To get an MBA or not to get an MBA, that is the question.

I’ve been considering getting an MBA for some time. At one point several months ago I had made up my mind that I was going to get one. Fortunately, I came to my senses and now I’m 95% sure that I’m not going to.

I think it started with an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about earnings reports. I had come across (yet another) term I wasn’t familiar with. My thought process went something like this: “Diluted earnings per share… what the hell is that? I have no idea. It sounds important. I better get an MBA so I figure out what its talking about.”

I started doing some research and found several online schools that offered MBA programs that focused on entrepreneurship (attending a school isn’t practical at the moment). The descriptions sounded perfect for me — if you want to start and run a business, we’ll teach you what you need to know… yada yada yada. It would cost me about $18K and 20 months of time at about 15 hours/week to get it. The wife and I discussed it and decided that I should do it.

I decided to wait a week to make the final decision.

I didn’t sleep well that week. I’d lay awake calculating in my head how much free time I’d have to work on the technical half of it. It turned out I’d have to pretty much put learning Rails and web development on hold until I finished the MBA program. I tried figuring out ways around this — maybe I could work on it during my lunch breaks. Maybe I could get up early on the weekends to get a few hours in. Maybe…

It wasn’t going to happen and I knew it–there just wasn’t enough time in the day. I’d have to put my plans on hold in order to get the MBA. When I realized that I became very depressed. I’d go hack away, frustrated that I’d have to put it on hold in order to learn what the significance of diluted earnings per share was.

There were other considerations as well. The online schools that offered these specialized MBA programs were not exactly prestigious. In fact, the primary one I was considering was solely an online school — they did not have a campus anywhere. They were mentioned on a few online MBA related web sites, but other than that, it didn’t appear that anyone had heard of them. If I was confident that I would learn everything I needed to know from their courses then maybe — but I worried that the lack of information I could find on their programs reflected on its quality. There were some good schools that offered other types of online MBAs, such as international business, accounting, and the like, but they cost upwards of $30K and I didn’t want to learn that stuff anyway.

Then it hit me. This — hacking — is what I love doing. It’s what I’m passionate about. I was considering giving that up in order to learn some business theory and definitions, something that I could learn pretty well on my own anyway. It’s not like I could even network (since they’re online) or get a resume booster (since no one has heard of them).

Additionally, given the time and money it would cost me, pursing an MBA would probably have the opposite effect on my goals. Instead of working on something tangible and acquiring the technical skills and experience necessary to found a startup, I’d be bogged in textbooks learning a lot of things I’ll probably never use. In a strange, ironic way, I think that in five years I’d be more likely to work as some mid-level manager with an MBA than without one and that is exactly the opposite of where I want to be.

And so, MBA is postponed… probably indefinitely.

I wouldn’t mind getting a masters in computer science, but I’ll save that for another post…

P.S. This guy’s recent blog article on his Wharton MBA inspired me to make this post.

With Domain Pigeon progressing nicely, its time to start learning how to deploy it. While it won’t be ready for several weeks, part of it will be integrated with Paypal so its essential that I have plenty of time to develop and test that portion of it.

Most of my inital hosting research was from a three month old post on HackerNews regarding the best way to work on a Ruby on Rails app. Now I have to admit this is kind of stupid in retrospect… but I didn’t realize I could build and run a Rails app locally; I thought it had to be hosted somewhere. I quickly found out about InstantRails, which I’ve been using since then to experiment and do work. Now that it’s time to actually launch an app, I’m back where I started, looking for a good host.

The responses on that thread pointed to Slicehost, Heroku, Dreamhost, HostingRails, and a few others. I briefly considered learning how to be a system administrator so that I could configure and maintain my own slice at Slicehost, but after doing a little research I realize I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m better off finding a managed solution. Dreamhost seems to have a pretty good reputation, though their lack of focus on Rails turned me off it. HostingRails and Heroku both focused on Rails applications, which I like, so it was mainly a chioce between the two.

