Book: The E-Myth Revisited

The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber, E. Michael.

It is a too verbose text for my tastes, so I will summarize it for you:

People usually start a business with a technician mindset but a successful business requires balanced entrepreneur, manager and technician roles.

• Entrepreneur: What do people need? How much would they pay for it? How will they know about my product (marketing)? What is my future vision for the company and myself?
• Manager: Provide structure (processes, manuals etc.) to the organization.
• Technician: Check technical feasibility of product ideas, build products.

Each role requires the same amount of time and attention. The main reason for business failures is that their founder is not aware of this and is stuck in one (usually technician) role.

Notes about A*

A* (AStar) is a relatively easy to implement pathfinding algorithm. There are good resources that explain the algorithm, so I won't go into detail here:

• A* Pathfinding for Beginners
• Informed Search (A*)
• A* Pathfinding Tutorial

I find the following particulary interesting:

• Closed list does not mean pure path list. It contains the path nodes and all the nodes that were considered as path nodes some of which not being on final path.
• Once the end node is reached, path is constructed by starting from end node and going backwards to parent nodes until start node is reached, i.e. until parent node == null.
• If open list becomes empty (i.e. no more nodes left to consider) before end node is reached, it means there is no path from start to end.
• Switch parent according to G cost.
• If h is admissable (i.e. if h >= hOptimal), A* will find shortest path.