The Never Ending Quest
To Build Cool Stuff

Notes for a presentation by John Polacek
Slides are here

An idea is not cool stuff.

“Go to Subway with an idea and see if they will give you a sandwich.”
- Jason Fried

The magic is not the idea.
It is what you are doing with it.

First, let’s take a look at some..

Cool Stuff

Quadcopters

$49.90 - Tiny 2.4GHz Rechargeable 6 AXES GYRO RC Somersault UFO
toys.brando.com

Also:

3D Printing


Face scanned using a nextengine scanner and printed on a z-corp Spectrum Z 510 3D printer

3D Printer Creates Copies of Your Live Fetus

3D Printed Houses Might be Closer Than You Thought

$1749 - Makerbot Replicator
$799 - Printrbot

Raspberry Pi

Arduino

Synthetic Biology

Biohacking

Robot Soccer

Cool Kids Stuff

Scratch - A programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- then share your creations on the web.

littlebits - An opensource library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play.

There’s also these crazy things I’ve been hearing about lately called Legos.

Cool Learning Stuff

edX

khanacademy.org

Ted Ed

Coursera

Check this guy out. He’s doing the entire 4-year MIT curriculum for computer science via their OpenCourseware in one year.

Holy Shit

It’s a goddamn hover bike.

And so much more..

Cool Web Stuff

That’s more my thing.

Yeah, there’s plenty of great web stuff out there, like this and this and this and this. But, I’m talking about technology.

HTML + CSS + JavaScript

+ APIs

Cool Stuff I’ve Done

..I’m just an Average Joegrammer (BQ:5)

Here’s a story about some of the things I’ve done. Hopefully, you get something out of it that helps you in your quest to build cool stuff.

At the start of each year, I write down a list of things I want to accomplish, usually things I want to learn and projects I want to do. For 2012, I made a simple goal, Do Cool Stuff.

I got an early start when my second son, Grant, was born on December 6th. Thanks to Draftfcb’s generosity, I had the entire month of December off. Now, having 2 kids is a handful, but thanks to visiting relatives and nap times, there would be some downtime available to me for coding.

After having some conversations about Responsive Web Design a few times around the office, I decided that I wanted to create a presentation on the topic. In addition, I had been thinking about an idea for creating online presentations, something like deck.js crossed with Nike Better World.

The end result would be What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?. To get there, I first had to create scrolldeck.js. And for that to work, I needed to make Scrollorama, a jQuery plugin to do scroll animations.

If you build it (and talk about it)
they will come.

On January 1st, I posted the Scrollorama plugin to Hacker News. It was my first post. My expectations were not high. I turned on the Bears game, and then didn’t think about it for awhile. When I did check back, Scrollorama was #1. I couldn’t believe it. Next thing I knew, it was getting picked up by dev blogs and podcasts. As a JavaScript Show listener, it was really cool to hear them talk about it, and laugh at the ridiculousness of the demo page. It is crazy, but I’ve seen my What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design? come up as high as #3 in the Google search results for Responsive Web Design.

In the time since, I’ve continued on my ‘Do Cool Stuff’ mission. While I was at SXSW Interactive, I created a funny little quiz game called Are You A Brogrammer? I released a sequel, Scrollorama2: SuperScrollorama. I’ve started up a company github group where we’ll be releasing open source projects from time to time, the first of which was BigVideo.js.

Building stuff that I think is cool has been tremendously fulfilling for me. Getting some notoriety and feedback has been great. It has resulted in great opportunities for me, like going to SXSW Interactive, Techweek Chicago and getting the opportunity to speak at Prototype Camp.

I think the best thing though has got to be seeing my code pop up in all these sites across the web. There’s this one and that one. Ones in other countries, like on The Black Sparrow, a restaurant website in New Zealand. Websites where I don’t speak the language, like Land Een Job!. Even awwward-winners like UK Copywriting company Rule of Three.

Building Cool Stuff

Q: How Do I Learn ____?
A: Just Build Stuff.

Challenge Domains

A Challenge Domain is a method of motivating research or development in a field of study through the use of an interesting or uniquely appealing challenge that inspires the imagination. (e.g. The Moon Landing or Robot Soccer)

Really Big Ideas

Break them into chunks

Follow Your Whims

Tired of it? Drop it.
Build the next cool thing.

ABP

Always Be Prototyping

“The key to being a good developer is to be really good at Google.”
- Abraham Lincoln

Stuff You Can Do

Read

Listen

Look

View Source

Learn

Subscribe

Collect

Aggregate

Plan

Share

Chicago ...’cuz that’s where I’m from

Get Your Stuff Out There

Increase your luck surface area!

Be More Bold Than You Want To Be

Talk to people, don’t be afraid to fail, go with your gut, all that good stuff..

Have A Focus

What does the cool stuff you like to do have in common?

Having a focus allows you to filter your ideas, and set your priorities to building the ideas that will excite you the most. After working on a few projects, you might want to change your focus, and that’s just fine.

My focus? Projects that are fun, and a little silly.

So...
What’s Your Cool Stuff?