I’m not there yet, of course, but it all came together.
Here’s the backstory: I saw the startupschool.org pitch, and always assumed I couldn’t go. After all, I’m in Minneapolis — it’s at Stanford. Besides which, you need to apply and be accepted… well, I thought, I could apply. What could that hurt? I probably wouldn’t be accepted anyways.
So I applied. And then forgot about it, like you buy a lottery ticket or a sweepstakes ticket, and realism makes you compartmentalize the possibility of “winning” in the “that’d be nice but isn’t going to happen” part of your brain.
Only next, I received an email telling me, “Congratulations!” And I was accepted. Now what?
Continue reading ‘How I Got To Startup School’
So, I haven’t asked for donations on the internet since my wife went to Peru a few years back. But, I’ve been accepted to Startup School and if possible, I’m hoping to make it. Unfortunately, it’s not in the budget.
All I need is about $600, so I figured, well, why not give it a shot. I created a campaign on ThePoint, which can be found here: https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/send-phil-crissman-to-stanford-for-startup-school/headquarters
I’m extremely passionate about the web and startups, and I can absolutely say that I don’t believe the trip will be wasted. If a few dozen people can spare $10-20, I’m there. If it sounds worthwhile to you, please consider helping out. If not; no problem. Thanks!
I’m going to take a short break from studying for tomorrow’s midterm to rant about it.
The class? Internet Application Development. Sounds interesting, right? (It did to me). What is the class actually about? PHP and MySQL.
My instructor is knowledgeable, and yes, I’m sure I will learn things (I don’t want to be that guy, the guy who thinks he already knows it all). But still; when I signed up for “Internet Application Development” I didn’t think that all I’d be doing was PHP and MySQL, the sort of things I taught myself on the web 2 or 3 years ago.
I had hoped I might learn things like:
- Creating web applications that scale. Running your app and/or database on multiple servers if load gets too high; maybe even an overview/discussion of grid computing?
- The MVC pattern, its pros and/or cons. It would seem to be a good choice since nearly every web app framework I’ve ever seen uses this pattern.
- Possibly even a comparison of the different languages/frameworks which could be used for web applications. I would expect that only Java and PHP would be talked about, but even an attempt to weigh pros and cons would be interesting.
But no. Instead I get to “learn” how good PHP’s require() function is. Really? Well thank you very much.
The only thing that keeps me from abandoning a degree altogether is that I’ve invested so much time in it, I just want to finish.
Okay, rant over. Back to studying for said midterm.
