Danish Khan's Thoughts Entrepreneurship, Programming, and Life

A few summers ago I was privileged enough to get a fellowship to work on a research project when I was attending University of California, Irvine.  Professor Patterson who was the professor overseeing my research was a big help in me deciding that I really enjoyed the culture of working in a startup because that is how he made the fellowship feel for me.  I was allowed to work for however long I wanted and during the times that I felt were best for me.  The only objective I had was to get to a certain stage for the end of the summer presentation (after the jump).  I would have few meetings with him throughout the summer to show him my progress, but other than that I was on my own.  In the beginning it was very overwhelming and scary because I had no idea where to begin, but overtime it became easier and a lot of fun.  I would work late hours on my own free will just because I wanted to get to a certain point in the my to-do list.  It made me realize how most startups require you to work late hours and have flexible schedules, which I enjoy a lot.  Also, the fact that even though it was Professor Patterson’s research project he gave me the responsibility of doing it how I felt was best as long as the project got done and did not have any bugs.

A few days ago I was introduced to a cool new ruby gem called cheat by my roommate Rob.  The ruby cheat gem is an amazing tool to have with you whenever you are programming.  Before this gem I would download pdfs cheat sheets for ruby on rails, vim and regular expressions. With this gem I have access to over 548 and growing number of cheat sheets all through the easy access of my mac terminal. 

Which of the two do you choose?  I was asked this question when I first entered college.  The realization was that you could only choose two of the three activities.  Therefore, you either had no sleep, horrible study habits, or no social life.  I thought that was the most absurd thing ever when I first heard it.  Managing all three would be a piece of cake and I would be able to enjoy everything college had to offer me.

The fact is trying to place yourself in the middle of the triangle is completely possible, but each end tries to manipulate and persuade you into slowly coming closer to it.  The more friends you make and organizations you join means you will have more social events and activities to be able to participate it.  Some organizations might require you to participate in a certain amount of activities throughout the semester or year as well.  The harder your courses get the more hours you will have to spend studying for those courses.  Also, if you are an overly ambitious person you’ll be inclined to study more or take harder classes to better yourself.  Lastly, all of these activities are going to eventually make you exhausted and tempting you to sleep more so you can rejuvenate your body.

So, I walked at my graduation commencement last week and it was an interesting experience. Even though I will technically receive my diploma in December I decided that I wanted to walk early so I could be with my friends.

In a way I am glad I walked before I officially finished my undergraduate career. It made me realize how much I still need to get done before I enter into the real world. I have to learn little things like keeping track of my personal finances and figuring out where I am going to live and what I want to accomplish once I am done.

This summer I have been fortunate to start working on Indinero, which has the potential of turning into a dream full time job that I would do once I am done with college.

The battle between these two softwares has been epic since Nicholas Jitkoff decided that apple just was not doing a very good job with spotlight. The first Mac I ever purchased was an iBook G4.

After getting sucked into the Mac realm I learned about Quicksilver and how it was the “swiss-army knife” that all Mac users needed to have and learn. I decided to use it and I would have to say it was by fair one of the most amazing and useful applications I ever used on my iBook. It allowed me to do so many things without having to click with my mouse and open folders or web pages. Whenever I would show my non-Mac and Mac friends what I could do with Quicksilver they wished they had something on their computer that could accomplish even half of the things I could do.

So I have been using Twinkle since I got my iPhone and I personally liked it a lot better than twitterific. Twitterific would load a lot slower and I did not like the ads. I’ve heard good things about the paid version, but I wasn’t going to pay for a twitter iPhone client when there were clearly free ones that were just as good.