re-joining them in June, this time without an expiration date.

I wrote a year ago about how last summer was the greatest summer of my life. I'm happy to say that this one blew it out of the water. I just spent three months building interesting products with a team of people I genuinely care about. It doesn't get much better than this, and I'm incredibly grateful for this experience.

I'll be back soon enough. In the meantime, don't have too much fun without me :)

The entire Ribbon team at of the end of the summer.

I Almost Dropped Out Of School

I just made the biggest decision of my life thus far.

Sure, there are decisions I've made that seemed like big ones at the time. But they weren't. Where to go to college? That wasn't a decision. My dream school was the first one I got accepted into, so the choice was clear. What to study? There was only one career that I wanted to pursue at the time, so that wasn't much of a decision either. It wasn't until I was faced with the prospect of dropping out of school that I really had to take a good, hard look at myself and decide what's best for me.

Let's take a step back and look at my academic career up to this point. Three years ago, I entered Northwestern as a film major. I wasn't too passionate about the academics, and my grades were pretty bad. The next year, I discovered my passion for programming and my grades shot upwards during my first year as a computer science major. But it's been a steep decline ever since. Sure, I still do fine in my CS classes. But the unrelated requirements don't motivate me at all. I was on the verge of failing 3 classes my junior year simply because I couldn't motivate myself to care about learning things that didn't relate to my life or my interests.

The academics at Northwestern don't align at all with my life goals. I've always been more successful outside the classroom than inside it. For this reason, I had always thought I would stay in school only until a better opportunity came about.

And then it did.

I've been working all summer in San Francisco with a small 10-person startup, and I'm having the time of my life. Many people on the team became close friends in a matter of weeks, and I'm passionate about the product I spend most of my time building. There's nothing I'd rather be doing with my life right now. Nothing.

One day, someone at the company asked me if I'd like to stay with them full time when the summer ends. I was overjoyed, and I told him I'd strongly consider it.

This was my shot. This is what I had been waiting for all along.

What I didn't realize is that this would be the start of a 2-week roller coaster ride inside my own head.

For a little while, I was on the verge of dropping out of school. At one point, I was literally on Northwestern's website, ready to download the form I needed to withdraw from the university. Why wouldn't I? I had the opportunity to never take another exam again. I had the opportunity, as a 21 year old, to make a starting salary higher than most people ever reach in their entire career.

Not wanting to jump to a hasty decision, I decided to talk to people just to make sure I wasn't crazy. I talked to people that I trust, as well as people that I don't know very well. People inside and outside of the tech industry. People who graduated college and people who dropped out.

There was a pretty overwhelming consensus about what I should do. Most people thought I should take this opportunity. This is clearly what I'm more passionate about and this is clearly what I'm more successful at. So why not go for it?

But there was something holding me back. For some reason, I still couldn't take the leap.

A couple nights before I made my decision, the CEO of the company told me about his own experience dropping out. About how he believed it was the best decision given his situation. And then he said something really powerful to me.

"Everything you've been doing in the past few years has been leading up to this moment."

It's true. I had entered an industry where most of the relevant skills aren't taught in a classroom. An industry where skills and work experience far outweigh a degree. An industry that glorifies dropouts.

Successful entrepreneurs always say that the vision and the culture of a company is set by the first 10 people. I had the opportunity to be one of those first 10 people. I had the opportunity to make more than enough money to live a very comfortable life in San Francisco. Even if the company went under, I could easily get another software engineering job or go back to school. I win no matter what.

It all made sense. It was the perfect chance. I just needed to talk to one more person before I made this decision. Someone who I knew would give me the opposite perspective. Someone who would make sure I've considered absolutely everything. I needed to talk to the person who brought me into the startup world in the first place.

I went into that conversation pretty certain how it would end. He was going to convince me to go back and finish school. He was going to say that I'll regret it if I drop out.

But he didn't.

He admitted that he went into the conversation with the intention of pointing me back towards school. But, after hearing my whole situation, he said that staying in San Francisco sounded like the best option for me.

That should have made this decision the easiest one I've ever made. But somehow, it didn't. After that conversation, I only felt worse.

Almost everyone I talked to was telling me to drop out of school. All the logic in my head was telling me to drop out. If I still couldn't make a decision, something was holding me back. There must be something in a dark corner of my mind that I was missing.

