This is chess, and this is boxing

Two people face each other in the box ring, full of muscles and full of tension. Sweat is rolling down on one guy’s face and blood on the other’s, as they are: hunching over a chess board.

The two opponents have noise-cancelling headphones on to filter out the classical music we hear, and I wonder how much a headphone can do about the blood rush in the head. Because one of the guys does not look great. And he has about one minute left to win this game by chess mate, before the fight music returns, and his opponent begins throwing uppercuts to his head.

This is the wonderful sport of chess boxing.

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We went for a real mens’ night out with friends a while back, and discovered chess boxing on an “Intellectual Fight Night”. The post I wrote after the event continues on Yakuzuzu.

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Kickstart any app idea: our recipe

It’s easy to be in the centre of attention if you have something cool to offer. Developers are a hot asset now: every now and then, someone wants our agency to do a mobile app for revenue share, a website for future buyout, or me, in person, to be the CTO of a new gig.

I love all these projects.

No, really, I do.

Not because they bring much cash or fame, as I don’t tend to earn much with most of them. But it’s always great to learn new teams and methods, and these projects provide a good field for experimentation.

Quite some guidance may be needed on the project setup and management though, especially if my co-founders lack experience with tech products. Here is the three points I like to send out to them, right at square one.

Our plan to kickstart any tech project (mobile apps, websites etc).

  1. Almost immediately start working on an initial prototype.
    Creating the prototype helps exploring the idea internally, and will also help explaining it once you can start attracting potential investors and new team members.

    By creating a demo product you will need to set up most of the tools and methods needed to – well, to create a product. So it can be nothing but super easy to demonstrate the team’s ability to bring an idea to the market – which can significantly help the negotiating positions with a VC.

  2. Set up the development workflows.
    Any rapid iteration process would do. The key is to answer this question: if anyone comes up with a new feature or idea today, how will that be incorporated in the product and reach the market tomorrow?

    There are a lot of free tools (like Trello or Asana) that will help teams keep track of these features. The bottomline with choosing one is: every new pair of eyes should be able to tell where the company is standing, just by taking a look at the dashboard.

  3. Start PR & marketing efforts from day one.
    Have you ever wished you had a handful of people to ping when you are ready to launch? Set up a ‘coming soon’ landing page and collect subscribers as soon as you start thinking about the product and that is taken care of.

    The rule of the thumb is to always start with the things that can be potential bottle necks, and a good marketing is one of these. First step here is usually to choose a good name, create a corporate identity with a nice logo and an initial mission statement. This will help strengthen the product as well as the team, especially with remote ones.

We tend to do the above in no particular order, and in strong collaboration with the business development. The idea is to get the product only far enough so that we can find out whether there is a market fit for it. If the answer is yes, the foundation to create the next version of the product is as good as it can get.

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Let’s create something impossible

Flipped through this hip ebook, listing 100 startup people from Berlin in 2014. Hundred people, that’s a lot. Hundred startups, that’s, yeah, a lot.

A lot of ideas a hundred, not a surprise therefore that most of the ideas are very similar. “Disrupting the e-commerce scene of blablabi”. (Call it a webshop, shall we?) A new social network platform (for some boring niche). A cutting edge (recipe book) app.

I’m excited about tackling this problem. Let’s make life better together.

Is the new off-license around the corner a startup as well then? Well it kind of should count, though they are making money. Because, as it seems, most of the upstarts will never, ever going to make any money (apart from the amount raised from angel investors).

But then, if all these startups are going to fail, or at least the better part of them, why are the ideas so similar and mundane? Why not starting something actually exciting, that makes you want to wake up every day?

Create something impossible. Try stuff out. Make mistakes. Learn from them.

Well, I have the answer actually. I’m in the same shoes.

We start mundane startups, because we don’t know any better. We are blind to difficult problems, and let’s face it: it’s ways easier to just start an Airbnb for dogs, than finding out what we really want.
What we really-really want.

Having recently turned 30 and having spent my twenties learning, travelling and experimenting, I only know a few parameters. I want to help people. Want to do something new. Want to learn more.

(And I’ve already started four companies, so ’just a startup’ is not that exciting.)

As for the purpose of life, I have no idea just yet. I have met people who can surf every day while running an Airbnb spot next to the ocean. And a painter guy living on a house boat in London. They inspire me very much.

