SparkleWise

Working solo and procrastination Working for yourself and by yourself, as you can imagine is a mine field for distractions. Nobody to keep you accountable and forbidding you to stay on the couch all day eating chocolate while you should be calling prospects and getting things done. When you work for days and weeks and [...]

I had a debate the other day with a friend of mine. To give the debate some context, I am a web developer. He’s a .NET developer working on nuclear weapon simulators, and as such, works in a controlled environment where Internet is not readily available: he needs to get up, walk past some offices [...]

I’m a data junkie. When my peers wanted to become singers or doctors , I wanted to become a statistician. I was spending hours and hours as a kid reading about economy statistics and making up my own countries. I know, I would have been worried about myself too. So, it doesn’t come as a [...]

A few days ago, while performing some end-of-class takedown routines in my krav maga class, I was under a guy way heavier than me. My left leg and body were not aligned, the guy pressed a bit too much, crack. My knee. It didn’t really hurt but I stopped right there and went home, walking [...]

Since having started to work for myself, I’ve had trouble with actually working consistently. No boss behind, no external pressure, no work environment, … it sounds idyllic but it can be tough to deal with! One way I found that really works (for me) is to create a routine for yourself. When you think about [...]

I’ve just come back from a weekend with friends that we call “15 minutes of fame weekend”. The idea is to go with friends (and friends of friends) to a house in the dutch countryside, to spend the weekend together, and on top of drinking beers and going to the beach and having a good [...]

I’ve recently started to work on a new startup idea. When I told it around me, I got lots of different answers. Some were positive, but most were negative. It seems talking to people is actually a great way to understand why your idea WON’T WORK. If you have ideas, people will find flaws in [...]

Since starting to work for myself, I launched a couple of websites, thought about hundreds of ideas and ended up buying quite a few domain names in case I want to implement these ideas. As you can see, I have a problem of coming up with too many ideas and having a hard time to [...]

A couple of months ago, I’ve launched a gift certificate template website. However it’s still not doing very well. I’ve recently started a new project. The basic idea is to provide a BMI calculator on a website. BMI? BMI means Body Mass Index. It’s an indicator that measures whether you have a healthy weight or [...]

Rewind: I left my job in January and started my own business, with the plan of making websites and small web applications for a living. The plan also involved being location independent and so I booked a round-trip ticket to Kuala Lumpur 5 months apart. The first stop on my 5-month long trip was Indonesia. [...]