Then I thought back on a conversation I had with a very good friend who still goes to Northwestern. She was one of only two people whose opinion I value who didn't think I should drop out of school even after I explained my whole situation. I didn't agree with any of her arguments, but still, it was enough to get me to consider what my life would be like if I went back to school. It got the ball rolling.

A couple days later, one of my fraternity brothers drove me down the coast in his car, and we spent the entire day talking about my decision. Even though he fully supported my idea of dropping out, he got me thinking even more about all the great times I'll miss out on if I cut my Northwestern experience a year short. That wasn't enough to sway me, but it got the ball rolling even faster.

And then it hit me. I realized what was holding me back from dropping out. I realized why I couldn't go for what seemed to be the clear winner out of these two choices.

There's been a trend in the past couple years in my life. I constantly get passionate about things, but a ton of effort into them, and then get excited about something else before I can finish. I jump from project to project, from organization to organization, frequently with nothing to show for it. My life has turned into a series of unfinished projects because I'm awesome at starting things but terrible at finishing them.

I don't want college to be my biggest unfinished project. And for that reason alone, I'm going back to school.

I didn't choose the best career move. Spending the next year working will benefit me way more than another year in school will. I didn't choose the more enjoyable option. Doing work I'm passionate about is much more enjoyable than doing homework. I didn't choose the logical option, and I didn't choose the suggested option.

I chose the option that would develop me the most as a person.

Working for a startup in San Francisco is one of the best things I've ever experienced. But it's not the best. Northwestern University is the best thing I have ever experienced.

I hate the academics. I always have. But that never stopped Northwestern from being the best three years of my life. I didn't let the things I hate stop me from having an amazing time. Instead, I worked around them. I made the most of the experience. I wanted college to be awesome, and I made it awesome.

I want to do that for another year.

I want to finish what I started.

I'm going back to Northwestern in the fall.

Goodbye

I don't think I've ever truly said goodbye before.

Sure, I've said plenty of goodbyes in the past. But none like this. None of the others felt as real as this. Or as sudden.

I guess the first time I had to say goodbye to people was right before going to college. Goodbye to all my high school friends. But that was more of a "see ya later" to anyone I really cared about. We all come home for the holidays, and I'm still able to see any of those people if I really want to. Plus, my best friend from high school ended up going to school a couple miles south of me. No real goodbyes there.

College is the first time I ever had to say goodbye to a bunch of people and know that I might never see them again. But freshman and sophomore year, that didn't matter too much. Sure, I had some good friends who graduated both of those years, most of whom I never saw again. But I wasn't extremely close with them.

This year, I've formed the closest friendships I've ever had in my life. Some of them came from living in a fraternity house and spending time with these people day in and day out. Some of it came from partnering on homework for some very challenging classes. As lame as that sounds, it got me very close with a select group of people.

And now, I'm realizing that I will probably never consistently spend time with these people again. Sure, I might see them once or twice if they come back to visit their alma mater. But after that, after I move away from Chicago, it's entirely possible that these people will be nothing but a series of great memories.

I don't want that to happen. Facebook makes it easy, in theory, to stay in touch with these types of people. But in practice, it's not as easy as it sounds. Our lives are constantly changing and evolving. New people enter as others leave.

I guess that's just life.

People

This is the broadest subject I could possibly write about. I’m not going to attempt to do it justice. Instead, I’m going to reflect on a very special night.

This night wasn’t particularly memorable. Nothing spectacular happened. But it involved a lot of people, which is what made it special. Not any more special than countless other nights involving lots of people, but special nonetheless.

It started after a week of near-isolation. I decided to go back home for spring break and catch up on some projects I’d been meaning to tackle. Sure, I spent some quality time with some awesome people. But not much. The week was mostly spent hunched over a glowing computer monitor.

Then I came back to campus. Shortly after, I got dinner with some good friends. We chatted, we had a great time, and two of us came up with a hilarious new idea. It was an awesome time.

After dinner, we went to my room to work on our idea. What was the idea? Doesn’t matter. We laughed, we learned, and we had a good time. Another friend joined in on the fun. It was awesome.

Then I got a call from someone I’ve recently become very close with. She invited me to hang out with a bunch of her friends. Another good friend of mine grabbed the phone and echoed the sentiment that I should join them. They’re both awesome people.

So I went out with them later that night. I finally got to see one of my best friends after he had been gone for three months. That was awesome. I had a deeply personal conversation with another friend about some issues I was finally starting to overcome. That was awesome.

