Today I had an interesting (brief) conversation with Semil Shah on Twitter, which led me to what I’m about to write. In the technology industry, and Silicon Valley more specifically, it’s hard to deny the importance of LinkedIn. I do believe that others are right in their negativity against the company — a lot of areas need improvement, which I’ll touch on — but the company has definitely made Wall Street a little less wary of internet IPOs. The company has a whopping $28 billion market cap, and it’s stock price has increased 134% over the past year; that’s fantastic in many respects. It creates more liquidity for employees, which means more money going back into the flame that is the Silicon Valley. It also makes it slightly easier for other tech co’s to go public.

On the contrary, there are some significant problems arising for the Mountain View-based company. Put simply in the words...

I’m currently in the process of trying to create new habits in my life. Currently I’m trying to drink more water and become todo-oriented. What I mean by this is that I’m trying to bring my structure to my day, and have a daily list of tasks that need to be completed.

I’ve never had an easy time sticking to lists. I think it’s because my life typically isn’t hectic enough that I cannot remember everything I need to do. Most of the time there are only two or three big tasks I need to work on in my life, which isn’t very hard to remember. Drilling down those individual tasks proves equally simple — it’s rarely if ever hard for me to determine the order of sub-tasks required to complete the overarching, or “parent task.”

However, the reason why I want to become more list-oriented is because there are things I would like to do, like blog more, which aren’t urgent enough to always be on the...

It’s been about a week since I picked up the HP 14” Chromebook (whatever the official name is), and I decided that I’ve had enough time to give a solid verdict on the don’t-call-it-a-laptop device. What do I think of it? I love it. I don’t just love this laptop because it’s a $300 thin and light laptop with an SSD and ~5 second boot-up. No, I love this laptop because it’s a no-nonsense device for those that live on the internet, like myself. My typical day involves reading news, writing blog posts, and building web apps for myself and others. Chrome OS gives me the best of Google and the Chrome browser. Nothing more, nothing less.

The question I hear from many techies is, if you just want a web browser, why not buy a tablet? First off, I own an iPad, but these are two completely different kinds of devices for completely different use cases. The market share for desktop computing may be...

I like to think my entrepreneurial aspirations developed when I was pretty young. I remember as early as eight or nine years-old I was holding garage sales, bake sales, and any other type of sale in my front yard. Unfortunately it’s hard for me to remember exactly what my motivations were, but I think it was mainly for money at the time (hey, I was nine). Either way, I spent an inordinate amount of time on my entrepreneurial endeavors in comparison to the neighborhood kids I recruited to be my business partners. Each sale was a shot in the arm of pure adrenaline, and I was hooked.

If I had to think of one seminal moment that changed the way I conducted business for the rest of my life, it was when I was ten. By this point I was proactive in my search for clientele, going door-to-door (really just asking people that were standing in their yards) asking homeowners if their cars needed a...

There are many common topics that reach the top of HN on a daily basis, but there’s one that really resonates within me. One that stirs up much controversy, for it is reviled by many as a repulsive practice in today’s IT community. What I speak of is “The Interview.” Everyone has their own reasons why they believe The Interview is broken, but here are some common ones:

1. More often than not, the problems an interviewee is asked to solve are irrelevant to real-life problems they’ll have to, you know, actually solve on the job.

2. In a work environment, developers have plenty of time to solve a problem before actually showing anybody. Also, they try many solutions knowing full well they may not work. I personally find myself using the process of elimination to squash bugs.

3. Performance in the interview isn’t often reflective of workplace performance.

I’ve only been through a few interviews...