carbon8
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Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
I've found it interesting how many people in the Bay Area, particularly veterans of the 90s boom, discount a lot of the ideas pushed by GitHub and 37signals. Anedotally, one of the common responses whenever I reference either company is, "Yeah, but how big is [GitHub|37signals], really?" It's actually somewhat surprising to me how consistently I've encountered this response (so consistent, it feels as if it was distributed like a political talking point). As mentioned in the slides, publicly announced funding definitely serves as a signal, and I haven't heard anyone say that about GitHub since then, though someone said it to me regarding 37signals within the past few months.
What I think it really has to do with is that GitHub seems to make an effort to hire doers, whereas many companies develop processes to deal with non-doers, eg, having staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers. Remote work also doesn't serve the interests of non-doers, since they want to Have Meetings and Make Decisions.
Comment · 13 years ago
Also, from a Kauffman Foundation report:
"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders [of companies that have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees] was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."
http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...
Comment · 13 years ago
"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders [of companies that have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees] was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."
http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-te...
Comment · 13 years ago
FWIW, having read through this book, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning Go. It provides a good, clear introduction to the language and is very easy to digest.
Comment · 13 years ago
Parts of this post are premised the "influencer" marketing model, but there is at least some research indicating that it might not be as powerful as generally assumed. For example:
* http://misc.si.umich.edu/media/papers/wsdm333w-bakshy.pdf
* http://www.digitaltonto.com/wp-content/uploads/WattsandDoddi...
"Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web," the book by Paul Adams @ Facebook (http://www.amazon.com/Grouped-groups-friends-influence-socia...), talks a bit about this.
Anecdotally, I've also seen quite a bit of evidence first hand that suggests the impact of influencers is not clear-cut.
Comment · 13 years ago
Quoting Phil Plait's very early speculation (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/15/breaking...):
"It appears to split, so I’m guessing the main mass split there. That’s not surprising; it’s happened with previous falls (like Sikhote-Alin). That means they could have disintegrated at different times, so there may be multiple places where pieces could fall."
I'm sure that there are companies that have a valid engineering need for perpetual staging environments rather than feature flags, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that staging servers are commonly engineering driven. Certainly in every part of the web startup world I've had contact with or heard about, staging environments have consistently been for product QA in organizations with heavy-handed processes and/or product management by non-technical stakeholders.
Edit for the people responding: This is not about haphazardly pushing to production. You should familiarize yourselves with continuous integration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration) and the various deployment strategies of major web companies.