I ran into two good friends of the guy that lives down the hall from me. I don’t know either of them very well, but we had no problem carrying on multiple conversations. They’re both awesome.

I ran into someone I used to intern with. We caught up and shared future plans. He’s pretty awesome.

I met someone new. Someone who told funny jokes and had what sounds like an exciting future ahead of him. Although we didn’t meet under the best circumstances (don’t ask), it was still an awesome part of my night.

After all this was over, I came back to my house to find a half dozen people that I usually see all the time but hadn’t seen in a week. It was awesome.

If you’ve made it this far, you just read the worst story in the world. There were no descriptions. There were no details. There were no names. Everything was intentionally vague. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters are the different groups of people I connected with tonight, as anonymous as they may be.

As I went to bed that night, a thought that had been inside my head for years grew stronger than ever: people are fucking awesome.

Watch the news, and people suck. Go on the internet, and people suck. Read a magazine, and people suck. People get a bad rap in non-personal media. We love to watch all the bad things that people do. That’s what sells.

But go out and have meaningful interactions with people, and people are awesome.

People are the reason I’m happy. People have gotten me to where I am today. People are the reason I am who I am. I’ve never done anything meaningful on my own. Everything I do, I do alongside awesome people.

People are worth spending time with. People are worth sharing moments with, even if those moments are the most mundane thing in the world. People are worth making sacrifices for. People are worth wasting time with.

People are fucking awesome.

#people

The Feedback Bias

I know I’m not a fantastic writer. But if I actually paid attention to all the feedback I hear about my writing, I’d totally think I am.

In an personal, informal setting, most feedback is crap. It’s heavily biased to be positive towards the receiver. Most people want to make others feel good about the work they do. While this isn’t a bad thing by any means, it’s definitely something to be aware of.

I don’t consider myself an active blogger, although I do blog from time to time. Every time I write a post, I get a few face-to-face comments that go something like this:

“I read your blog post. It was really good. You’re a really good writer.”

Translation: “I read your blog post.”

There are two things that could be happening here:

The only people who actually read what I write and then tell me what they think are people with a genuine interest in what I have to say, and therefore they will always love it.

Nobody wants to disagree with or attack anything I write to my face, and it’s much easier to just pretend to like everything.

It’s probably some combination of both.

Generic positive feedback is great to some extent because it provides encouragement to keep going. Beyond that, however, it’s not very helpful.

I’ve only ever had one friend point out some serious flaws in one of my blog posts. Aside from that, all the constructive feedback I’ve ever received has happened online.

From what I’ve seen, online anonymous feedback has a bias toward the negative. When names and identities are optional, the fear of personally offending someone is greatly reduced. Thus, people tend to be a bit more honest.

It’s easy to dismiss everyone who posts something negative online as being a “troll”. But for every trollish comment, there’s an attempt at constructive criticism, even if most people don’t read it that way. (Okay, maybe it’s not even close to a 1:1 ratio, but bear with me.)

A great example of a community that thrives off negative feedback is Hacker News. Any time there’s even the slightest flaw in anything that’s posted, you bet there’s going to be a comment about it. Would people be getting that constructive, actionable criticism if all the feedback they received was from people they knew? I don’t want to speak for everyone, but my guess is probably not.

Over the summer when I lived in New York City, I chatted with Chris Poole (creator of the infamous 4chan) for a bit about online identity. Poole (who goes by “moot” on the web) runs a website where posts are all anonymous. He believes that the truth comes out when your remarks aren’t attached to your identity. Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, pushes strongly for an authentic online identity that’s inseparable from your real self. (Interesting fact: they’re actually friends, despite their strongly opposing views.)

So, who’s right? I think they both are, especially when feedback is involved. It’s important to hear from a mix of both close friends and anonymous bystanders, and everyone in between. That way, the feedback biases balance out and you have the encouragement to keep going while knowing where your flaws are.

Oh boy, the feedback on this one is gonna be pretty ironic.

Why I Believe JavaScript is the Best First Programming Language to Learn

If you've never programmed before and want to start building that skill, I think JavaScript is the best place to start. I'm not claiming this to be the absolute truth, since it really depends on why you want to start and what you want to do with your programming skills. These are just my opinions and reasons why I believe JavaScript the best place to start for the average person who wants to start coding.

