The weather is rainy. Think of London or Ireland, something like that, but less cold. Insects are not a problem here, in northern Spain.
How far the beach is... it depends on the roads, maybe 2h on average but it can take much longer (5h maybe?). I live in Santiago de Compostela, there is a beach about 30 mins away.
There are hills almost everywhere, but not many mountains.
I live in Galicia (Spain), near some of these villages. I've been to some of them personally and they are beautiful. Creating a tech community in one of them has crossed my mind several times.
Positive:
- Calm and beautiful places, surrounded by hills, forests, rivers... a good place to think and to develop new ideas.
- Affordable houses and terrains.
- Galician goverment gives money and help if you want to move in.
- Airports nearby, London is 3-4 hours away by plane.
Negative:
- Most of these buildings are in ruins.
- Poor infrastructure or none at all: you'll miss water, electricity and phone lines. No mobile communications, for sure. Phone companies don't help much either.
- Roads that lead there are often difficult and dangerous.
- No other villages or cities are close, so no hospitals, supermarkets or other services nearby.
Had some very rough times myself, including the death of a relative, work harassment during 2 years and a very hard divorce... all at the same time. We humans are made to keep on living, your own human nature will give you strength to keep going. Compare yourself with older folks, who survived wars, famine, nazi holocaust... do you think you can do better? I'm sure you can.
Developing a warehouse management system for one of the biggest companies in the textile industry, world-wide:
- project kick-off with a team of 10 junior developers
- working under pressure for 3 years in a row
- avoiding office politics
- without support from IT staff, my bosses, the client or any other one except our development team
- integrating factory hardware with our own multithreaded applications
The most important lesson I've learned: for software and tech development, people comes first. Always.
The most common feature I've found in successful tech products is ease of use. For this, a product should be intuitive. My definition of "intuitive product":
- Simple, but useful: it must possess not too many parts or features, just the most useful ones.
- Familiar, but innovative: the features it possess must look like other features from other well-known products, but have recognizable improvements also.
I've felt this way too many times, until I realized that it's better to be relaxed, fail and correct your own mistakes, than never fail.
If you try to never fail, you're trying to never be wrong and that's impossible because of human nature. After trying to never be wrong (and failing) for a long time, the result is depression. And a very depressed person starts to fail at almost everything.
Ironically, trying to never fail leads to failing more frequently.
Some advice:
1. Failing and correcting (iterate!) is better than never failing.
2. Problems are targets for your skills, and they are not always your fault.
3. Prioritize, always! Solving the most important problems first buys you time to solve the less important ones.
4. Too much pressure is an enemy of success. When under pressure, the brain switches to life-or-death mode, so it mostly shuts down rational reasoning... the exact same brain functions you need for solving problems and be successful!
Ok, here is mine: Prototyper.
- Create a webapp that allows the users to choose their phone model.
- Based on that, generate and allow downloading of a custom app (Android, iOS) for that model.
- The user should be able to customize the software modules for that app and interconnect them, IFTTT-like.
Many people with ADD/ADHD end up in the IT business. Drinking and drug problems, nicotine and caffeine addiction, high-risk behaviours and family issues are very common among ADD/ADHD people.
The reason behind this: low dopamine and norepinefrine levels in the ADD/ADHD brain. Those low levels create a very high reward threshold, so people with ADD/ADHD tend to unconsciously seek for strong or risky stimulus.
Math is not my field of expertise, but I think I get your point. My point was based on a social and economics perspective. I think these other causal paths are fundamental, because they are empirically verified (computing power vs health and life quality).
Maybe a bit off-topic here, but I think there is a cause-effect relationship between number of transistors and life expectancy. More transistors implies more computing power. More computing power leads to better/faster information processing, including medical information. This leads to faster patient diagnostics, better treatments (pharmaceutical innovations), earlier and more precise health warnings (lab tests an medical equipment), and so on.
Faster and better information processing leads also to higher food quality (food processing plants), higher life quality (environmental temperature and humidity control), etc.
Germany is a highly industrialized country, so information processing power causes a big social impact.
How far the beach is... it depends on the roads, maybe 2h on average but it can take much longer (5h maybe?). I live in Santiago de Compostela, there is a beach about 30 mins away. There are hills almost everywhere, but not many mountains.
Map: https://goo.gl/hqklRv Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Spain)