Life at a startup

http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/

by emmett • 15 years ago

226 43 15 years ago

TheSOB88• 15 years ago

Really awesome story.

From the guy's page, it looks like he's a super hacker - learning to program at nine, embedding a Scheme interpreter in the Linux kernel. Between this and jacquesm's recent "it's easy" post, I wonder, do you have to be this kind of crazy passionate coder to be able to accomplish this kind of thing? I feel like I could be passionate about coding certain things, but nothing I'm doing now comes close.

geoffw8• 15 years ago

I'm currently grappling with "Computer science for dummies", wonder how I feel ;)

stcredzero• 15 years ago

If you can get things done, then this counts for a lot. I know people who are geniuses and polymaths -- the kind of guys who do the calculus to optimize patterns for making their own juggling balls as a leisure activity. That doesn't mean that they are the best at getting things done though.

Be able to get things done. Be good at taking into account what you don't know. Know how to cooperate and delegate. This is the stuff that's most useful.

gtani• 15 years ago

I just found this, googling for Pat Methenys quote:

Be the worst guy in every band you’re in.

http://apprenticeship-patterns.labs.oreilly.com/index.html

abstractbill2• 15 years ago

Thanks! I'm really glad you liked it.

Don't worry about people being better at hacking than you though. There's always someone better, and in the end the only thing that really matters is your ability to get stuff done.

jamesjyu• 15 years ago

This is a terrific writeup, and mirrors a lot of the experiences I've had at Scribd as one of the first employees over the past 3 years.

Build fast and push it live.

kayoone• 15 years ago

Great story, also looks like the guy really knows what hes doing. That said i read a post by him a while back where he talked about how useless unit tests are and how they dont help finding bugs: http://abstractstuff.livejournal.com/60388.html

I found that quite irritating from somebody who seems so experienced.

anamax• 15 years ago

> I found that quite irritating from somebody who seems so experienced.

Okay, but is he wrong?

Let's be specific. He says "[Unit testing] just doesn't cover a large enough class of potential problems to be generally useful."

He said how he evaluates bug-finding tools and discussed his experience. What is yours?

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

The dumb part about this debate is that it's being framed as all-or-nothing. The important question isn't "Are unit tests useful?" (the answer to that is "It depends..."), it's "Under which circumstances are unit tests useful?"

If a particular unit test costs you more to write than it saves you in bugs, don't write it. And if it starts costing more in maintenance than it saves in confidence, get rid of it. There's a fair bit of cargo culting going on about how much to test - in my experience, it's not worth testing getters/setters, it's not worth testing simple "if this then set these variables" logic, and it's not worth unit testing database or external calls (you should have some integration tests for them though).

It is very much worth testing tricky cases like a parser, or a bit-level decoder, or complicated algorithms. I just recently got up to 100% code coverage on a UTF-8 decoder I'd written. I found about a dozen bugs in the process. They were silly things, like leaving a digit off a hex constant, but they rippled throughout the decoder so that the results were completely wrong. If I'd just included that in another library without testing, it'd make the dependent library subtly wrong too, and I'd never hear about it until users started complaining, and they'd waste hours trying to find bugs in their code that are really bugs in mine.

I'll also mention one other thing: the point of unit testing isn't to find bugs, it's to give you enough confidence in your code that you can freely change it. The real cost of bugs isn't that one erroneous event that customers will probably never notice, it's that the fear of that one unpredictable event makes management (which is sometimes you, if it's your startup) say "It works. Don't touch it, because you'll break it" and never improve the software. That's how you get shitty software that you can't fix.

gridspy3• 15 years ago

Speaking from personal experience, there are a lot of fads in software development. From the most recent language to the latest and greatest library. From design patterns through to work practices like Agile and TDD.

You must be critical in your thinking for each one of these. Just because it works for someone else doesn't mean it will work for you.

Personally, I think that most design patterns are used as an excuse to make a simple system complex. I think that unit tests are more painful to maintain than they are worth (in many cases). I think that new technology should be approached carefully and only proven tech with minimum lockin should be used.

Don't go round saying that "experienced developers always do X" because a real experienced developer knows that X is great for some things and a huge waste of time for others.

nahname2• 15 years ago

He really does not come off well in those comments. Repeatedly saying I am successful, therefore what I am doing is right.

In his defense, it sounds like he has mostly worked by himself. Some practices don't have a very good ROI when you are just hacking away by yourself. I would argue that unit testing is one of them, if you are not very experienced with it anyways.

gridspy3• 15 years ago

It sounds to me like he got beaten up in his own comments section. The people commenting don't seem to realize that he is talking about a different type of programming than the commenters are doing.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Are there any "hacker gods" that are really big on unit testing or use TDD? Most of the recognizable names that I see talk about it are agile book writers. Not actual devs. It was Paul Bucheit who says (from that link), "I'll make a somewhat heretical claim even: Unit test are 20% useful engineering, and 80% fad. They are great for tricky code with well defined behavior (like a parser), but wasteful for most code."

Does Sweeney, Carmack, Cutler, Joy, Thompson, Knuth, Page, Steele, Zuckerburg, Anders, etc... use unit tests in a big way?