Universality

Until a few years ago, JavaScript was primarily a language for front-end web programming. Nowadays, it works pretty nicely for doing backend development, native iOS and Android development, scripting, and possibly more that I haven't discovered. While it may not be the best choice for most of these use-cases, it can be used for all of these, and that's hugely important for a newbie programmer. While it's easy for experienced programmers to pick up new languages on the fly and choose the best tool for the job, this probably isn't the case for someone who's just starting out. JavaScript allows a novice to dabble in many different areas without the overhead of learning many different languages and syntaxes.

I've used PHP, Ruby, and Python to create the backend of web applications. Someone who knows JavaScript can do the same with Node.js. I've used Python quite a bit to write scripts to manipulate and analyze data. Someone who knows JavaScript can do the same, also with Node, without even touching anything web-related. Native iOS and Android apps are written in Objective-C and Java, respectively. Appcelerator Titanium lets you write native apps with JavaScript. Knowing JavaScript lets you get started in many different areas, and from there you can learn the languages that are best suited to what you're trying to do.

Jeff Atwood takes this to the extreme when he says that any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. I don't fully subscribe to that idea, but I think it does say something about JavaScript's usefulness.

Little to no setup

Want to write some code and see what it does? Hop on any computer, and there's an interactive environment right there in the web browser. No packages to install, nothing to set up. You don't have to deal with the terminal, which can be intimidating for someone who's never worked outside a graphical environment before. Google Chrome even has debugging tools built right in.

Even if you've never programmed before, you can go to www.google.com, type the following snippet into the JavaScript console, and press enter.

document.gbqf.q.value = "I entered this with JavaScript!";

The search box will then populate with the text "I entered this with JavaScript". You might not understand what you did and why it worked, but at least you were able to run a piece of code and make it do something. That's far more accessible to a beginner than installing packages, setting up an environment, possibly importing libraries, and then finally being able to write code that actually does something.

Want to learn how a for loop works? Run the following code in the browser's JavaScript console to count from 1 to 50.

for(var i = 1; i <= 50; i++) { console.log(i); }

Congratulations! You just used one of the most important concepts in programming using the same software you're likely using to read this post (unless you're on a mobile device).

JSON

JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is widely used nowadays to transmit data between different services. Want to pull data from some API? You'll likely need to understand JSON. Each language has its own way of representing data, but if you understand how JavaScript does it, you've got JSON covered with no extra effort.

C-style syntax

While I actually prefer coding in languages that are more space-based than brace-based, C is an important language to know. Many popular high-level languages are implemented in C, so doing some C coding can give you a much better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. While knowing JavaScript does little to teach you about how things are actually implemented, coding in a language with C-style syntax makes for an easier transition to something like C or C++ if you want to go down that route in the future. I don't mean to say it will be an easy transition, but I think going from JavaScript to C would be easier than going from Python or Ruby to C.

Agree? Disagree? I'd love to hear your thoughts where you think is the best place for a new programmer to start.

UPDATE: I just came across this excellent Quora post: What's a good first programming language to learn? which addresses different reasons to get into programming and which languages are best suited for each of them.

Catching up with 2012 hackNY Fellow Sean Gransee

I wasn’t always a hacker.

There are some people who have always had it in them. Programmer by age 12. Software development internships in high school. A moderately successful business under their belt halfway through college.

I am not one of those people. I wasn’t a programmer in high school. Not even at the start of college. In fact, I went through my first year of college as a film major. Computer science? That was for the people much smarter than me.

My life has since taken a huge turn. I am now diving head first into the tech startup community. In less than half a year, I’ve developed a few small apps that have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and gotten press ranging from Lifehacker to NBC. I’m now working on an idea that I hope to convert into a sustainable business, something that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of doing a little while ago.

Read the rest of this post on the hackNY blog.

No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson's Law to Kick Procrastination's Ass

I've recently made four lifestyle changes that have allowed me to get more done and put much more effort into everything I do, all while feeling great with very little stress.

I sleep 8 hours a day

I work out for an hour every weekday

I hide all clocks while I'm working

I don't do anything related to academics on Saturdays and past 5pm on weekdays

My main focus of this post is the last two, but I'll briefly address the first two because I think they're very important.

Sleep

I read a lot of what tech entrepreneurs have to say, and I've noticed a trend. The ones who are most successful seem to be the ones who value their physical and mental health. I feel like every few months I see a new study about how getting adequate sleep makes you perform better. It's almost common knowledge at this point. Yet so few students take that research to heart.