HostingRails seemed like a decent option. The reviews were generally favorable and most of the negative comments about downtime were from the 2006 period. The site was pretty well done, though some of the tutorials could have used a bit of work. I could even pay them a one-time sum of $79 and they would set up and configure my app to run on their servers. Or, if I wanted, I could use their tutorials to do it on my own. I looked through them and they seemed reasonable enough. One bad thing is that they require a year’s payment up front, which seems like a +EV move for the makers of a crappy product.

On to Heroku… I had been to Heroku several months back when this all started and when I came back yesterday to check it out I saw that everything was basically the same. That mistakenly led me to believe that the site wasn’t still being updated and for whatever reason was inactive. I later found out that that’s not the case. The site is very much active and the founders apparently are very helpful for whatever issues come up. I also thought that they posted a banner at the top of each site, but again, that was bad information; the banner is for the developer to access the control panel. It can be turned off as required.

I asked HN, which hasn’t disappointed yet, and surely enough they came back with clarifications and help on the issues I had with Heroku. This pretty much sums up their responses:

My experiences with heroku has been very positive so far: The online IDE and tools are very robust and they’ve been responsive to me when I needed to ask questions.

I don’t think you’ll be disappointed

And so, as the title suggestions, I’m going to use Heroku to host Domain Pigeon. I really have no idea what I’m getting into, but the site looks perfect for my skill level and site requirements.

Tomorrow, time permitting, I’m going to try to launch a test application so I can familiarize myself with the site.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I downloaded TextMate, the Ruby on Rails TextMate bundle, and watched a Peepcode screencast on how to use them. Kind of like that Macbook, I don’t know how I ever went without it.

Even though I haven’t seriously played poker in some time, I still browse the 2+2 poker forums often. There are a boatload of really smart people on the site. While most of the conversations are about poker, there are often great discussions about success, philosophy, happiness, & life — topics that are usually on my mind.

The general note to everyone is stop spending so much time grinding/ on two plus two and spend more time doing fun stuff you want to do. I have realized playing poker gives you the freedom to do a lot of **** that you could otherwise couldn’t and most people don’t take advantage of it. A simple example is I wanted to start working out, my trainer said what times are good for you? My answer was any time because I have nothing to do all day. I suspect this is true for a lot of you. Focus less on poker, focus more on life. Take advantage of your freedom and do stuff you want to do. If there’s a skill you want to learn, or something in your life you want to improve. Just ****ing do it, stop wasting your time browsing 2p2 and get useful things done in to improve your life. Personally I have realized there is no point in me saying I would like to do XYZ or I should try and do XYZ my new answer should just be I will do XYZ because if I want to do it there is no reason not to.

– Eagles on this page

And:

There was an episode on the twilight zone, where a ruthless criminal was killed running from the cops, and is greeted by an angel that was sent to grant his every desire. He couldn’t BELIEVE that he was in heaven, and was skeptical at first. Over time he began to ask for things, a mountain of money, beautiful women, naked fish sushi, etc, and was granted everything he asked for, and life (or death), so it seemed, could not have been better.

As time passes, the pleasure he receives from his constant indulgences starts to fade; the ease of his very existence grows dull. He asks the angel for some challenging work to mix it up a bit, but is told that in this place he can wish for anything and will be granted it – except the opportunity to work for the things he receives.

Without any struggles, living a purely blissful life, the criminal becomes more and more irritated. Eventually, in a fit of desperation, he tells the angel ‘I want out, I want to go to the OTHER place’. The criminal, assuming this is heaven, wants to go to hell. The angel turns to him, with a wicked grin on his face, and with the booming laughter of the devil says ‘Fool, this IS the other place.’

Raptor, same thread

There’s another thread in the High Stakes forum discussing the merits of playing poker, going to law school, or pursuing a career in finance. I enjoyed the thread to so much that I submitted it to HackerNews, something I rarely do.

My brother is currently struggling with some major life life choices. In a conversation with my mom he asked her, “If you had to choose between doing what you should do and what you want to do, which would you do?” My first answer, had he asked me, would be to tell him he ought to go with what he should do. But after considering it, I don’t know if I could tell him that without being a bit hypocritical.

We have a choice between stability and risk. From my perspective, my brother should choose stability. He doesn’t fully see the consequences of the risky path or how the stable path has a much higher chance of success.

Could it be the same for me?