Entrepreneurship on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Computer History from Giants Themselves

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was an idol driven kid and I’ve always had somebody I admired when growing up. From the earliest recollections I could trace back in my memory the very first person was probably my grandfather, the master tailor. And through him I got to know MacGyver. I was allowed to watch MacGyver, since my grandfather believed it would teach me creativity and also because I loved pocket knifes. Till this day each time you say something bad about MacGyver, you’ll have an enemy in me, since it was such an integral part of my growing up and becoming creative. Same applies to John Hannibal Smith and probably Dr Emmet Brown. The older I got, the more my idols shifted from the fictional characters to real-world people, and this stayed with me till my adult life.

Why it's not about self-driving

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In “How to be Rich” Jean Paul Getty expressed his excitement about enormous advances in science and technology at the beginning of the 20th century. The 21st century seemed to start in an equally exciting way, for example the self-driving car is attracting a great deal of attention lately. When I was about 14 years old a friend of mine told me that if KITT had existed, she’d have bought one. I wasn’t surprised - every kid in my neighborhood wanted KITT and everybody wanted to be Hasselhoff. Moving to the US meant dealing with everything supersized; the smallest car at the airport car rental was bigger than anything I’d ever driven. I really wanted a CarOS: a software featuring a button which would get me from A to B with no hassle. I promised myself that when a self-driving vehicle like this becomes available, I would become an early adopter as soon as my wallet would let me.

How do you evaluate new technologies?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“How do I get started with X” is probably one of the most frequently asked questions on technical forums. With 2.8 billion results from Google, somehow technical “AWS” manages to top the search results page:

As a software crowd, we all start to use new technologies at some point. While many technologies are fairly self-explanatory (having no “democratize” or “disruptive” in their name), many of them aren’t, or simply have no feature that distinguishes them from other available options. How do you select new components for your newest product?

Non-continuous innovation = dangerous or “Amazon Ad Platform Cleanups”

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I received an email from Amazon two months ago, but I didn’t really pay attention to it,letting it stew in my mailbox for a while, until I visited the reading section of my website in the hope of referring to the book I read a while ago, and all I saw instead of a nice picture was this:

The cause is good, but the place is bad. So I went back and I dug up the email:

Optimize for the Developer’s Time, Not the Machine’s

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It is sometimes easy to forget how computer engineers in the early days struggled just to make things work. In ’70s and ’80s, computing resources like memory were scarce; CPUs were slow, and disk space was limited. There was little or no networking, and communication with the computer was primitive. Heck, even Norton Commander on a 12” was suboptimal. Right now, I could probably achieve this:

And do it in a single Terminal window, which would make ’70s engineers’ eyeballs go red with jealousy. Have you ever wondered what the world was like without Vim or Emacs? Yet these are fairly recent accomplishments. To summarize: It’s easy to forget all these things and keep asking questions such as why are Microsoft Office file formats so complicated, unless you understand the heritage of certain decisions and computers in general.