Looking for an assistant, apprentice, or intern programmer

I have the good fortune of having three awesome software business projects in the pipeline. My idea garden has never been more luscious!  Our goals for these three projects are ambitious and I'd love to get some help with them.

If you've got basic programming ability and are looking for a way to get started as a professional programmer, or you want to get some experience working on early-stage products, or you think I'm an interesting person, I'd love to work with someone who wants to learn the ropes. I would give you lots of mentoring and lots of responsibility for executing different parts of these ideas. We could work out equity compensation if that's interesting to you, but the main benefit would be experiential. By the time we're done you would know a lot about how to launch your own products.

All three of these involve working with successful, super interesting, super smart non-technical entrepreneurs. So that's an additional benefit.

I don't even know if such a person exists, but I think when I was getting started I would have loved to do something like this.

Three more important, straightforward computer security precautions

I had many non-tech friends tell me they appreciated my article about two important computer security precautions everyone should take. So here are three more I recommend:

1. Start using different passwords for everything. I recommend either LastPass or 1Password to help you track them all. These tools take care of auto-filling the password also help you generate super strong passwords.  If you only change ONE password from the default you use everywhere, it should be your email password. If you lose control of your email you could lose control of many online services. (Note: LastPass is better if you use multiple machines, as it seamlessly syncs passwords across browsers in a secure way)
2. Make sure the browser you regularly use has locked-down Java and Flash settings. Mac users are no longer invulnerable to these attack vectors. That article explains what Windows, Mac, and Linux users should do to avoid the whole class of attacks represented by the new Flashback malware.
3. For laptops, store your data on an encrypted disk. Ideally you would encrypt your whole hard drive; OS X has a nice feature called File Vault that will do this for you easily, and doesn't seem to affect the computer's performance.

Slides from my Coding for Uncertainty talk at RubyNation

Update: here's video of the talk
I had a great time at RubyNation - definitely one of the best tech conferences I've been to! I gave a talk called Coding for Uncertainty where I spoke about some of the tips and techniques I've been using to speed up my coding process (mostly by eliminating waste and making my code easier to maintain, not by cutting corners).

Important links from the talk:

• Rapid Development
• Service Oriented Design with Ruby on Rails
• Enterprise Rails
• Objects on Rails
• The Lean Startup
• 12factor.net
• James Golick's "Crazy, Heretical, and Awesome"

The slides are below:

Coding for uncertainty  

Putting shorter-form content on Tumblr

Since I aspire to the "Fred Wilson School of Blogging", I've been experimenting with blogging informal, shorter-form content on Tumblr at http://short.subelsky.com/. So far it's been pretty fun! Check me out over there if you like.

My new email signature

I've been inspired by Scott Burkholder and Matt Porterfield to change my email signature:

SENT FROM BALTIMORE
subelsky.com
@subelsky // (443) ###-####

Even as we're all more globally connected, I think it's very helpful to brand yourself as being rooted in a place and part of a community. I'm also just really proud of Baltimore and I love living here, so this is just a small way to communicate that to my correspondents.

How to help tech entrepreneurs in your city

I've attended a few meetings lately with groups in Baltimore who want to help technology entrepreneurs. Here's what I've been thinking and saying in these meetings.

First, make your city more livable

You could do the most good by focusing on quality-of-life issues that affect everyone. People who want to start tech businesses are likely to be highly mobile with options and resources. Any city that takes itself seriously as a safe, tolerant place offering diverse choices of lifestyle, housing, and fun things to do, should automatically become a technology hub.

Fortunately, there are already many people working on improving quality of life. I asked Scott Burkholder for some examples of civic and cultural groups that are doing good work with whom we in the business community could partner. Some of his suggestions are below:

• Safe and Sound Campaign 
• Incentive Mentoring Program
• Baltimore Intersection
• Hand in Hand
• City Neighbors Charter Schools
• Play Works
• Baltimore Rock Opera
• Winter Festival of Wonders
• Fluid Movement
• Glass Mind Theater
• Single Carrot Theater
• Open Walls Baltimore

(of course Scott was too modest to mention his own public art endeavor, Baltimore Love Project)

Entrepreneurs don't actually need much direct help

By definition entrepreneurs are "relentlessly resourceful", so on some level they don't need any help - they need the government to stay out of their way (I'm looking at you, Tech Tax 2). I always think of my friend Scott Messinger and his company Common Curriculum, which I advise. That dude is not waiting for anyone to give him anything; he taught himself to code, he's overcoming all kinds of obstacles, and he's making a great product.

So if you want more tech businesses to form in your city, what can you do recruit more Scott Messingers and how do you retain the ones you already have? What can you do to make your entrepreneur corps more efficient (in the sense that they either succeed or fail-and-learn more quickly)?

