This one’s a bit dry but it lays out some ideas I think are really important for successfully launching a niche engineering product. The kinds of products I’m thinking of become a tool for someone else so they should adapt to the goals of the user rather than requiring the user to think differently about their goals. They should be blend in with the world they’re used in but they should be open to inspection and modification without undue effort.

SD cards are hard to keep track of because they’re tiny, they hold a lot of data, and no one device can read every format of card. I’ve accumulated a lot of these little media cards; technically some are MicroSDHC, some are MicroSDXC, and some are older “full size” SD cards in my collection. I’d like to inventory my cards so that I can spend less time looking for a card when I need one.

When you wake up in the morning and you don’t have something on the calendar already how do you decide what to do? Or maybe you have leisure time in the evening. Suppose after dinner you can spend an hour however you like. What happens in the next sixty minutes of your mortal time? Obviously these are questions that you’d never ask yourself. Such a thought would never even rise to your conscious mind.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve observed as a language-learner. I’d like to talk about it today by way of some experiences in my own life. I grew up in a city with a healthy mix of humans from many parts of the world. That gave me access to lots of people whose first language differed from mine. Inevitably that makes for some fun - like all the kids in my gradeschool learning how to swear in Italian complete with expressive gestures.

Late Night PC Service was a business I started back around 2003. I had a fulltime job writing software when I started it. My idea was to spend evenings solving hands-on computer problems for people in their homes and spend my weekends building websites for myself or clients. The logo was pretty nice and I liked the amusing mix of risque and nerd colliding in the business name. It was pretty demanding sometimes, wearing all the hats: technician and developer were the roles I wanted.