Valuable Ideas

I am always trying to think of valuable ideas that will earn me a quick million dollars or create an excellent resume builder. Often, I come up with these ideas only to later get bored of them, forget them, or, most honestly, realize they weren't good ideas at all.

Simultaneously, I see many simple ideas that people have executed well. I often wish I could have realized that such a simple idea could do so well. I wish I knew where to place my effort. Occasionally I see what seem to me like excellent ideas that are not done well.

I've come to the conclusion that ideas are anything but valuable. It is the execution that earns money, experience, and recognition.

Even if my ideas are not solid or well thought out, I can gain a lot of experience from implementing them. Experience that can then be used later projects. For instance, I had a terrible idea for a web application; it was so bad I don't even recall what it was. At that time, I had built several websites using JavaScript and HTML, but nothing that required a user login and database. I set out to learn how to build a website with more substance than a pretty interface. Back then, Ruby on Rails was king and fresh enough that new tutorials, blogs, courses, and books were coming out all the time.

I purchased a book and read it cover to cover, completing every exercise. I learned some basics of Ruby on Rails, relational databases, and user logins. However, I was still confused and could not put the information into practice. Ruby on Rails did a lot of magic things like automatic routes and database migrations that made no sense to me. I simply didn't understand the basic of building web applications.

Next, I purchased an interactive course that turned out to be excellent. Being my second exposure to the material along with their exceptional explanations made me feel comfortable with Ruby on Rails, and Ruby in general.

I sat down for the next couple of months, and with every spare hour, I created my million dollar idea. The website sucked, and finally I realized the idea sucked, but I now had a finished product and I had a deeper understanding of using a framework to build complete web applications.

Today I cannot recall what the idea was, but my knowledge of website frameworks has carried forward. After becoming familiar with Ruby, I took some courses in Java, C, and C++. I eventually got a job building websites in PHP. When I had the opportunity, I started building them in Go (Go was the cool new language at the time, though I still use it today). I've built and still work on projects in PHP, Go, Node, Python, and C++. Soon I have a Java project coming up - well, SalesForce, but I think that is Java-based. I've been told that SalesForce has excellent training, which I am looking forward to.

Sure, I haven't earned that million dollars yet, but I have a good job with an excellent company building small, but important web applications. All this started with self-learning for the execution of a silly idea. An idea with no value.

Coming soon: there was an idea that got me started in dabbling with web development in the first place. It's not an original idea, and many people have done since that time, but it is still an idea that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it- even if at just a basic level. My brother teases me about how long I've been planning it. I'm sure I'll write about it soon and hopefully I will have an example to show if I find some spare time.