Jason Adriaan's Blog

Question: How do we as developers all get our world-changing side-projects into the world if we cannot muster up the strength to ever finish any of them? I have a theory how we can, and here it is…

The Problem: As developers doing either a day job or freelance work it is almost impossible to get around to building your own applications.

Required Ingredients: For this you need some developers as friends sitting with the same problem as mentioned above.

The Solution: Take up one of your friend’s side-projects, build it for them to spec and charge them a mutually agreed on amount. (eg. $ 5000) Then ask your friend to build your application for the same amount of money and mutually agree on a time-frame in which to complete it.

The Result: In theory by the end of this both you and your developer friend should both have fully built products that have been built to spec in the defined timeline.

The Theory: Side-projects generally are never developed because we are driven by very basic primal forces. This solution provides a monetary incentive but doesn’t cost any party a cent unless he/she does not deliver on the mutually agreed upon workload. So hypothetically if you build your friends side-project and he does not build yours he owes you $5000 for services rendered.

Now give it a try and tell me how it goes :)

The technology industry is no different to the music  and movie industries. We are holding onto archaic laws which are doing more harm than good. Patent law like Copyright law has become completely impractical in its current form.

Old patents made for cascaded windows and one click purchases are being infringed by nearly every startup and if the dinosaurs of the industry decided, they could kill the whole industry with a couple of lawsuits. Everyone has at least one piece of copyright infringed material sitting on their home computer, similarly most startups infringe patents owned by large companies.

The early tech businesses went about patenting everything they could lay their hands on. So pioneer technology businesses now own the vocabulary of the modern web and dare you utter a word and you can potentially have lawyers at your door.

Microsoft sits on 20 000 patents, Amazon owns the patent for the one click purchase, Yahoo has hundreds of patents sitting in their portfolio. Nuclear weapons amassed for a the day when they become threatened or desperate enough to use them.

Patents had an original function of protecting inventors in exchange for public disclosure of their treasured secrets so that they don’t die with them. We have long since moved on from those humble beginings. The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. Today patents in software are like copyrights on mp3’s - they ignore reality and impede human progress.

So let’s stop writing posts about how Hollywood and the Music industry is outdated, archaic and evil. There is an elephant in the room and his name is patent troll, and he is the demon we have to deal with.

This interview was from 2005 when facebook was still in it’s infancy. Facebook had some momentum but not nearly enough for Mark to be convinced that he was building the 800 million user monster that they have today.

I know some of you have seen this interview before, but I just wanted to note something interesting here. Notice how humble and rather oblivious Mark was to what exactly he was building. It was just a simple little directory to connect people, nothing more.