Working more hours in a day doesn't necessarily correlate with getting more done. I find that I'm much more efficient and productive if I've slept well the night before. Therefore, I've been putting myself on a consistent sleep schedule from 1am-9am every weeknight. After a few days, I started being able to fall asleep much faster and wake up refreshed in the morning... something I haven't consistently felt in months.

Exercise

I also made a habit of going to the gym every day from 5-6pm. In the beginning this was a pain, and I felt like it was taking an hour away from me getting work done. I used to feel like I didn't have time to exercise, but now I feel like I don't have time NOT to exercise. By forming a habit, it feels like something I need to do every day, just like eating and showering. I don't think twice about it anymore.

Parkinson's Law

But my real trick for getting more done with much less stress is in the things that I don't do. It all stems directly from Parkinson's Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

-- Cyril Northcote Parkinson

The idea has been around since 1955, and taking advantage of it has completely changed the way I work. Parkinson's Law, in other words, states that if you have a certain amount of time to complete something, that's how long it will generally take.

Usually this means that if you have more time than you need to get something done, you'll use that extra time because it's available to you. From personal experience I've found the reverse to be true as well. If I give myself less time to do something, I'll still manage to get it done in that limited time.

Focus

Scott H. Young wrote in his email newsletter that time usually isn't the bottleneck when it comes to getting things done. The real bottleneck is focus. I found that to be absolutely true when it came to my study habits. Everything I did took 3-4 times longer than it should because I would distract myself every few minutes by Facebook, email, text messages, Hacker News, or any number of other distractions.

But the real time cost when it comes to these distractions aren't the distractions themselves. It's the context switching that occurs every time I'm distracted. Thirty seconds on Facebook may seem harmless, but the real time cost comes from the time it takes me to become mentally re-engaged with a task after a distraction. Read up on context switching, and the findings may surprise you.

Everything up until this point led me to believe that I would be much more productive if I eliminated distractions. If I could frequently achieve flow (being fully immersed in a task), then I'd be able to get things done more than twice as fast, right? So now comes the mission of eliminating distractions.

Distractions

The biggest distraction in my life (and potentially yours) isn't Facebook, email, friends, or anything remotely related. It's the clock. Whenever a clock is in my field of vision, I find myself constantly looking at it. Every time I look at the clock, some sort of thought about how much time I have left enters my head. Every time that happens, I waste time because of context switching.

Cover the clocks

So I eliminate clocks whenever I'm working. I disabled the clock in the corner of my laptop. Since you can't disable the clock on an iPad, I ripped the sticky part off a post-it note and covered the clock. My phone isn't a problem because I usually have that on "do-not-disturb mode" when I'm working.

The only genuinely useful thing about clocks when I'm working is that they tell me when I have to be somewhere. But I don't need a clock for that. All I need is an alarm. If I don't have to be somewhere until noon, I'm much better off not knowing what time it is until it's 11:45. I'm able to get by without ever looking at the clock because I set an alarm before I have to be anywhere. I use an app called Brrrr Alarm, which vibrates your phone instead of making noise, all the time when I'm working in a quiet space.

Let's think back to Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." The no-clocks thing works great for short tasks. When I don't know how much time I have to complete a task, I naturally work as quickly as possible the entire time.

But aside from eliminating some context switching, this alone doesn't really do much to help me efficiently complete long-term tasks. What harm can a little Reddit break do when I'm working on something that's due next week?

No studying after 5pm

The answer is simple. It might sound crazy, but rigorously following this rule has forced me to completely focus most of the time and start things long before they're due. I don't do anything related to academics on Saturdays and past 5pm on weekdays.

I like to think of this as reverse-procrastination. Think of how procrastination works. You put a task off as long as possible, and then complete it hours before it's due. In a way, you're utilizing Parkinson's Law when you procrastinate. You're limiting the time you have to do something, and therefore you're able to complete it in much less time than it would normally take you. In a way, procrastinators are very efficient when it comes to how long it takes them to get things done. But this comes at a great cost: stress.

If I give you a week to complete [a short] task, it's six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

-- Timothy Ferriss

It's stressful to do everything at the last minute. So I've taken procrastination and turned it on its head. I tell myself that the due date for everything I need to do each day is at 5pm. This forces me into consistent periods of ultra-efficient productivity because I'm constantly racing against time to get everything done by 5pm. I find myself not even wanting to take those quick breaks because they might stop me from completing everything I need to do by 5pm.

