Terry_B

It's all who you know? http://sivers.org/xn

"Luckily, who you know is up to you, not luck."

Working in the aerospace industry for a number of years, I've seen and created all types of crazy spreadsheets to design aircraft and ensure they are safe to fly.

The good thing about the engineering industry though is that all those spreadsheets get checked by someone more senior than you.

The problem is though, thanks to the increased usage of finite element analysis and more detailed models, the amount of data being pushed around in spreadsheets has grown exponentially.

Far beyond the ability of someone to reasonably check it all.

In addition to the other reasons here, I think when it comes to lawyers and doctors, people typically want "the best".

Are you willing to take a risk with your health or getting into legal trouble?

So the price of the best people just keeps going up and up.

With developers, there is more of a concept of "good enough". As long as you find someone that can build the thing and it works, that's good enough.

You're still way up the pointy end of the business though. You are directly involved in acquiring customers.

I think the OP was making the contrast more with people who try and reduce the companies admin overhead slightly by automating parts of the accounting system.

That type of thing is easy for a company to put off and involves getting through cultural change and threatening people's turf to implement. A harder path.

Yeah, should have been more specific. If they result in the company getting more sales done with the available time/resources then they add to revenue.

The company could of course treat it as "doing more with less" and therefore use it for cost cutting instead. Depends on the situation.

This is a great point. I've been trying to think of as many things programmers can do that increase revenue as possible.

A/B Testing and sales funnel optimization is definitely a winner.

- Optimizing how a company utilises it's resources

- Optimizing the speed and performance of a critical business function.

- Increasing marketing reach

- Generating more sales leads

What else guys?

"The price is still up 30 percent on the year but far from its 74 percent increase a few months back."

I think Twitter understands that there is a much lower barrier to leaving their service for a competitor, compared to the other social services.

What data do you have in Twitter that you wouldn't be prepared to leave behind?

Wish you guys the best of luck! As someone who has worked on and thought about location based gaming like this for a long time but failed to launch I'm really hoping you guys pull it off. We even called our prototype "Turf" :)

Location based gaming throws up a lot of challenges and problems that we felt were less than ideal as a gaming experience and instead of just launching something, we over analysed and try to solve them all upfront (without evidence that they are really problems). My only advice is just launch!

I always figure that the maintenance guy and probably half the staff know the master code.

[OT] Why is it that I knew he was a fellow Australian the second the video popped up and without volume? The brain is a crazy thing.

I love this concept and hope to do some remote working like this soon. Most important factor though, how good is the wifi?

The world needs a website with tropical resorts rated by wifi quality.

I suspect that the recent addition of automatic referencing counting will help a LOT for iOS apps.

Sure, amongst other things I've written software for use by commercial pilots and nurses. I don't think I'll end up being either of those.

It's a good point but there's a huge field of potential software and opportunity out there that we programmers are not the users of. Who should build it then?

As time goes on The Lean Startup thing is starting to look a lot like the lifecycle Agile went through doesn't it?

- A good idea comes along that makes a lot of sense

- Starts to gain traction

- Some people get a bit too religious about it which annoys some other people.

- Some do it well and lots do it badly

- The annoyed people try use the examples of it done badly to make generalisations about it, smear its name and generally miss the point entirely.

- on and on we go

I've read a lot of the most well known game design books and its staggering how good this book is. League of its own.

Yeah, glad I read this before upgrading. My large collection of podcasts stored in Instacast will probably be lost straight away.

Yep and all of this because mostly business drives technology not ideological programmers.

And on the rare occasion the ideological programmers are in charge, you can't get them to agree.

Frustrating but that's the way the world works and I'm not sure where complaining gets you.

Nice! I like it.

Couple of thoughts perhaps on how you could better close a sale.

It wasn't immediately clear to me what exactly I'd do with this. Would I create a book for myself with things other people have told me? Would I put my wisdom in a book and give it to someone else?

Lets say I've got my mind around it and I think this is a good idea that I plan to do. You need to convince me pretty quickly that I shouldn't go and look for other online book publishing sites that are cheaper/easier.

I don't disagree with you but I've seen a number of articles that simply present the fact that the top have increased their % and left it at that as proof of something bad happening.

If what you say is true then that is the argument that needs to be made before reaching that conclusion, that's all.

Sure, it might if you show the data that proves it.

But showing the data that the top has increased their % share of the wealth does not prove that.

Not picking on this article in particular but whenever I read these types of stories I get the feeling that people don't make a clear separation of these two very different issues:

1. The bottom is worse off relative to the top in terms of wealth than they were before.

2. The bottom is worse off in terms of wealth (quality of life) than they were before.

People seem to imply 2 when they talk about 1. but they are very different things.

Oh for sure, networking and word of mouth seems to be 95% how the business works. I was just interested specifically in whether any success had been had with any forms of advertising other than adwords and seo.

What forms of advertising have you tried if you don't mind me asking? Just online stuff?

Effective or not, I've been struggling to think of ways to advertise a small contract development business to enterprises other than adwords and seo.

Yeah, the idea of deliberately leaving something unfinished so you know exactly where to start from next time you sit down has helped me greatly. http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/leave-your-tasks-unfini...

Something I've found in getting people started in this direction is that they don't know what words to use when googling for their problem.

You can give them a huge leg up by giving them a programming vocabulary to help them on their way.

There's that famous saying about once you have a name for something the problem is pretty much solved...

You can also help them heaps by telling them what's important and what is not important. Most books on programming languages etc start with a whole bunch of stuff they should probably put into the basket of "computer trivia I don't need to know yet"...

Would love for this button to exist within the Instapaper app.

I'm rather skeptical that there are many interesting classes of information for which geography is a good filter. I don't read my local community newspaper because it's boring. On a larger scale reddit/r/australia is more interesting to me.

For most types of content I just want the best in the world and location is irrelevant. If you took the best from just my area I can imagine the quality being way below that and I live in a good area!

The best thing about the internet is how we now instantly have access to the best content and people that exist on earth. It's no longer based on who you happen to be lucky enough to live near, bump into etc...

I'd agree with you if it were a case of literally taking the source code from someone else's creative algorithm and copying it. So in the same way people find it offensive to copy someone else's fish shooting concept it would be offensive to straight copy the RSA algorithm and claim it as your own.

But it seems like 99% of software patent issues are about two people sitting down to solve the same common problem and independently writing their own algorithms that achieve a similar solution.

A case of people simultaneously converging on the optimum solution to a problem and implementing that solution themselves seems like a complete non-issue and what progress looks like to me but that's what most the current fuss seems to be about.