My work/life balance sucks.

I plan my weekends off like you'd normally plan vacations because they occur with roughly the same frequency. I don't get to see my family or friends nearly as much as I'd like and when I do it's often in a very timeboxed fashion that doesn't leave enough room for serendipity. I've seen our coworking space at all hours of the day and night and share a special connection with the handful of others who regularly do the same. I have a growing list of hobbies and events that I want to do or try that never gets any shorter. I suck at spontaneity now. I started booking meetings 5 minutes shorter just so I'd have time to run to the restroom or grab a bite between them.

This typically looks like a recipe for a painfully sad existence.

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It's been some time since I had 10 minutes free to write. Well, that's not true... by my count, I've written over 800 pages of text and recorded dozens of hours of video in the last 4 months but that's exactly the problem. There's not a lot of room in the margins for creative expression when you're teaching a cohort of students, writing curriculum, managing a team, growing a business and trying to learn how coffee works.

The Viking Code School is the full consumption of my soul right now and rightly so. I'll give it far more just treatment when I'm able but, for now, suffice it to say that it represents the marriage of 2 years of hard work with a lifetime of dreaming about making impactful changes in education.

We're building a highly focused online coding bootcamp that's the first of its kind -- it combines the rigorous and collaborative nature of an in-person bootcamp with the reach of the online medium. We're educating prospective developers and entrepreneurs who want to take their ideas to reality.

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Since I struck out on my own to build a business, I've banged my head on countless metaphorical low-hanging beams, taken the proverbial rake to the face at least weekly, and otherwise made just about every mistake in the book. But, despite the cost, I've actually learned a thing or two along the way. Hopefully you won't make the same mistakes. Actually, you will, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Last Tuesday we launched beta for The Odin Project, a website where you can learn web development for free. The launch went well -- to focus solely on users, we got >10k visits converting to >1k new students in just two days -- and it hammered in an epiphany that I first had in September of 2013: Do nothing quietly!

There are a lot of expressions out there which capture pieces of this mentality, like "Fail early and often", but I like the directness of "Do nothing quietly". This is very counter to the mantra of the engineer: "head down, get shit done". Engineering culture has little love for self promotion, bold (unsupported) claims or anything to do with PR. But, to build an effective business, you've got to get over it and make sure people know about your idea.

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The Odin Project is a free online curriculum for learning web development with Ruby on Rails. It stitches together the best existing content into an opinionated and straightforward path for going from total novice to hireable as a junior developer.

I recently overhauled http://www.theodinproject.com to turn the website from the barest minimum into the kind of platform that can support a meaningful user experience and grow over time.

Because the project is founded on the belief that transparency and openness facilitate learning, in this two-post series I'll walk through the decisions behind the redesign and the tactics and trade-offs that were a part of its implementation. Find the first post here.

Getting Started

With the redesign goals laid out and the wireframes put together (see Part I), the needs of the users and the site owner were represented and it was time to move towards actually building it.

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The Odin Project is a free online curriculum for learning web development with Ruby on Rails. It stitches together the best existing content into an opinionated and straightforward path for going from total novice to hireable as a junior developer.

I recently overhauled http://www.theodinproject.com to turn the website from the barest minimum into the kind of platform that can support a meaningful user experience and grow over time.

Because the project is founded on the belief that transparency and openness facilitate learning, in this two-post series I'll walk through the decisions behind the redesign and the tactics and trade-offs that were a part of its implementation. You can view Part II here

The Old

The Odin Project started from some pretty darn humble beginnings -- it originated as a collection of Markdown files about web development on Github and a splash page that linked to them:

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At the end of every December, I clean off the white-boards, flip to a new sheet of paper in my notepad, and sit down to reflect on the past 12 months and plan for the coming year. The older I get, the more importance this ritual seems to have. The end-2011 review put me on the path to upending my life and moving to San Francisco. End-2012 end-capped the most disruptive and incredible year of my life and had so many unknowns that it was almost impossible to plan more than a few months ahead into 2013.

All those unknowns meant that a lot happened in 2013. I learned how to code, worked at a startup, broke off a long term relationship and founded The Odin Project. I've also become more and more fully engaged with life -- I'm getting closer to eliminating "empty time" like mindless web surfing or TV watching or other wasteful activities.

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When I was in college I played poker online and did well enough that it steered me towards an interest in trading on Wall Street. I liked what I learned about trading and decided that I wanted to someday start a hedge fund. My friend's father headed a public company at the time and he put me in touch with two fund managers so I could get some advice.

The first guy I called worked within an old-style bank. I don't remember much of anything from our conversation except that he seemed a bit... "traditional"? My questions weren't very good and his answers were pure vanilla. I learned nothing.

The second guy was a different story. He ran a nimble long/short fund with a few hundred million under management and had needed to scrap for every victory. From the second he picked up the phone I could tell he was short on time and low on patience. I kind of stammered through my list of questions and he gave me answers that appropriately reflected the poorly researched nature of my queries, which included things like "what is a long/short fund exactly?".

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This post is based on a great talk given by Jared Fliesler, formerly VP of User Acquisition at Square.

How do you begin thinking about growing your startup or product? "Build it and they will come" is long gone and "Be user centric" has taken over product development but what frameworks do we have to think about growth and user acquisition specifically?

These 4 simple steps, starting from the most coarse to the somewhat finer grained, should get your feet firmly planted and your mind pointed in the right direction.

1. Identify Your Core Product Loop

Every product has a single core user experience, a set of finite steps that represent a successful use or transaction. If you had to define your product's use in as few steps as possible, what would it look like? What happens after the use is complete?

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This letter was addressed some time ago to the younger sister of a good friend, a very smart young lady who grew up without a lot of resources in a small town and who was struggling with the specter of college admissions and the general life questions raised by the process. I don't want to dive too deeply into the background, but it's a situation which puts one at a crossroads -- staying home and living a big life in a small town or throwing the dice and heading off to school elsewhere.

Note: Names and identifying references removed. Some points relate to previous conversations.

[Redacted],

I don't often go out of my way to check up on people or give advice but I know you've got such great potential that I feel like I should make sure you get off on the right path and such. I've included some thoughts about various things (that got longer than I initially expected) and an invitation to call me for whatever reason anytime about whatever random BS is giving you grief and slowing you down.

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Producer

As a bottom-up guy, I've always needed to see the gears working to trust that the machine will do what I say it will. More than that, I believe that understanding the machine provides an unmatched power to deploy it.

So to confidently build a web-based tech business, I had to start by learning web development. But as important as that is, it's also easy to get caught up in the sprint and lose sight of the greater goal. Spending nights and weekends feverishly coding sure feels like a productive use of time and it can be a fantastic creative outlet but it isn't the optimal path to building value.

Recalling the Simple Model of Value Creation I laid out before, I've so far been learning the skills of a producer, the most granular level of value. It's an incredibly important skill set -- the best generals were soldiers and the best founders were product grunts too.

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