My outdated Computer Science degree: Was it a waste of time?

A friend of mine shared a link on Facebook and it mentioned a lot of technology acronyms. His friend, in turn, commented it all sounded like gibberish to her and he commented back saying all those things didn’t even exist when he went to college.  Wow. I never thought it like that and I started wondering how much of the technologies I use to create software today I had not learned in college. Turns it, it’s a lot.

I went to college between 1991 and 1995. I’ve got a Computer Science degree. That degree was a new degree at my University so a lot of what we were learning was cutting edge because the curriculum had just been set 3-4 years before. At the time, the Web didn’t exist. It was invented in 1993, but only became popular in 1995. The building block of the web was HTML and Web Servers (HTTP). I learned nothing about that in college.

Today, I build web-based services. I use .NET (launched in 2002). I’m still learning about MVC (Model-View-Controller) which was a concept that existed for a long time, but I didn’t learn in college and it only started getting more attention after Ruby on Rails launched around 2004. I do a lot of JavaScript (invented in 1996 or so) and AJAX, a technology that was enabled by IE 5 in 1999 but only became a popular/viable after Firefox 1 launched in 2004.

Cloud computing didn’t exist when I went to college. The standard practice of client-server applications (this is what we used to call software in the ‘cloud’ back then) was to have a very big server, so there was no concept of scale-out (multiple servers), or network architecture with servers taking unique roles. Your one big server was everything.

Video encoding was impossible back then, so I learned nothing about it. Not that I need to learn how to write my own video codec, but I use YouTube/Vimeo embeds, I use a Flash Player and all that was enabled by new codec and streaming technology that didn’t exist in 1995.

Mobile development also didn’t exist. You were lucky (or rich) if you had a cell phone back then and those were very dumb devices. Actually, the whole concept of Mobile applications only started to appear circa 1999 when Microsoft launched Windows CE 3.0 with several partners. As soon as I got one of those devices, I wrote an app (it was an English-Portuguese dictionary).

Databases were also very simple back then. Of course there was ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) on those databases, but they were just tables and indexes. Think about dBase IV if you remember that. Now we have an immense amount of storage technologies, not only in software, but in hardware as well. From RAID to External HD, from cloud-based relational database to NoSQL.

Was it a waste of my time?

As I start a new project (EveryMove) I have to wonder how much I have to learn to keep up with new technology, methodologies, tools and processes. It’s an immense effort and unless you are at a constant learning mode, it’s very easy to get behind. If you take a 4-year break and go build a restaurant then decide to come back, you’d be shocked how much changes in such a short period of time.

I already wrote that Computer Science schools have a hard time keeping their curriculum up-to-date with new technologies.

I think there are two things I learned while getting my Computer Science degree that are with me since then and have proved extremely valuable. The first is the Computer Science fundamentals, things like data structure, algorithms, compression, I/O concepts, networking principles, security, etc. Those things are like physics laws, they don’t change and once “discovered” they become part of our knowledge, and it turns out that most of those things date back to 1940s and 1950s, way before computers using microchips.  A person going through Computer Science College today will learn exactly the same thing I did back in the 90s and a person going to college in 2030 will also learn those things. But that’s not enough, which brings me to…

The second thing I took away from college was the need to be self-taught and realize you have to learn dozens of new things every year. Contrary to other degrees like English, History, Law, Civil Engineering, Biology, Dentistry, Medicine and many others, in Computer Science what you learning is not necessarily augmenting previous learning, but replacing it. Which means there is no point on your career you can be considered a big shot because you know more than everyone else. Just take a 15-day vacation in Europe and you fall behind others!

Big deal: Me, EveryMove and the future of what’s important!

Short & sweet...
I’m the Co-founder & CTO of EveryMove with my new friend Russell Benaroya. EveryMove will change how people think and act in terms of physical activity and their overall health.

Long & spicy...

It has been nearly 18-months since my last (and first) big entrepreneurial endeavour ended. In August of 2009 we shutdown Sampa for good. I had more than one idea since Sampa. Heck, I probably had two dozen ideas, maybe a hundred. Several of those I pitched to many friends and investors. I was mentally tired, so I decided I should stop trying to build a new business and give my brain a break and not be the boss. I joined Conceivian in early August of 2010. After six months there it became clear I needed to get back at building my own thing. I’m not getting younger and you get just one life to play around, and I didn’t want to regret not having built the next big company.

A few days before my last day at Conceivian I sent an email to a handful of friends telling them I was moving on and for them to let me know if they knew of any opportunity. Less than 30-minutes later I’ve got an email from Andy Liu saying he needed to talk to me.

