Ciro Santilli
OurBigBook.comAt first I had intended to create a lot more content for the world class university located where I lived, but I ended up not doing that and just improving the project tech instead.
There are a few reasons for this, good or bad:
- as a tech nerd, my natural tendency is to first sit down by myself and code to solve big general problems rather than go out and try to solve specific people's specific problems to obtain money and users
- at one point I got the feeling that helping students with a bunch of small courses might be useful, and that instead I might get more impact by instead by focusing on creating content for a next big thing area such as: because many of the courses are fundamentally useless by design due to misalignment between university and reality.I'm still not sure what to do about that, but I do think I'll try to do a bit of course solving at least and see how it goes.One thing I've learned first hand through Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions and Linux Kernel Module Cheat is that the barrier to make money from a useful open source learning project that benefits a large number of people a little bit is huge, perhaps infinite, and that it might be better to instead focus more intensely on fewer users. This insight pushes me more towards going for solving local courses.Another consideration that supports going for courses is that being close to students is perhaps my only unfair advantage. There is likely no one else in the world in the same position that I'm at, with some "free time" to chill with undergrads and help them with 100% of my undivided attention and passion.A point that pulls me towards the big tutorials however is that my time is almost up, and focusing on them would increase the chances that I will be work in those fields afterwards. This feeling may go against the best interests of the project, but it is perhaps an inevitable self preservation consideration unless someone decides to free me from that forever with the 2M :-)
- the entry barrier to help students of a top university is rather high. The students are already extremely busy and pressured (this is pe), and if it is in the slightest hard to explain their problems to you because you are not fluent enough in their subject, they will find a faster way to obtain the knowledge and never come to you.
- I also did a bit of procrastinating with a few quick few exploration into cute programming projects. Nothing too crazy long however, just the usual. It's in my nature to have broad interests, and perhaps only such a person can make a OurBigBook.com. I'm not a fast worker. But I never stop. Once something is in my "this must be done or learnt list", I just keep coming back to it again and again until it happens.
The downsides of going for tech first are severe:There are however counterpoints to these as for anything else:
- you risk being misaligned with what users want and spend enormous amounts of time on useless features
- it is also rather demotivating that you are working hard on a really cool feature but you know that there are no users yet so no one will benefit from it, and that this feature alone is not enough to attract the users anyways
- I'm a user and I'm always improving it for myself. If there are other people like me out there, they will love it. If there aren't, perhaps I'll never be able to do anything that caters for them well enough anyways.
- as the two users made me understand, once someone touches your thing, they expect it to be perfect, and their standards are extremely high. This is understandable in part given the large number of note taking apps in existence, and notably WYSIWYG ones. As such, there is some rationale for improving tech.