A thought became
a project.
It began with What I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Sam Altman. Then came the decision to make something useful.
The story so farInspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
A reason to begin.
ComputingPal began after reading Sam Altman’s essay, What I Wish Someone Had Told Me. Its advice about optimism, focus, useful work, and persistence became a reason to start building rather than keep the idea waiting.
The idea was to make studying computing easier to work through: a place to test an answer, understand the reasoning, and return to the concepts that still need practice. Knowing that a tool could be useful was a starting point. Making something a learner could actually use was the next step.
That is the connection between the essay and this project. Inspiration became a practical question: what can we make useful now, and what can we improve through the work?
Start with what is useful.
The first release focuses on quizzes, explanations, and practice history. Keeping that scope small gives each part room to become clearer and more useful before the project grows.
Quizzes give learners a question to think through and an explanation to return to. The answer matters, but the reasoning is what can carry into the next problem. Progress should mean understanding more, not simply clicking through more questions.
NCC Review is being prepared for a later release to help check a document’s formatting, structure, and word counts. The assignment brief remains the reference for what the work needs to meet.
Improve through the work.
Several ideas from the essay give this project a working direction: choose a small number of things that matter, communicate clearly, pay attention to outcomes, and keep iterating. For ComputingPal, that means making a question easier to follow, an explanation easier to understand, or a document check easier to use.
A useful improvement can be small. A confusing label can become a clear one. A weak explanation can become a worked example. An unnecessary step can disappear. The point is to notice what gets in the learner’s way and do the work to improve it.
The project can have a long horizon while the next change stays concrete. Build, look carefully at the result, learn from it, and keep going. The essay below is the starting inspiration; the responsibility for what ComputingPal becomes rests in the work itself.
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.
Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
Communicate clearly and concisely.
Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.
Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
Get back up and keep going.
Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.