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MBA Considerations

Mazur 2 Comments

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.

URI.parse

Mazur Leave a comment

Quick little lesson on using the URI parse method, using an example:

uri = URI.parse("http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/")

uri.host = "www.mattmazur.com"
uri.scheme = "http"
uri.port = 80
uri.path = "/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/"

More details on URI including other methods here.

Macs: Productivity made Easy

Mazur 2 Comments

Day #3 of the Macbook…

I began working today with the intention of integrating a test Heroku site with Paypal’s Instant Notification System. Didn’t get there quite yet, but I’m getting there. Here’s a few things I worked on this evening:

Modifying the Terminal Prompt

Every line had been displaying “matthew-mazurs-macbook: Matt $” or something long and annoying like that, so I looked into how to change it. Some helpful individual on #rubyonrails told me to look up PS1 and surely enough, changing it is pretty easy. This site teaches you how to change it, though this method only works for the current terminal. When you reload the terminal the name reverts to its previous state. To change it permantely, you have to close down termal and edit /etc/bashrc in some text editor. Change the PS1 name to whatever you want and it’ll be changed permantently for future terminal windows. There’s probably an easier way to do this but hey, it worked.

Using VI

As nerdy readers have probably realized by now, I suck at the command prompt. I regret not taking more opportunities during my college compsci classes to gain more experience with it. Anyway, this tutorial is a pretty good introduction to what you need to know in order to navigate vi.

Ruby Gems

Up until this point in my app’s development I haven’t had to use any gems so I was pretty lost when I read I should install a Paypal gem to interact with Paypal’s Instant Payment Notification system. For the unenlightened, IPN is an alert that Paypal sends to your site when someone has made a purchase. You can use this notification to enable a user’s account, for example. Thankfully, rubygems.org offers an excellent tutorial which quickly brought me up to speed. I worked my way through their progressbar example, which as stupid as it is, was a nice thing to get working.

Fortunately, while developing ALL IN Expert (more to come on that — I promise), I spent a lot of time learning how to do IPN with PHP. Things are slightly different now, but the prior experience is helpful.

Heroku it is

Mazur 1 Comment

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.