About
I am a software engineer living in Auckland, New Zealand. I have a wide range of interests, though I am particularly interested in technology, entrepreneurship, and investing.
My interest in technology is not limited to just IT: I’m also interested in medical technology, space technology, nano technology, etc… The difficulty with most of these fields is that they are so inaccessible. For example, I may be interested in the latest replacement-organ medical technology, though it would be extremely complex and expensive to begin experimenting in this area. And ethically questionable to begin growing new human tissue in the corner of my bedroom! That is why IT is so appealing to someone like me. For less than a thousand dollars, you can buy a desktop computer, download a free compiler and IDE, and begin developing new and exciting software. And with that standard PC hardware and software, one can build peer-to-peer networks, fully-featured Internet web-sites, spiders to crawl the web, neural-networks, etc…
Another area of interest that stems from my interest in technology is an interest in entrepreneurship. One of the exciting things about the software industry is that there are many opportunities to be entrepreneurial. If we imagine the big software companies, whether Google, Microsoft, or Oracle, they all started with a few computer geeks and not much capital. There is this feeling in the software industry that any entrepreneurial software developer with a new idea or who correctly picks a trend can start the next Google. Essentially, we all want to be the next Larry Page!
One of my other main interests is investing. The idea of picking trends in a market and then beating the supposedly efficient market is very addictive. I find it really interesting trying to predict how different technologies will develop, how this will alter the structure of different markets, and who will end up winning in the long term. I figure, if I could be right more than fifty percent of the time, then I should be able to beat the market. Unfortunately, as to date, it appears that I am correct less than fifty percent of the time!