As a tool to find out what to do next, we are starting this magazine and community of creative thinkers: Yakuzuzu. Maybe, if we interview enough smart people, we can find the best life for ourselves.

Guys, come with me. Let’s write, take photos, travel and find the most inspiring people out there. Let’s make Yakuzuzu together.

Let’s s find the purpose of our lives.

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Startups, why don’t you learn from corporates?

Right on, you got the title right. While I’m helping large companies implementing startup techniques in their work culture, it always leaves me surprised how young upstarts have an attitude towards learning from anyone else.

If you are a startup though, you shouldn’t forget that corporates are entrepreneurs too – they are just a bit different. And those differences are not necessarily all that bad; there are at least a few lessons you can take away from them.

So what secrets can startups learn from a big mammoth? Here are my favourites.

The company structure

Regardless of what type of structure the age dictates, be it a bureaucratic hierarchy or an upside-down pyramid: having one is a must. Responsibilities and rights management make life easier, especially when it comes to avoiding conflicts.

(If you are now thinking that as a one-man-show you are safe, here is another lesson for you to start with: learn how to delegate. Hiring an online assistant for a few hours a week will give you the opportunity to focus on what you are the best at – and eventually, to make more money.)

Within startups, it’s quite common to see programmers and graphic designers fighting over marketing questions. The reason is simple: there is no marketing guy in the team, and no one else has the right to make a decision alone. Working in such a structure is not only inefficient, but has a bad influence on the work morale too.

Clearly, the more people work together, the more support they will need on the management side, increasing overhead, making the hierarchy more complicated. All this is very unnatural for upstarts, but as the company grows, these questions will arise. The sooner you have the answer for them, the easier the transformation will be.

Planning ahead

Do you know exactly, how long you have been working on this product? Do you know how much more time you would need to finish it? Do you have a marketing budget?

Most startups have difficulties answering these simple questions. Some can’t even tell how much money they will need to finish their only project. And even when they have the numbers, those are far from being usable: costs usually include everything around the development but not the product launch costs, maintenance, support, marketing (and sooo on).

Planning ahead is not easy, and any system that aims such has to be extremely flexible. Large corporates tend to suffer from strict policies, forcing managers to do those little cheats: buying chairs of the marketing budgets and what not.

Ignore the math early though, and it will put you in serious trouble later: imagine running out of cash the moment you finished the product – and with a zero marketing budget, you will eventually reach no one. Maybe except from those you are friends with on Facebook.

Good planning won’t save you from being unlucky. But at least, you will know when you are in the need of making a decision. When the project exceeds the budget only halfway through, you can decide to freeze the features, cut some of the marketing costs or handle the situation in any other way. Without budget expectations, you might learn about running out of cash too late – and end up with no money, no product – and no plan.

Information management

How many people do know about the company’s assets? Who has access to the bank statements? Who do your clients trust?

What happens if those people leave?

You may not be surprised how much it can cost you if a trusted employee leaves the company – but you surely would be surprised to know how much of that cost could be reduced by utilising the right concepts.

Corporates have to handle a huge fluctuation of employees and board members – and each time someone leaves, it turns out that none of those guys were irreplaceable. Everything works fine without them too, and – unless the ones just left are fishing in the dark -, the company’s assets and products are safe too.

The way they do that is having the responsibilities and rights set ahead. From this article’s point of view, it really doesn’t matter if you want your startup to be a place where everyone knows about everything, or, a company with strict data security policies.

The only thing important is being prepared to replace every single person – even a board member or a co-founder -, with having clear responsibilities and being ready to give and revoke access to any asset.

Using the right tools

Yes, large companies have a lot of cash. You can argue that for them better computers and a few more test devices cost almost nothing, or that they can share everything between many projects and employees.

There is nothing against being creative though. There is no need to buy a 3D printer to use one, and one of the big advantages of using co-working offices is to work close to similar startups. You can ask them to test your products, or lend each other all sorts of resources: graphic designers seem to be working on all sorts of projects in their empty hours.

The same goes to online tools.

Software, infrastructure, marketing is for free, one can say. Except that is usually not true. Surely, there are great opportunities out there, and the best form of advertising – word of mouth – is also free. But in most cases, you will end up investing something more important: your time.

