Soi Silicon

37Signals talks about author Jim Collins ‘low overhead’.

They say:

He keeps his living expenses in check so that he’s not dependent on drumming up income (he and his wife have lived in the same California bungalow for the past 14 years), and he keeps only a small staff, preferring to bring on volunteers as needed.

Although the post is about productivity, the most interesting thing is what they say about ‘low overhead’:

Also shows the freedom you get from having low overhead. The less you owe, the less you have to do things you don’t want to do.

‘Low overhead‘ is one of the best things about living in Thailand. You can create the same web app from Thailand as you can from the US, but with much less overhead.

By moving to Thailand, I found I was easily able to satisfy many of Maslow’s needs. And once that happened, my brain just automatically switched into ‘creative building’ mode. I know how many entrepreneur blogs love to talk about building things to make the world a better place. But I found that before you can even begin to think in those terms, you need to satisfy your basic needs first.

For those that don’t know, Maslow is a psychologist who believes that not only do we have needs, but that they follow a specific sequence. For example, before you can think about love, for example, which is a ’social need’, you need to satisfy ’safety’ needs, and before you can satisfy those, you need to satisfy ‘physiological’ needs. It was one of the few things in psychology class I believed to be true

Mark Cuban also mentions something similar about low overhead. He says:

“The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that.”

The video below demonstrates that living cheap does not necessarily mean living poorly. It’s a view from the balcony of my apartment which costs $300 per month.

(This HD video was taken with a new camera I just bought, one of the first-ever point-and-shoot cameras with HD video, the Panasonic Lumix.)

In a blog post titled, Tell Us Why Your Language Sucks, David MacIver has many commenters list which languages they have used and hated.

Interesting to note that the one language that does not (yet) have a complaint is C#.

Well, except for this tongue-in-cheek comment:

i hate microsoft. i hate them for making something like the CLR which is actually half-decent. i hate that they can get some respect when they’re obviously so evil and all… I hate that they’re actually getting smart people to put thought into things instead of relying on monopolistic bullying… they should be more evil and do more wrong things so I can hate them more.

I’m personally a big fan of C#. I love the fact that I can write both web and desktop applications using the same language. And the language is just so perfectly logical.

Before this, I tried several others. Ruby on Rails kept changing and had little documentation. PHP was just too hard to memorize. I remember someone once describing it as a bunch of macros more than a language.

That being said, these other languages have created some of the largest websites in the world, so all are capable. And some of the ‘old school’ programmers hate the abstraction layer of C#.

Make sure you spend time doing your homework before choosing a language.