I spent about a month talking to Andy and Russell Benaroya about this idea of how to impact people’s life and change their behavior towards physical activity. It’s not a surprise to anyone that as a society we are becoming more sedentary than ever, and that has tremendous long term implications on our health, on our kids health, on our academic and work performance, and on the cost of health insurance and health care.

Initially I was not so interested on their pitch to me. My two reasons were: I don’t understand the health care industry and I don’t know how to modify people’s behavior towards being more fit and healthy. But Andy is a great entrepreneur and investor, and he and I have been trying to do something together since I was done with Sampa, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and kept listening.

The Pilot

Russell Benaroya had worked with Premera Blue Cross to fund a pilot study with Premera’s own employees. It was a 6-week pilot where people would log their physical activities, earn points and compete in a team against other teams at Premera using the simple prototype we built. The Pilot was just finishing when Russell, Andy and I started talking about me joining them. Russell was conducting two focus groups with 20 individuals each who participated in the pilot test to understand their reactions and feedback. I sat in the back of the room making notes and observing everything.

Half-way through the focus group I was blown away by many of the findings and discussions. I won’t disclose them here because that’s our customer development secret, but I can tell you I was moved! I knew I could make a difference on these people’s life. I know I can build a software product that will dramatically improve their health. I was sold!

Next morning, we met for coffee and I told them I was very excited about the opportunity. After a week (or two) of negotiations, we were a team. Russell Benaroya is the CEO, and I’m the CTO.

Russell and I have very complementary skills. He has actually been in the health industry for the last six years. You can see his background on our website (BTW, sign up to get some emails about EveryMove).

I come from a tech-consumer background. Together, we are putting together a business and product vision that could revolutionize the life of millions (tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) of people, and that’s big!

But, what is EveryMove?

We are not ready to publicly disclose what we are building (read: we are still figuring it out). I can tell you is not a fitness tracking application (there are hundreds of those), it’s not a fitness game (probably a 1,000 of those) and it’s not a support forum or content website. It’s different. There is nothing like it out there. We are actually looking at building something that will nicely integrate with existing fitness and health services out there, from RunKeeper to Fitbit, from Weight Watchers to Spark People.

What EveryMove will do is make you be more fit and healthy; and by “you” we mean the average person, not the person that is already an avid runner or cyclist; and by “fit and healthy” we mean fit and healthy.

Why this is big?

You know how you use email instead of paper mail? You know how you save your pictures on your computer instead of shoebox? You know how you buy airline tickets online instead of a travel agent at a shopping mall? Yeah, the entire health industry is about 15-years behind that. Pretty much every aspect of health care, from diseases to forms, from fitness to food and diet still doesn’t have a meaningful bridge to the online world -- yet.

I hear people talking about how big the Travel industry is ($800 billion according to some) and how they are going to disrupt the incumbents, yada, yada, yada. Well, the Health care industry is actually over $2.5 trillion and this industry is still running Windows 95 on 386 machines! Talk about a disruption waiting to happen. The only industry that is as big and as behind on technology adoption is education.

I’m excited because this is not only a big vision with a big financial potential, but also with a big and meaningful purpose. That’s big! Stay with me and enjoy the ride.

The inner secrets of the Seattle 2.0 Awards

Today we just announced the finalists of the Seattle 2.0 Awards 2011. It’s a moment I always look forward with pride and fear. Pride not of my own, but seeing and hearing the pride from the founders, investors, executives and everyone else involved with the finalists. Fear because it’s amazing how much crap I have to dodge every year.

Last week about 30 people on the Selection Committee voted for their choices on each category amongst the nominations made by the public. This time, each person on the committee got four votes on each category (on previous years it was two votes). The top 5 most voted on each category were called the finalists.

I always try to infuse the selection committee with as much diversity of professions, experiences, age and gender as possible to get a good spread of views. This process has worked remarkably well at nominating amazingly competent and deserving finalists. Certainly there are more deserving and competent companies and people who could be the finalists, but we only have 5 slots on each category.

I was sick last week and spent most of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in ultra-slow-mode, which accumulated a significant amount of work to be done between Friday and Monday so we could have the vote starting today.

I spent countless hours researching each of the finalists, finding headshots or logos, their website, LinkedIn and Twitter account, writing short descriptions of the product or biographies about them so the website would be ready today. In addition to that I sent email to all finalists congratulating them and telling about the process, sent email to the press, prepared the marketing plan and a lot more. I end up working late on Sunday and I was exhausted at the end.

I’m very happy so far with this year’s Awards. Although this is a lot of work, I drive a lot of satisfaction from the energy these Awards create. Go Seattle!