Creating a circle around you where everyone shares their discoveries, newly utilised tools or just explains the ones you don’t have time trying out, is a good way to make the learning curves a little steeper. It doesn’t only feel great but is extremely helpful for everyone involved.

Think BIG

Large companies have huge numbers on the cost side – so they need to have big numbers in the income column too. One of the upsides of running a startup is to be able to keep the costs low – but it doesn’t mean you need to keep your income low as well.

As a startup, you are probably trying to find a nice niche in the market. But one of the reasons you have the opportunity to fill up your gap is that it is – a gap. A small, tiny piece of the whole cake. Now, it might be a really profitable segment and a very tasty slice, but there is a high chance that the whole cake would feed many more mouth.

There are plenty of reasons for being unable to immediately go for bigger ventures of course. It’s very unlikely for example, that an upstart animation studio would get the next feature-film deal from Disney. These trust issues and other obstacles can usually be hacked though, and the opportunities are always there. They are there for the ones who are looking.

So, keep looking.
Keep learning.

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How I messed up being vegetarian

Being vegetarian is awesome. Living with a smaller footprint and in harmony with the environment, contributing to a more sustainable life while taking good care of your health. Who doesn’t want this? This last New Years Eve I tried to remove meat from my diet altogether – just to find myself in misery a few months after.

Starting the smart way

Jumping into such a huge change is never an easy move though, and I wanted to do the right way. First, I moved away from meat step by step (here is a blog post on how I started out about a year ago). I also talked to vegan nutritionists and vegetarians regularly, asking about the shift towards vegetables without missing all the important nutritions.

I’ve read all what was out there to read: about vegetarian weight lifters’ diet, the need of iron and all that. My kitchen became fantastic. The number one rule was to keep on adding new dishes instead of just removing the meaty ones – so I ended up learning great tastes and even new vegetables and fruits.

In theory, everything you need is available in a vegetarian diet, especially if you vary the ingredients a lot. Betting on this I was fairly confident that everything will go fine.

This is not a symptom, is it?

If something small is missing from your diet, you won’t know about it until much, much later. At a time, when you don’t even expect it to come from skipping meat.

Looking back, my first warning signs were after a day in the mountains, when we did sports all day and had one too many glasses of wine in the evening. The next day, while driving home I was feeling really week. Have you ever felt week? Yeah, I did too. It’s not really a symptom, is it?

Sleeping got worse, on a few occasions I woke up in the middle of the night. Once I even noticed heart palpitations; had a little water and went back to sleep, and the next day I continued my yoga routines. All went back to normal again, so I was suspecting my turning-30-anxiety – all my friends had those as well, I guess.

More fun was to have short depressive episodes. I had beers with friends, when those weird thoughts crossed my mind: ‘it’s quite alright to collapse here, there would be enough folks around to call the ambulance‘. I didn’t consider these hundred-percent-normal for sure, but it was easy to blame the alcohol intake and the lack of sleep.

Fortunately, at this point I’ve met a friend who is an animal right activist and a vegan nutrition nerd. We had lunch one day, and she mentioned that most vegetarians take B12, because it’s impossible to get it from outside animal products. Oh, and by the way, most vitamin deficiencies cause weakness, fatigue, bad memory, heart palpitations – all sorts of those not-very-defined symptoms I had.

Fight B12 and iron deficiency

Having started taking vitamins right away, I went for a blood count the next week. The results showed that I was indeed lacking B12 and some iron as well. Good news is that fighting mineral deficiencies is rather easy. Supplements come in many forms like vitamin pills, power drinks and even as a tooth paste.

There is one big drawback: it’s all interconnected. As an example, while milk contains B12, it also affects the ability to absorb iron. And if you take iron pills, you should supplement it together with zinc – and so on. The whole thing is very, very confusing, and I couldn’t even guess what else was missing from my diet. Hence, for until my body finds its way back to normal, I decided to eat some meat again.

What is it like, to eat meat after a long time?

It’s rare to see my girlfriend as happy as the day we went for our first real burger. Well, at least till the point we actually entered the joint. After the first few bites I felt terrified and expected a heart attack any time; the room suddenly became too loud and smelly for me to bear, and we had to leave with half the sandwich to go.

