It was about to be a month since my previous blog post. So here is a status update. I was busy building my new life in a new county, with a new job and new friends. Luckily it’s been good so far. I am sharing a rental apartment with a colleague from Microsoft. I’m living in Bellevue, WA for now. I’m still trying to get my first driver’s license, but I’m not sure if I should get a car since I’m completely fine with commuting to work and carpooling with friends.

I am trying to establish my living style as well. I’m on my way to become a minimalist in terms of owning stuff. I’m still buying stuff that I can throw them away anytime —no strings attached.

For the last 8 years, I’ve been living in school dorms. But I’ve just realized that somehow I’ve been taken care of all the time and now I’m on my own. Budget planning, rent, bills, health insurance, taxes, groceries, company stocks etc. have never been part of my life that much. Read More →

Lately, I’ve been reading Joshua Becker’s book Simplify about minimalist lifestyle. It’s a very short book, but hey, it has to be, this is minimalism!

This is an inspiring book about removing clutter and stuff you don’t actually need from your life and enjoy your life –not the things. Here are my key takeaways from the book:

• Which you hold, holds you. Things you own actually begin to own you after some time. You clean them, organize them, buy them, sell them etc. More you own, the more time they rob from your lives.
• “There are things more you should value more than possessions –God, family, relationships, character etc.”
• Give things away or sell them if you are not really using. You won’t lose that much.
• Spend money on life experiences than possessions.

Read More →

Software as a service is a tremendous market. All online services are transitioning to the era of subscriptions. Even Microsoft’s new Office 2013 is will be available as monthy subscriptions. That’s a radical decision for a box software sold in CDs for last 21 years.

Have you ever made a list of which software services do you pay every month? I did:

• GitHub $5*
• Spotify $5
• RunKeeper Pro $5
• put.io $5
• Mailjet $7.5
• XBOX Live $4

Surprisingly all of them ranged around a monthly price of 5$ and each solving a single problem, which I will relate with long tail strategy. Instead of selling a huge service for high fees, they sell a simple product making life easier to a broader customer spectrum. That’s a very healthy business model once you got the problem and solution right. It does not take too long to implement the product and start to sell it immediately. Recall, GitHub was profitable on its launch day and continued to be so. Read More →

You’ll go to lots of places. Your path will cross with lots of new people. You will choose adventures to take and people to walk together. You will see people let you down, people steal from you and people hurt you. You will see people enlighten your way on a dark crossroads. There are things you can’t change but you will keep pushing and end up with disappointment. Although you can’t know if you can change the world, there will be things you can change, but years will make you lose your excitement. Read More →

Here are a few side project ideas that I dreamed of but decided to not to implement in the near future. Feel free to pick one of them and let me know if you managed to do any of it!

Habit List app for Android

Habit List is a great iPhone app. It is simple, concise and exactly many people need to keep track of their habits. It worked on me very well and I use it everyday. (Remember how difficult it is to get into habit zone. Similar Android apps are not designed well and bad at user experience. Someone please just clone it. (Consider asking permission to original developers of the app, I believe they’ll give a permit.)

8tracks playlist downloader

8tracks is a great startup and it is exactly where you should look for curated music content. Although downloading would be illegal, you can offer a way to obtain media files in an 8tracks playlist.

Find the traitor: who sold our emails to spammers

It is not uncommon that you register a website with your email address and after a while you get emails from websites that you never heard of (and interestingly they do not go to spam). Read More →

iTunes has a nice public music search API which offers 30-second previews and detailed information about music albums and tracks. However I could not play these previews on Android or Chrome browser —but it was playing perfectly in iOS apps and OS X Safari browser. (See sample audio here.) With the help of a little bit of packet capturing I found out the reason why iTunes previews cannot be played outside of iOS and OS X. Read More →

Yaay! Happy birthday pal. It all started with a handmade blog written in classic ASP. Read More →

This weekend I decided to practice my iOS skills with a simple utility app. The TV satellite receiver box in our home Vu+ Duo runs on Linux and it has an API to simulate remote control, change channels, set volume, list channels etc. After connecting to the device over WiFi local area network, it can be used to “zap” channels instantly or controlling device with a virtual remote. So I put these down in an app and submitted to App Store today for free. Read More →