Critique

Everyone says hindsight is 20/20 but that's only true if you actually take the time to look back.  I'm going to examine existing products and decisions and try to extract as many lessons as possible.  Here's an example:

I know that I hate just about every piece of software made by Adobe (yes, even photoshop) and that I love almost everything made by Google.  I need to figure out what Adobe does wrong and what Google does right so that I can try to incorporate those lessons into my own work.

Strategy

Every day I find myself having more influence over the decisions made at the company I work for.  Unfortunately, I have almost no experience making business related decisions and I need a way to practice without actually putting my company at risk.  The plan is to take real situations that companies are in right now and figure out exactly what I would do in their shoes.  I'll never know if my plan would have worked, but I can follow what the company actually does and hopefully learn from that.

I believe that you learn much more from mistakes than from successes.  My goal is to learn from other people's mistakes so that I can avoid making them altogether.

Demonstration

One thing that I love about my job is that I get to work on all kinds of different projects which results in me developing a lot of new skills.  I've found that if I need to do something I'm uncomfortable with, the best place to start is by copying someone else that does it well.  Then I make it my own.  I'm going to try to post these exercises on this blog.

For example, I do all of the graphic design for my company.  I have no formal training in design so I have to learn as I go.  I often know what type of look I want for a site but I don't know how to actually design something to look that way.  In these situations, I find a website that has accomplished the look I'm going for and I try to make an exact copy of that site.  I obviously can't use this as my own design, but I normally learn everything I need to by the time I'm done and then I can start from scratch with a lot more confidence, experience and knowledge.

I also regularly write stupid little web apps for my own personal uses.  I'll try to make these available through this blog as I write them just to demonstrate the type of stuff I'm working on.

Ideas

Sometimes I have ideas for projects or businesses but I just don't have the time or expertise to pursue them.  I realized recently that if you asked me to name some of these supposedly great ideas, I'd draw a blank.  I want to record anything worthwhile that I come up with on this blog both as a way to record the ideas for the future and to help me think them through in a more structured way than I'm used to.