Create a center of excellence

Most of the organizations I've talked to are internally-focused. They have members or clients and are primarily devoted to servicing them, because that's where their revenue comes from. What we need is a "center of excellence for technology entrepreneurship" funded by entities that care about improving Baltimore's tech industry competitiveness. This center would be externally-focused, dedicated to educating citizens about the science of entrepreneurship while helping them practice it more efficiently. This could include:

• Hosting entrepreneurs-in-residence who offer regular office hours to local startups (perhaps this would be a good way for cashed-out entrepreneurs to give back, a place for them to hang their hats while looking for the next opportunity)
• Publishing blogs and podcasts documenting new technology endeavors (sort of like what gb.tc is now doing) and disseminating lessons learned
• Organizing workshops, bringing in guest speakers, hosting courses in its own classrooms, etc.
• Coordinating tech education efforts (which might look like DC's new Hungry Academy or NYC's Academy for Software Engineering)
• Acting as a trusted connector, brokering introductions for startups and investors/mentors/customers/service providers
• Pooling risk and providing access to shared resources like office space (perhaps by guaranteeing leases)

There are a couple of places where that center could reside. I'm hopeful that one of the organizations I've been meeting with will take on this role. There are also two exciting projects developing this year that might house such a center or take on some of these missions, one of which is opening its doors in a few weeks. The other one, led by the Innovation Alliance, is holding a town hall meeting next week to discuss all of these issues.

A video game almost made me cry

I recently finished playing an excellent video game, Mass Effect 2 (just before Mass Effect 3 comes out), on the advice of one of my favorite writers, Tom Bissell. His video game writing on Grantland is extraordinary and his book Extra Lives is a great exploration of video games as an art form. In the book he describes how storytelling in video games has become "formally compelling" (even if the stories being told are overly baroque or poorly written) and uses Mass Effect as an example.

I totally agree with Bissell. There's a pivotal scene halfway through the game where virtually your entire crew gets captured. You're given a choice: do you want to go on a high-risk rescue mission, for which the team you lead is unprepared, or do you want to continue to prepare so you're ready for the mission? If you go on the rescue mission at that moment you're also potentially leaving a bunch of side missions undone.

While some characters were beseeching me to move quickly "while there's still time to save our crew", I had other characters cautioning me to wait, telling me that proceeding would be suicidal. I thought this was the standard sort of fake-dramatic choice offered up by video games. Why would I want to rush and  get creamed by the Collectors when I had more fun stuff to do?

So I prudently put off the rescue mission, but had an eerie feeling walking through my ship. Once, it had been populated with chattering NPCs, but now was silent. I went about completing all of the side missions and got my rescue team fully dialed-in: plussed-up attributes, awesome weapons, useful upgrades, and so on. Only then did I order the rescue attempt.

My team prevailed, and the mission turned out to be relatively easy given how prepared we were (I should say how prepared "we" were, since we're talking about virtual characters - yet they felt real enough to me). But here's the thing: when we discovered where our crew was being held, there was only one survivor left. And I saw something horrible happen to the second-to-last survivor just as we showed up. The sole survivor then lashed out at me (at my character), protesting the length of time it had taken us to arrive. She said stuff like, "I'm sorry, it was so hard watching them all die." (All this hit home because the voice acting in Mass Effect is superb, something Tom Bissell also wrote about)

It was then that I realized: had I chosen to immediately go on the rescue mission, Mass Effect 2 was programmed to let more crew members survive. That choice I made unconsciously really mattered! Maybe I could have saved all of them! A glitch in the rendering underlined this for me, somehow more poignant for being erroneously disclosed. In the background of the frames with the surviving, distraught crewmember castigating me, I could see another crew member, whom I had already been told I did not save. So obviously there was code in there to control how many survivors I got to rescue based on how long I took to get there, yet this small bug caused one of the dead crew members to show up anyway.

The scene gave me chills. It made me feel horror and sadness and regret. I can't think of any other storytelling medium that could create a similar effect, because the game implicated me in these events. I made a careless choice, even if it was the right choice, and pretend people suffered horribly. I wish I could go back and start the game over again, knowing that my decisions in this game, unlike so many others, would bear such weight. I'm also really curious to see how hard the rescue mission would have been had I listened to my gung-ho virtual colleagues, and how many more crew members I could have saved.

This is what Bissell means when he says these games have become formally compelling: a good story-driven video game can grab hold of you; can involve you; can entertain you in a deep, rich way that no other medium can. I predict that just as we are seeing with recent television, some of the best writers will start to gravitate towards this medium because it offers such rich narrative possibilities.