Only the next time I ate meat did I realise that it had huge effects on my body. I was crossing a bridge on a sunny day after lunch, and my heart was about to jump out of my chest – pretty much the same experience as in the burger joint, except that this time I could enjoy it. It was like drinking six coffees in a row.

Fix your nutrition, it fixes your mind

Having to drink less coffee is only one upside of paying attention to my vitamin intake (and eating some meat again). A bit more than one month in, my overall mood is ways better, I’m more patient to my friends, and I’m less and less anxious before lunchtime.

The upside is, in the last half a year I learned a lot about food, the importance of nutrition, vitamins, micro-minerals and the effects they can have on the body and the mind.

In the end of the day: what doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger.

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Bitcoin to save Prague (and tourism overall)

Thanks to the snow and a missed connection, I’ve had unexpected hours to kill in Prague. I’ve bought some cakes, wrote this article – and realised the true value of Bitcoin.

These unforeseen opportunities to discover a city are usually loads of fun. This time however – having seen the Czech capital a few times already and being held back by the sub-perfect weather conditions -, I just decided to jump in a warm cafe and spend the time with work. I assumed that eating out some place in the former Eastern European Bloc is the cheapest option anyway. And I learned that it isn’t.

Do you know how much a coffee costs in Prague?

£5,40. That’s almost twice as much as it is in London.

Well, let’s be fair: the price the cafe asks for is very reasonable. The problem is that this is not the price you will eventually pay. Czech has its own currency, which means you look at significant banking- or exchange costs.

The cafe I chose didn’t seem to accept AMEX cards. Coming from direction Germany and talking about a small amount of cash, my best option was to exchange Euros (which I previously withdrew from my sterling account, to make it more financially rewarding).

So I went to the cafe, checked the price of one cappuccino and the most expensive looking cake, went to the exchange, queued for cash, and went back for the warm beverage.

Now, I understand that governments need their own currency to make corruption easier and to be able to confiscate the economy around the election campaign time, for all sorts of populist reasons. It’s just that it makes the world a little worse.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to pay with a currency you are already familiar with, without the need to deal with fake-looking Monopoly money, dodgy exchange booths and shady folks?

Cryptocurrencies are not only for the Internet.

Hey foreign merchants, just so you know: if I ever see a Bitcoin badge on your cafe’s window, I will go in. Even if you play minimal techno in Balkan punk style. Even if your seats are made of stones.

This is happening right here and right now, people – and it’s moving really fast. There will be more currency options, the markets will lose their volatility, and I’m waiting for the day to be finally get paid in BTCs.

I’m definitely in for Bitcoin (and Litecoin, Namecoin, Quarkcoin etc.) – but trying to stay on the safe side. For the start, I’ve set up a server to collect market infos and created an app to display price charts. So far the server is slow, so only the 24-hs BTC view is free as an Android app: BTC Charts for Android (coming soon for iOS and the web).

(Please debate on Twitter.)

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Hong Kong Electronics Fair – tech insights for 2014

Being in the mobile software business in US or Europe, you might think that visiting an all-electronics fair in China is simply irrelevant. But it’s not.

This is a sneak peek into your future

Hong Kong Electronics Fair: tech insights for 2014 by Richard Dancsi
View of the Hong Kong Expo building from the Kowloon pier.

Not exactly the future of high-end technology though. At least the products showcased on the Hong Kong Electronics Fair would definitely not receive a standing ovation on an Apple keynote.

Most of the products and services here are of a significantly lower quality than what you see on the upper shelves in those electronics supermarkets in the US or Europe. Apart from the really big brands, the few exceptions won’t be amazing either – more like, well, decent.

I still think this is a great opportunity to look into the future:

  • The Asian region already accounts for 45% of all internet users globally. The next boom is coming soon as the penetration rate slowly reaches the US levels.

    These people tend to use low-end smartphones to access the internet, and the devices on the fair will meet a need on – among others – the humongous Indian or Russian market.

    Still think it’s irrelevant? It isn’t: it’s a safe bet that Google went back to support 512MB devices with Android KitKat just to fulfil the need of these markets.

  • Asian companies are not only manufacturers anymore, but also creative drivers with a huge market. As more and more products emerge, they will have an ever bigger impact on what services and devices we’ll see in the next years.

