You’d think at that age I would have aspired to be something more sensational: astronaut, president, movie star… Nope, I wanted to drive a forklift. I wanted to load semis with pallets of board games. But, it wasn’t just forklifts that got me going, it was the bigger picture. It was commerce. It was business. It was the movement of products and money, in and out, day after day.

Now, it wasn’t the money or the greed or the power that excited me, it was the growth. I was so obsessed with watching things grow. Still am. Things like the Topsy Turvy excite me.

Why don’t you work in a warehouse now?

To be honest, a lot has changed since I was 5. My parents got our first computer in 1992, and my fixation with computers since then has had the most significant influence on the course of my life.

Over the years, I was obsessed with video games that involved economics. Here’s a few:

• Sim City 2000
• Castles II
• A-Train
• Theme Park
• Harvest Moon
• Cross Country USA (I liked this one so much that I made a one-player board game using a map, a toy truck, and some dice so I could play it offline)

These games taught me about the impact of economic decisions and the joy in the seemingly mundane. And that you have to make friends with gnomes, it’s the only way to get the golden axe.

I got into web development around 12. I picked up web dev not necessarily because I was particularly passionate about computers, but because it was a business opportunity with $0 cost of entry. That’s to say that if a warehouse was on the market with $0 down and $0/month, I would have been on that hard.

Stop glorifying idleness

Mike Rowe has it right. We’ve declared war on work. More specifically, we’ve declared war on unsexy jobs.

There’s a massive opportunity for software companies to create a new era of business applications. Not just another social media monitoring app. When I see apps like Chain.io, I smile. We need more of this.

Let’s make useful things again

There’s been some talk about stepping back from our obsession with creating consumer one-hit wonders, in lieu of making products that create long-lasting value. We don’t care that Facebook leaked an iPad version of their mobile app.

We need to get back to making software that improves life by optimizing supply chains, saving doctors from having to manually enter data from one system to another, or making it easier to manage a school. The current software offerings in each of the previous industries are embarrassingly bad. Like, “is only supported by Internet Explorer 6 and below” bad.

When you really think about it, it’s somewhat ridiculous that our best engineers work at places like Facebook and Goldman Sachs. I’m pretty damn capitalist, but we’ve got real-world problems to solve. I guess this post isn’t really just about software, but more about creating a rallying cry to go back to working on things that actually improve life rather than chase money just for money’s sake.

I’m not saying social networking and innovative financial services aren’t great things, but I’d put some other issues before them. Like technology that lowers distribution costs. Watch Modern Marvels - Containers, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s like we stopped caring about actually changing the world, and instead focussed on making things that let us talk about changing the world. Let’s start caring about real problems again.

If you’re not sure what I mean: these things are awesome

Takeaways

1. Kids need more games that focus on business and economics. They gave me a tremendous grasp of real-world problem solving at a really young age.
2. If what you’re working on involves a check-in, a daily deal, or an angry bird… is there something better you could be doing?

P.S. I just realized that I’m writing this at Devnuts, which actually is a warehouse, so, I guess, WIN.