This constraint I've imposed on myself has also caused me to start tasks long before I need to. Before I started imposing this constraint, I generally wouldn't start anything until the day before it's due. Now, if I've finished everything I need to get done for tomorrow, I'll go ahead and start something that's not due until next week. Why? Because I don't want to get stuck in a situation a week from now where that task isn't done by 5pm. I now spend almost every moment before 5pm in my day actually working.

Here's what a typical week looks for me now:

Weekdays: 10am-5pm: Homework, studying, going to class 5pm-6pm: Gym 6pm-1am: Whatever I want, as long as it has nothing to do with academics 1am-9am: Sleep

Saturdays: Whatever I want, as long as it has nothing to do with academics Sundays: No constraints. I can use this as a catch-up day if I absolutely need it

I'll occasionally make exceptions to those constrains for group work or scheduled school events like review sessions and exams. Other than that, I stick to this schedule pretty rigorously.

By constraining the amount of time I have to study and do homework, I force myself to completely focus and put more effort into my studies with much less stress. This, combined with getting adequate sleep and exercise, has made me much happier and more efficient these past few weeks. It may or may not work for you, but this combination of lifestyle choices has been tremendously beneficial for me.

UPDATE: I'm not suggesting using the same constraints as mine. Only that constraining your time in some way can be beneficial.

UPDATE 2: I don't spend that time from 6pm-1am twiddling my thumbs. I work for a bunch of startups and a research lab, so most of that "free" time is actually spent working. I just find it much less stressful to separate my academic and professional time rather than jumble them together in my day.

For more, I recommend reading the following articles: How to Use Parkinson's Law to Your Advantage - Lifehack Beat Parkinson's Law and Supercharge Your Productivity - Litemind Parkinson's Law and Productivity - Academic Productivity

#productivity

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seangransee

A post I wrote on Software Cake explaining the halting problem by talking about Chuck Norris, and of course, cake!

hackNY Summer Series: Chris Dixon

The world isn’t run on ideas alone. Having a world-changing idea is great, but many big ideas are essentially worthless without proper execution. During one evening of the hackNY summer series, the 2012 Fellows got down to business with Chris Dixon. Chris is the co-founder of Siteadvisor (acquired by McAfee) and Hunch (acquired by eBay), as well as an angel investor. In this candid discussion about the business side of tech startups, Chris talked about the successes and failures he’s seen in the startup scene and gave us many tips for turning our dream business ideas into a reality.

Read the rest of this post on the hackNY blog.

The Real Value of College

A professor recently described his attendance policy like this:

Attendance isn't required. However, if you don't show up to class you're losing a lot of money. Here's your yearly tuition. Now let's divide that by the number of classes a typical student takes in a year and then by the number of lectures this course has. One hundred dollars. You're losing $100 for every hour you don't show up to class.

By that logic, this is the yearly breakdown of my college tuition:

Library access: $0 Athletic facilities: $0 Online resources: $0 Student network: $0 Alumni network: $0 Company recruiters: $0 Homework/exams: $0 Office hours: $0 GPA: $0 Diploma: $0 Lectures: $43,380

I've heard the same argument from parents, colleagues, and yes, even students.

In reality, lectures themselves aren't worth much at all. If they cost $100 an hour, then why can anyone with internet access watch lectures from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT for free? How come I can watch one of my favorite teachers lecture about anything from Trigonometry to Art History without paying a cent?

Because real learning doesn't happen during lectures. It happens while trying to solve homework problems. It happens during discussions. It happens while studying for exams. The lectures are just a starting point.

Let's look beyond courses. You're not just paying for college so you can learn about a bunch of subjects. Success in life isn't determined only by what you know. It's determined to a great extent by who you know, how you present yourself, and how you deal with complex situations.

Very few of these skills are improved through courses, and definitely not during lectures. Many important aspects of life are based on interactions with other people. I'd argue that the most valuable aspect of college is the immense opportunity for social interaction.

That's half of what you're paying for. You're paying to have the full college experience, which is a combination of lectures, homework, exams, a GPA, dorms, athletic events, alumni, recruiters, resources, eventually leading up to a diploma.

When you get a $20 meal at a restaurant, does the actual food cost $20? Of course not. You're paying for people to take your order, cook your food, and bring it to you. You're paying for the expertise of an experienced chef. You're paying for the building and its utilities. You're paying for the atmosphere. You're paying for the whole experience of going out to eat. The cost of the food is a fraction of that $20.

Nobody argues that your entire check at a restaurant just pays for the ingredients. So why do people argue that your entire college tuition just pays for the lectures?

