HN user
I'll second the flot recommendation. I recently started using it on a hobby side-project (http://www.gdpinbananas.com/) and am enjoying it.
It's dead-simple and doesn't require a lot of tweaking to make the charts look decent. Check out some of the author's examples here: http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/
A little bit of everything I guess. I'm a developer for sure, but I'm a generalist at heart which is why a small start-up sounds appealing to me.
As for specific skills, lately I've been defaulting to Python. I've been going through all the SICP lectures too which is re-exciting me about lisp, but I'm not too optimistic about finding a job using that.
As for business areas, I'm feeling pretty open-minded right now.
Start a business in 24 hours? Interesting... does that actually work for people?
Anyway, thanks for the links!
I'm learning fast, but it'll be a while before I'm really comfortable with it. Every time I think I'm getting good somebody will say something that sounds to me like a long unparsable stream of borka-borka like the swedish chef and I'll get all depressed about my progress for a couple of days. :)
Rumor has it that most of this kind of work is done in English, which would help. I haven't been able to verify that yet though.
Anyway, maybe we can help each other out. Email me if you feel like it. It's a gmail account and I'm "davesimard".
Retyred is on to something here. Outside of web startups I think the trend may have actually gone the opposite way over the past 20 years or so. Companies are getting bigger, not smaller. Here are a few:
Retail: just went through a mass-consolidation. The more dynamic firms, the "places to be" if you wanted to do something interesting in retail, were the ones doing the consolidating. Think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, Walgreens, Best-Buy etc... While it may not be interesting to the crowd here, innovation in things like supply-chain has been stunning.
Consumer Goods: P&G has been unstoppable, and that's where most people in that business want to go because that's where the interesting things were happening.
Consumer Electronics: Dell, Apple, Sony etc... have crushed everyone.
Banking: Ditto. Where did all the ambitious young financial engineers want to go? Easy: Goldman-Sachs. Not that innovation here was a good thing... but that's another story.
Agriculture: ADM, Monsanto and the agri-business giants have almost completely taken over. Small farms are near-extinct.
This list could go on for a while, but I'll stop. I think you see a similar winner-take-all pattern playing out in most industries. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of all this: the percentages of people employed by institutions of different sizes.
Perhaps pg is right that it's starting to happen though. Maybe the web world is at the vanguard of what will be a broad counter-trend. I suspect that won't be as strong a force as he thinks though - the advantages of being big are still too great in too many fields.
Then again, maybe the mass-consolidation was artificial. Maybe all the M&As owe as much to artificially cheap money as to natural advantages of scale. I guess we'll see.