Moonshooting.

Well, looks like there's a new buzzword in town: The moonshot.

The basic term means that instead of thinking how to solve a problem incrementally (Improve by 10%), you try to think how to solve it 'exponentially' (Improve 10 times instead).

Though there are already 'exponential thinking' courses taken at universities, Wired had a special issue about 'thinking big', and a nice website with all sorts of neat videos from top scientists and CEOs about how the world's problems are going to be solved in the coming years.

The way I see it, in today's world, this type of thinking is essential in today's scale factors. If you work in the b2c business, and solve a problem with data, you already need to think by millions and millions of transactions - That's exactly the 'big data' thinking.

So the next time you think about a redesigning your system for performance, try to think how it would handle 10 times more users. or 1000. or 1000000. The world has gotten big, it's time to scale our thinking as well :)

School yourself!

The tech world is all about tech fashion. Buzzwords come and go, new OSs, frameworks and stacks come and go, but sometimes, instead of learning the 'framework of the moment', you would want to learn some completely new fields and skills.

Luckily, this is really easy to do these days.

Udacity, founded by the head of Google X (Google's futuristic project lab), offers plenty of courses, all of them free. From web development to parallel computing, it's all there, neatly packed, with tests, certificates and all.

General Assembly offers video courses, some free and some paid, and focus more on design and entrepreneurship.

10gen, creators of MongoDB, have 3 great courses on database, from programming to scaling and maintenance (Of course by using mongo...)

There are plenty of other resources online - Just pick what you want to learn, and go there.

Spending 2 hours a week expanding your horizons and skills - It's worth it, even if just for the fun and challenge.