#education

The Decisions Behind WikiLoopr

A couple weeks ago, I created a website called WikiLoopr. Hours after it went live, the site exploded on Hacker News, made its way around Reddit and Twitter, and got featured in an NBC News tech blog. Those first 24 hours brought in over 40,000 hits to the site.

The site went live on the same day that I came up with the idea. Plus, I’ve never paid a dime for hosting. This was my least expensive project ever, both in terms of time and money invested. It is also by far my most successful. Here’s how I turned an idea into a viral success in a single night.

If you want concrete code examples for anything I talk about, check out the source code.

I satisfied my own curiosity.

The idea stemmed from this blog post by Andy Jordan, a brilliant student at the University of Chicago and fellow intern at Syndio Social. After reading his post, I spent way too much time that day looking up random Wikipedia articles and clicking links until I entered a loop. I was hooked. Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided I wanted to build something that could automatically show you the entire path to the loop without all the manual clicking. A couple hours later, I came home from work and got started.

I kept the design simple.

Look at the design. There’s nothing there that’s not necessary. I didn’t set out to create a beautifully designed website. All I wanted was to see the loop that stems from a Wikipedia article. The site has two distinct colors, plus a few shades of gray. As far as images go, there are two logos and a loading spinner. Nothing more is needed.

I didn’t use a database.

Yes, it would have been cool if I had kept track of things like what people are searching for, average length to the loop, and more. But this wasn’t part of my original plan. I didn’t care too much about analyzing the usage… I just wanted to get it out there! This saved me a bit of development time and aided performance.

All the logic is on the client side

Speaking of performance, this one is huge. I run the site on a free Heroku server, which can only process one thing at a time. Unfortunately, processing one request from the user can take quite a while. The site has to find the first link in the article, follow the link and download the next article, find the first link again, etc. Some requests can spawn up to 50 Wikipedia articles. With hundreds of people on the site at once, that would have killed my precious free Heroku dyno.

So I took a different approach. I wrote all the logic in Javascript (well, Coffeescript to be more accurate). When a user visits the site, the browser essentially receives a list of instructions for what to do once the user searches for a page. It’s the ultimate form of parallel processing. Instead of one little server downloading all those pages and finding all the first links, hundreds of browsers can do that work at the same time.

The downside of this is that the site is much slower on mobile devices. But the huge benefit of running everything on the client side far outweighs this minor disadvantage.

I didn’t cache anything

This one is a little controversial. Yes, I could have cached the results so that any time a new page is requested, WikiLoopr stores the first link so it doesn’t have to fetch the page from Wikipedia again. I didn’t do this simply because I wanted to release this thing as quickly as possible, and it simply wasn’t necessary. It may have put a bit of strain on Wikipedia servers, but to a site that serves 2500 pages per second the increase is barely noticeable.

Looking back, I’m really glad I never ended up caching anything. Why? Because the loop kept changing. When I made the site, most pages would lead you to a loop between Philosophy and Reality with nothing in between. Over the next few days, Wikipedians edited pages for Philosophy and similar concepts, which changed the loop. About 6 hours after I launched WikiLooper, the loop contained 28 articles. It has since leveled off at 7. Andy Jordan, the author of the blog post that inspired WikiLoopr, wrote a follow-up piece in which he described the observer effect that was occurring.

I made the site evolve with Wikipedia

As I said, the loop was just two articles. In addition, the path leading up to the loop was usually around 5 or 10. Everything fit nicely on the screen at once. But then as both the loop and the path leading up to it got bigger, they would no longer fit on the same screen. I started getting requests to show how big the loop is. So I added a little display on the right side of the page. Not only does this tell many users exactly what they wanted to know all along, but it makes the site easier to understand.

I didn't waste time hunting down bugs

It would have been nearly impossible to find all the bugs myself. With an input domain of 4,049,583, it would have been pretty damn hard to test to make sure every Wikipedia article worked. So I didn’t even try. I spent about an hour testing it with all the random Wikipedia articles that popped into my head, and that’s it. Then I released it knowing that many articles would cause problems.

And they did. But people were very quick to point them out. People commented on Hacker News and Reddit. People tweeted bugs to me and submitted issues to GitHub. Within the first few hours, I knew about almost every bug that existed on the site. I fixed them later that day, and haven’t noticed any issues since the first few days. As far as I’m concerned, WikiLoopr works for 99.9% of pages and I can leave the code alone and move onto something else.

