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Year of Focus
I like listening to Cortex because they are thoughtful about how they do work and they always give me something to consider. They recently had a discussion about how New Years Resolutions are terrible and instead you should have themes for the year. In the past I’ve been convinced that Goals are a really crappy…
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Stock Options
A colleague of mine today sent me this link from Hackernews that explains options ownership. I think it’s great! More people need to understand this stuff, and I’m very happy this is out there. It does remind me however of how complicated everything has gotten and that always makes me ask why? My colleague had…
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Minimum Viable Process
The following are a set of thoughts I’ve had watching a company grow from 60 people to 600 people – it’s not a complete thesis, but I wanted to put it out there to start getting feedback from people. Thoughts on Organizations Processes are sets of rules in the same way that computer programs are…
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The other 95%
Paul Grahm has decided to take up the old torch of more H1B immigration because “there are not enough great programmers”. In the second paragraph he says that people who disagree with him are “anti-immigration” people who don’t understand the difference between good and great programmers. I’m all for completely open immigration; let people who want…
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Business Models
I saw this tweet today “New startup concept: 1. Make something of value2. Charge money for it3. Spend less than you make I call it “business”. Thoughts?” — https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/517393404888875008 I’ve been confused for a long time about why this isn’t how modern startups are run. This is the exact model I had in my…
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Why Here?
This winter in NYC was particularly long. I am SOOO happy that it’s finally summer. But season of polar vortex after polar vortex combined to make me really quite depressed, and I started wondering… why are we here? Specifically I mean, why are we coding physically in NYC? It’s crazy expensive, the weather in the…
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Phone Screens
The most recent trend in interviewing developer candidates is the normal phone screen, but with a live window in which you can type and the interviewer can see what you’ve typed. Something as simple as Skype with a chat window open, or a more complex website like collabedit which gives nice syntax highlighting and auto-indentation,…
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Perka recruiting
Every now and then I receive emails from various recruiters trying to find technology people for their company. I was surprised when I came to New York that there were head hunters, and that they were looking for tech people. I had heard of executive head hunters, but as far as I can tell there’s…
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Africa has better tech than NYC
One of the most surprising things to me when moving to NYC was how often I would NEED CASH. It seems, anecdotally, that most restaurants and bars in the village are CASH ONLY (also most cabs prefer you pay in cash, and can be real dicks if you try to pay with a card even…
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Must See Tech Talks
I was super happy when this link was passed around the office and I had, in fact seen the majority of these talks. They are almost exactly the same list I would have created so definitely check it out http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/must-see-tech-talks-for-every-programmer.html The Fun ones are particularly hilarious! I would include any talk by Jeff Hawkins on…