review | Polymath Programmer

What did you ship in 2010?

This is my list in response to Seth Godin’s year 2010 ship list. Initially, I could only think of 2 or 3 items. I sat down and looked through my blog archives for ideas. It turns out I didn’t do too bad.

First, a definition of the word “ship”. When you ship something, it means you created something and put it out in the world to see. It means you did something that other people can comment on, improve on, hate on (that can happen). Maybe you wrote a useful ebook and told everyone about it. Maybe you painted a garden and put it on your website for sale. Maybe you stood in front of hundreds of people and talked about your ideas. Maybe you organised an event to get people aware of a cause. The conditions are that it must be done, and it must be out there in public.

So here’s my list:

Launched Math Wizard, a Dungeons & Dragons game supplement.
Presented at Barcamp twice. The first time was a disaster. The second time was better (I talked about e-zines).
Gave free stuff on the blog for the first time, because it was a special day. I thought there would be zero responses, but I was surprised.
Launched my own online magazine, Singularity in June 2010. Whaddaya know, 7 issues already (not counting January 2011 issue)!
Swallowed my fear and asked people for interviews for my magazine. I interviewed Parker Emmerson, Alex Hall, Iain Broome and Matt Pearce.
Did a voice recording for money.
Learnt to draw with a pencil. Check out my landscape drawing and window view drawing.
Launched my store. Will be adding more products (such as my Excel Open XML programming guide, but it doesn’t count as “shipped” since it’s delayed). Buy a T-shirt! Support my magazine!
In an effort to ignite my creativity, I did a No-Mirror diet. Yes, I dared to not shave for a week.

I also helped people with queries including programming, maths, and business-related concepts. I’ve even received engineering problems, although I didn’t do anything (I asked an engineer friend for help). It’s just that I seem to get requests for help, and sometimes they’re strange queries… I’m not sure if these count as shipping, but the prominent ones are with negative numbers in business reports, long-term percentage contribution and reverse engineering a quadratic Bezier curve.

Ok, so I managed to do a lot. So tell me, what did you ship in 2010?

AONC review – be remarkable and question the status quo

The Art of Non-Conformity book

I wrote a review on The Art of Non-Conformity book (Amazon link), by Chris Guillebeau in the November issue of Singularity. Here’s an excerpt:

Interestingly, Chris compared the amount of time and effort spent working on his university thesis paper and his world domination manifesto. Both took roughly the same amount of time. But the former was read by only 3 people. His manifesto was downloaded more than 100,000 times.

When I read that, I was thinking, “That is so true!” My own thesis was read (presumably) by only 1 person, my advisor. My blog articles and this magazine are read by more than 1 person. Mathematically speaking, I’ve already done better. My work may not be as widely read as Chris’, but the concept is the same: more bang per word. Understand the result you’re going for.

Download the magazine with the entire review.

You can also buy Chris’ book too (Amazon link).