So there you have it. Feel free to reach out if you have any specific questions.

My summer in hackNY

Whenever someone asks me how my summer was, I usually start rambling on and on, unable to contain my excitement. This is my first attempt to finally put my thoughts about this past summer into coherent sentences.

I’ll start with an analogy. Since a lot of my friends outside tech are very familiar with theatre, I’ll use that as the basis of my analogy.

Imagine being an aspiring actor. Someone gives you the opportunity to live in New York City on the same floor as 30 other aspiring actors without paying a dime. They assign all 30 of you to different theaters on Broadway, where you all get to play fairly significant roles in your respective shows. You also get paid handsomely for your work.

Sounds like a dream come true, right? But wait, it gets better.

During the day, you all go off to work. Two or three evenings a week, you all come together to a different theatre and meet some of the most successful actors, directors, writers, and producers in the industry. People that you’ve read about for years, you finally get the chance to meet.

You spend the rest of the summer becoming very close with everyone at work, getting to know the other students in the program, and making connections with people who have made it in the theatre industry.

Now replace all the theatre references with “tech industry” or “startup scene”, and you basically have my summer. That is hackNY in a nutshell.

My day job was at an awesome startup called Kollabora. I spent 9 weeks there working on some really cool projects, learning an incredible amount, becoming close with my co-workers, and in general having a truly amazing time.

A couple evenings a week, I got to meet some people who’s products you may have used. Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), and Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow) to name a few. These aren’t random employees of their companies, they’re the people who started them. Add to that list some great investors, lawyers, and an insanely talented user experience designer.

I got to know some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else in this program becomes incredibly successful. These are the world’s up-and-coming innovators, and it was a pleasure getting to know many of them.

Every few weeks I attended a tech meetup and even gave a presentation of my own at two of them. When I wasn’t busy working or meeting people, I explored the city either with other hackNYers or with my friends from school.

Combine all that with free housing near Union Square and a nice paycheck, and you have the best summer of my life.

Viva la hackNY.

———————

If you want to read more in depth about hackNY, check out Jesse Pollak’s excellent blog post.

From film major to computer science

During my two years of college, I've spent one year as a film major and one year as a computer science major. Computer science is without a doubt the one I’ve found to be easier and less time consuming.

Most people who hear this think I’m crazy. At my university, the school of communication (which includes film majors) is stereotypically the one where students get to slack off and have obnoxious amounts of free time. At the other end of the spectrum are engineering students (including computer science majors), who stereotypically spend most of their academic lives working on, well, academics. From my personal experience, I’ve found both of these stereotypes to be false.

Let me explain…

I like to divide being a film major into two parts: analysis and production.

The analysis part sounds simple enough. Just watch a bunch of movies and write about them. The problem is that I’ve never been particularly good at finding all the deep symbolism in every damn frame of the movie. After a while, watching movies became a chore and something I didn’t look forward to. Not so easy anymore.

Then there’s production. Actually making a movie. This part is fucking hard, and I have the utmost respect for people who can do it well. The schedules are grueling because you have to coordinate around everyone else’s busy schedule. There’s so much to keep track of at once, and there’s very little you can do to correct mistakes after it’s too late. In short, this just wasn’t the lifestyle for me.

So I switched to computer science.

It immediately clicked with me. Sure, there's a whole different set of challenges in this field. But I not only found these challenges to be much more interesting, but I enjoyed tackling them.

I was able to work at my own convenience rather than at everyone else’s. I procrastinated a lot less because I truly enjoyed what I was doing. I slept a lot more at night. I ended up with a lot more free time to invest in jobs and other interesting projects. After a while I found that I could succeed without even attending class.

Here’s some data to illustrate my point.

Spring 2011 75% communication classes Hours spent in class in a typical week: 18 Term GPA: 3.43

Spring 2012 100% engineering classes Hours spent in class in a typical week: 3 Term GPA: 3.68

In the engineering school, I cut my time spent in class down by 83%. I also spent less time outside of class doing academic work. And in doing so, I achieved better grades.

Maybe I’m an odd case, but I think it’s bullshit when people talk about how engineers have it so rough and film majors have it so easy. I don’t think you can realistically say that any major is “easier” or “harder” than any other. It all depends on the person, their interests, their lifestyle, and how they think.

Engineers just happen to complain a lot more.

softwarecake

seangransee

A post I wrote on Software Cake explain version control through the eyes of Oompa Loompas.

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