Your capacity for exploration is limited. Your curious impulses are stunted. Your decision making process, while well established and fine-tuned by the sheer number of products pushed in your face on a daily basis, is nonetheless contingent on having the options clearly and plainly presented to you.

You will have no such luxuries in the shell. Nobody is watching what you do, nobody is there to help you along or to hold you back. All the information you could ever want is available to you, but no-one will help you find it.

Every Monday for the next 9.5 months I’ll put out another short, digestible article for your consumption that will slowly build your knowledge base to the point that you can competently command and control your personal computer as well as any remote machine. I’ll teach you how to troubleshoot and customize a web server and a database. I’ll give you an introduction to all the tools you’ll need and a basic fluency that will let you provide value for either your own projects or a client’s.

As Theron and Queen Gorgo said in the 300: “This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this.”

Way too often I see people in our industry with insular, elitist attitudes that “just because my mom doesn’t get how to use it doesn’t mean its not revolutionary.” Actually bruh, that’s exactly what it means.

Nothing came of the initial e-mail contact I had with Gary and AJ then, but if it wasn’t for that early adopter action, Gary would have no idea who I was when we met in person at the NYC Digg Swigg in April. If Gary had no idea who I was then, then the conversation that we accidentally struck up with @drzhang who was serendipitously seated next to us at the NYC Blogs with Balls conference never would have let to us arranging a meeting with Gary and AJ at the then nascent Vaynermedia offices in Hell’s Kitchen, and I would never be working at my dream job today.

I know it may be unconventional, but I’m a strong believer that lazy loading or lazy evaluation is a more efficient mentality. Freeing up brain space by only retaining information that is absolutely essential allows you more computing power for problem solving. In tech terms, RAM > Conventional memory. In human terms, Effectiveness > Completeness. I mean >>>>>>, it’s not even close.