Ideas I’m Exploring

If any of these strike you as deeply interesting, email me.

• What happened to apprenticeships? For hundreds of years people apprenticed under masters for an average of 7 years. Why did this drop off and what happens if we bring it back?

• Significantly more people are being able to make a living without working for someone else. How can we enable more people to do this? What barriers and burdens can we remove? How can we help them focus on what makes their idea special and not the implementation details?

• Software development has shifted focus from a research topic to a focus solely around implementation and execution. What happens when we return to the research thinking and improve the tools of software development? Many people have joked about their parents being able to write software to solve their problems. How come this isn’t the case?

• Video blogs (vlogs) are gaining in popularity on YouTube at an impressive rate. What is it that’s attractive about this? How can we make it more valuable? What will vlogging be like in 5 or 10 years? Who vlogs? Why do they do it?

• How can you share the way you think with more people?

• The quality of software seems to be directly related to the amount of context it understands. For example, Slack is hugely impressive because of it’s attention to detail. How can we bring this smartness to all software?

• Education is growing at a rapid pace. Everyone seems to still be trying to charge for the content. This seems obviously wrong. A poor person with access to the internet will find free content to teach themselves without paying a dime. That’s the beauty of the internet. So, what then, do you charge for in education? Mentorship?