Insights from the fair for 2014

To start with the easy-to-guess ones, it’s no wonder that compact cameras and camcorders are nowhere to be found: most of these functionalities are already replaced by the features of the smartphones. Action cameras are still fine, but dedicated GPS and personal navigation tools are also gone.

Phones and tablets are blooming. I did hold five perfect iPad mini replicas in my hand, and tried dozens of other phones and tablets. Android seems to run on almost everything, even on portable wifi routers or mini USB computers.

The wearable accessories wave shows no signs of calming either. There are smart watches, fitness bands and some sort of smart glass-looking things. This still feels being an early stage here, with most of the showcased products lacking a strong use case just yet.

Smart homes, offices and class rooms are hip. Home sound systems even more: wireless speakers and headphones are everywhere – some with Bluetooth, some with AirPlay and some also with added NFC support. There seems to be a hipster-driven turntable comeback as well. (Hell yeah!)

My favourite tool, a 2-in-1 shower radio with built-in torch, shows that Asian inventors are unstoppable.

Hong Kong Electronics Fair: tech insights for 2014 by Richard Dancsi
Radio and flaslight. (Photo from Shenzhen XinHuaMei Electronics Ltd).

Can I get in? Can I get in for free?

Yes. Most probably, yes.

I was lucky enough to be invited by one of my clients, but everyone with a trading company can simply register online. As far as I know, if you do it quite in advance you can get tickets for free. The standard price is not high either though: 100 HDK – about £9 – will buy you access for the two visitor’s days.

Scams & pitfalls in China and lessons from Apple’s supply chain

For those of us who are unexperienced with the Chinese market just yet, the free seminars are an excellent opportunity to catch up. On these one hour long lessons you can learn quite a lot, from avoiding scams to negotiation techniques with Chinese partners.

Choosing the right supplier can make or break your business. It’s well known that Apple has over 150 suppliers – the biggest being Foxconn, employing over 250,000 in China alone and running the operations like clockwork. Foxconn then also has about 500 suppliers on behalf of Apple. Imagine the negotiation and management power they need to run a manufacturing monster this size. So these talks are indeed pretty useful.

Are you a government? Copy this event!

The Hong Kong Electronics Fair is the world’s biggest expo of the kind. It’s also something more: a 5-story example of how governments can support local businesses.

The event is organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), the international marketing arm for Hong Kong-based traders, manufacturers and service providers. The fact that they have 40 offices operating worldwide shows that they are serious about their mission, to create opportunities for the region’s small and medium-sized enterprises.

With the fair, electronics manufacturers and their distributors have a controlled and comfortable environment to find each other. More than 4,000 exhibitors from 30 countries are showcasing their wares, and have the opportunity to close the sale right on the spot.

How awesome would it be to have something similar for your business, right?

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Bintan, Indonesia: free wallpaper downloads

On my latest trip in Asia I had the time to meet up with friends and go for a weekend getaway to Bintan, Indonesia. This is a truly beautiful island with gorgeous blue skies and a turquoise sea, so it’s no wonder that we took some pictures before jumping in the water.

Bintan, Indonesia - free wallpaper from Wimagguc

These photos then ended up being my wallpaper, bringing the summer to the cold Northern Europe. Please find the screens available for download below:

Bintan, Indonesia - free wallpaper from Wimagguc

Bintan, Indonesia - free wallpaper from Wimagguc

To take the photos I was using my good old Nexus 4’s sub-awesome camera, hence the huge amount of noise. I tried to remove that with some lightweight Photoshop editing, and then doctored a somewhat more natural, diapositive-like colour too. I’m quite happy with the Cereal Magazine style, but feel free to argue on Twitter.

The wallpapers are free for personal use. (Please contact me if you want to use them elsewhere.)

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Custom UIAlertView for iOS

It was a common pattern for iOS developers to create customised dialogs by attaching a subview to a standard UIAlertView. Since iOS7 however, Apple removed this feature and developers are left without a dialog pattern that matches the iPhone UI.

As a solution, I wrote an open source class to create an iOS8-style dialog which can be extended with any UIViews or buttons. The animations and the looks are copied too, and no images or other resources are needed.

You can just grab the open source code from Github now. In this article I will write about the implementation best practices and some background info.

Extend your current AlertView code to support iOS7 and iOS8

To create an AlertView with a custom subview, you probably wrote something similar to this:

And you did probably reset the frame in the delegate method willPresentAlertView too.