I'm actually a fan of unit tests, although I generally dislike TDD.

abstractbill2• 15 years ago

Nobody in Peter Seibel's "Coders At Work" seemed to have very much time for unit testing as far as I remember, and they pretty much all qualify for that title in my opinion.

I'd stand by pretty much everything I wrote in my original post, for what it's worth, but I guess I don't really understand why it seemed to ruffle so many feathers to be honest.

Unit testing doesn't help me enough for the work I have to put in (compared to things like good logging and monitoring, for example, unless I'm writing something like a parser, with well-specified behavior). It doesn't seem to have helped justin.tv too much either, when we've tried it. But if it helps someone else, then good for them!

hello_moto4• 15 years ago

Josh Bloch does.

Zuckerberg and Carmarck are typical geeks that just love coding and don't care about the rest (like documentation, etc). Besides, it's their own company, they can do whatever they want and don't have to deal with the consequences; they have hordes of developers to clean up.

Knuth writes something for himself. He's probably the only coders there.

Anders has thousands of qualified MSc, PhD, and a bunch of other smart people that would write automated test for him (they call them SDET at Microsoft). (Besides, he seems to be an "architecture" kind of guy, does he still write 1k LoC everyday?)

Half of the people you mentioned came from the time before unit-tests were relatively unknown and they believe that to ship means to spend countless night and sleep below their desks. Coding, Coding, Coding is definitely the mantra. They don't know the other type of software development.

If it breaks, just fix it. No punishment.

I don't mean to paint it in such a bad way. If you look at Facebook during the earlier years, if it breaks, who cares, you're not going to lose million of dollars. The situation, culture, environment, products, and market segment are totally different.

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

There's a bit of an implied selection bias in your question: people get to be hacker gods usually by starting something that later becomes big, and it's in the "just starting out phase" where unit tests are least useful. You never hear about the maintenance programmer that joins five years down the line and finds unit tests indispensable, because there are lots of maintenance programmers and hence little reason to think that any one of them is a hacker god.

bradleyjoyce• 15 years ago

I really wanted to read it but it was too painful on my eyes... tons of text smashed together, taking up the whole page.

Fluid layouts are great, but there is a reason books aren't generally 12" wide. (hard for humans to keep their place on really wide texts)

Also, increasing the line-height of the paragraphs would help a ton.

LiveTheDream• 15 years ago

I thought the line-height was fine. Agreed that reading long lines is harder, but luckily our browser windows are easily resizable.

ideamonk2• 15 years ago

Give the readability add-ons a try, if you haven't already.

davidwparker• 15 years ago

I think the biggest takeaway for me from this is how he had the power to, and actually said, "no" to feature requests. This has definitely been a problem for several projects that I've worked on.

ayers• 15 years ago

This is a very very important thing. The package that I currently support needed to learn that years ago.

enjo• 15 years ago

I was thrust into a similar role to this guy when I was all of 24 or 25... It took awhile to learn to say 'NO', not just because it's hard but because it often led to really strong disagreements. The guys on the sales side of the product just couldn't understand when we couldn't do something. There was always an undertone of 'are you guys just not good enough?'

I think that's the hardest part. Generally you say know even when it's technically possible. Hell you probably know exactly how to do it, just not in the timeframe you have. Learning to keep your ego (I can do this) from getting in the way of what's best for the product and the business is the hardest lesson a good developer has to learn IMHO. It's the programmers version of crossing the chasm.

eunice_chen• 15 years ago

I love the story and the writing style. He shows his passion in an honest tone; is proud of his successes and is honest about his (and the company's) mistakes. Very smart coder/hacker but also with a talent for writing (which people always think are mutually exclusive!). Props!

ideamonk2• 15 years ago

Had a great read. Growing up watching gates, wozniac, jobs and other success stories in documentaries, I never wanted a 9to5 at a big establishment. You touch upon homebrew club which brings me back & close to what I still long for - the working in the garage/backyard moments. Perhaps its time. Thx!

JMiao• 15 years ago

bill: i recall viewing a startup school 07 attendee wiki and being impressed with your self description. i think you went by "bill bland" back then. good to see quality people doing great work.

wtn• 15 years ago

Oh nice, he beat YouTube to a seek feature that's been in QTSS for a decade.

bconway• 15 years ago

Great read, it's nice to see non-founders that are so enthralled with their jobs. Off-topic, though:

All of our early press had evaporated, it turned out nobody actually wanted to broadcast their lives, and we really had no idea what to do.

How did you solve this? I look into Justin.tv every few months and there's nothing compelling there for me, but it must be aimed at a different demographic.

idea4gud• 15 years ago

I absolutely admire the work by your team. Startup has those energy which I am hungry for , but I am stuck in enterprise world with lots ...., just watching in sheer amazement.

kmc2• 15 years ago

"nobody was saying much to me"

"I didn't bother to read the irc spec, I just watched the real-world traffic and used that as a spec"

"no code review, not even any conversation about how I'd implemented things"

Is this really the work environment we want to idolize?

Life at a startup

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