The truth of the matter, sad as it is, is that I don’t enjoy coding as much as I used to. There was a time in my life when sitting down to the computer to plug away at some code was something I genuinely looked forward to. But something in me snapped. I think I just became more social at some point and no longer liked the constant isloation that coding provides. While it’s true I still like my alone time, my interest have, instead, drifted toward the customer-facing tasks of designing and planning a site rather than actually implementing it.

I genuinely enjoy talking to business owners about their web sites, their goals and how I can help achieve them. It brings me great joy to share in their excitement and be a font of information and solutions. When time comes to implement, however, it’s becoming a bit of a drag for me.

Maybe it’s just because the code itself isn’t as challenging as it once was. I’m a sponge for information and I love a good challenge. Coding always presented endless fun logic puzzles for me to solve. But I’ve solved most of the puzzles I come across most often, and the bigger puzzles that I want to solve, to be frank, aren’t at all profitable. Take AI, for instance. The idea of teaching a computer to think is what drew me to programming in the first place when I was 10 years old. Movies and TV had taught me that computers were hyper-intelligent sentient beings. When my mother tried to explain that, in truth, computers are simply machines that take instructions from humans, I was determined that I’d eventually give a computer the necessary instructions to think for itself. That dream has always lingered in the back of my head, and I enjoy keeping up with some of the topics happening in AI research these days. But in the end, AI is still just research. Sure, there are plenty of commercial applications for it, but the interesting stuff is all in the research, which costs more money than it generates.

I think, ultimately, I’d like to build a business model where I’m paid to play with ideas and such, generating money for myself, my team and my customers. I probably should have gone into research, but I never had the discipline that modern academia requires. I’m not one for bureaucracy and political intrigue, so working in academia would probably make me miserable. Still, I like playing with ideas.

Which brings me back to TechKnowMe. I get endless amounts of pleasure in looking at the technology available and helping small business owners find ways to use it to meet their business goals. In this role, I get to play with ideas, explore possibilites and see them come to fruition. At the moment, though, I’m a one-man show, which means I also need to deal with the dirty nitty-gritty. I still enjoy coding now and then, but I need to find some folks who love to code as much as I used to. Hand off the nitty gritty implementation details to them, check their work, then refine it to suit the needs of my clients. That’s the business model I’m currently working toward. It’s attainable, but man is it a lot of work.