This was working on all previous iOS versions. On iOS7 however it will result in an empty dialog. What you have to do therefore is to fork the code here: display a standard UIAlertView on the old devices, and a CustomIOSAlertView on the new ones.

Forking the code is as simple as this:

For the new dialog, you would add something like the following:

Putting these two together, a full solution would look like this:

And that’s it! For the CustomIOSAlertView is a hack-free UIView, you don’t have to add anything to the willPresentAlertView delegate, just keep it as it is. For handling the iOS7 button clicks, you can use code blocks or delegates – please refer to the project’s readme.

How did we end up here?

Apple never officially supported the addSubview method of the UIAlertView. Their approach is to use this dialog only for a small subset of functions, like a plain text input. This is as easy to do as setting the style of the UIView to UIAlertViewStylePlainTextInput.

However, UI/UX designers like to use the dialog pattern for other use cases as well. An example is to show a simple image to the user, or display a progress bar while the user is waiting for a background download to be finished.

Until the previous iOS version the addSubView method worked fine, and developers used it as a best practice for these dialogs patterns. That’s why Apple’s move left app publishers in a bad position: before rolling out the updated version of our apps, in some cases we have to find a completely new user journey.

This is where the CustomIOSAlertView comes handy: we can roll out the iOS7-support quickly (and start up the user experience think thank in the background).

(Free code and source from Github. Opinions, debate: @wimagguc on Twitter.)

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Why the software industry needs more short-time jobs

How taking short-time projects will make you a better developer, and how managers should hire those brains to give a long lasting boost to the software team.

Being a good developer doesn’t end with having a deep understanding in the technologies and languages you use. It goes even further than knowing the ins-and-outs of the tools, patterns and algorithms you utilise on a daily basis. To be a great developer you have to constantly research, and adapt the new solutions and technologies others invented.

So if you are programming Java websites since university, the least you should do is writing some Android apps on the side. It might be the same language and tools, but you will surely end up looking into some UI/UX stuff that will broaden your mind and skill set.

Corporates have a good reason to keep programmers dumb

Experimenting with new technologies is not what usually happens within corporates though. Engineers are paid to provide a solution that works, within the shortest time frame and with the most certainty that the software will not break. Not exactly the best place to be creative and invent new stuff.

This is one of the key factors for most of the workplaces not using the latest software or technologies: implementing those takes time, and sure: why would they bother updating something that worked just as fine before? It may be totally understandable, but that’s how you end up with software running on Java 1.5 and office documents written with Office 2007.

Reading Hacker News? Come on. Xkcd, maybe, if it was fun.

Start small, start quick

It’s very usual to get comfortable after having the same job for years. Showing up at work just a bit late, having a long coffee break in the kitchen, starting the morning with Facebook and Twitter – and at the same time, feeling more and more tired of work

This industry has a crazy pace though and having an up-to-date knowledge doesn’t come easy. It’s already hard enough to predict which technologies will stick in the long term. Who could tell if it’s better to start with iOS or Ruby now? How many months before Nokia was going down did Symbian developers start looking into Windows Mobile code? (I actually know this last one: two.)

Cash in for what you learned

Committing for something completely new would be too much of an investment, and perhaps not very wise either. First, it’s hard to find the time in the evenings and weekends to learn. Second, with those few projects you can launch, or the 1-2 years of experience you may gain, you will probably look at a lower salary level than at your current workplace with 2+.

There is a way to learn some new tricks quickly though. They say that the only way you can get better in chess is to play with someone who is better than you – and the same rule applies very well in the field of programming too.

Good enough reason to be in the market for short-time projects. If you change your jobs every 6-12 months, you will be introduced to many more projects and even more people, exposed to new technologies on a daily basis. All of this you can learn from, and the new stuff will look great in your CV.

And a great CV eventually leads to a fat pay check.

Managers, this is what you do

If you are leading a software department, now you think you shouldn’t keep the employees for too long with the company. This is hardly the case. All you need to do is to hire some developers for a few months, every now and then.

They don’t even need to be the best fit for a project. The more experience a programmer has with other technologies the better, but the main thing to make sure about is that during the project, the outsiders should be well integrated within the team.

Everything else is magic.

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