davetong

http://railscasts.com/announcements/11 http://railscasts.com/announcements/12

I really like what you are doing, but after seeing what happened to RailsCasts I am a worried what will happen to this business model once it hits 400+ episodes. Hopefully your "other plans" have this part worked out?

That's how I have always seen it though - top flaps open...

I still can't see how the base of the box is aligned :(

"Mark Zuckerberg's design team is his imperial guard. They work closer to him than any other discipline in the company"

Interesting... as I don't rate fb's design at all...

Interesting... Are you measuring by the number of users or revenue?

Hi Oliver,

Thanks for participating in this thread. Just out of curiosity, how will your service differentiate from iCloud for Apple users?

An idea without execution isn't worth anything.

You'll be doing all the work up front and then all the work maintaining and improving.

You're also not a flight risk as it sounds like you're in it for the long haul.

They also sound like they're not convinced, which means they either haven't though it through or they're not worth the risk.

Good luck with the decision. I would vote a no for them as it sounds like you deserve better and if you keep looking, you'll find some cofounders worth taking the startup risk with.

I'd hire you if you kept on going with your answer... you've shown the following traits already:

- ability to analyse the problem

- talk about possibilities, thus displaying communication skills

I have probably misled my comment by using the phrase "brain-teaser" when I really meant "design question".

The following are some of the main misconceptions of what's floating around between the blog, TC comments and HN comments.

Misconception 1: answering programming questions tells if the developer is awesome

No it doesn't. When an interviewer asks you a programming language-specific question, they are wanting to know how awesome you are at the language to see if you can hit the ground running on your first day. These sorts of questions only tell you one thing though, that the person you are interviewing has spent a lot of hours in front of the one programming language. I personally do not rate these types of questions for an interview because anyone can learn syntax, data structures and best ways to implement language-dependent code.

Misconception 2: brain-teasers don't tell you anything

This couldn't be more wrong... The reasons why an interviewer throws you a brain teaser or design question is to understand your thought logic and problem solving skills. While you talk through how you would solve your problem, they are assessing your communication skills, your process in solving a problem and also what knowledge you have as part of your experience.

Misconception 3: degrees don't tell anything

There is a lot of "show us your projects" being thrown around. While this is a fair call, one should not dismiss the degree. Simply being, that the degree is a project. It means that the candidate has had to spend three to five years juggling multiple subjects (read as 'projects'), while working part-time (read as 'projects') and managing their social life (read as 'drinking beer' and 'tuning hot people'). A degree is a testament of the students ability to see something through from start to finish... it's an example of their dedication.

Misconception 4: degrees aren't teaching students how to code, so how are they expected to code

Again, this is a fallacy. The degree is teaching students how to collaborate through group projects. How to work unsupervised and be resourceful while working unsupervised. It teaches the fundamentals so they can pick up any programming language (just another tool) and apply the fundamentals they have been taught.

I strongly agree with @marcamillion's statement about "developers being better over time". This is why I disagree with Misconception 1, as all this is doing is showing how much experience the interviewer has with the language they are quizzing someone on.

Overall, give the new coder a break. They most likely got hired because they: - fit into the work culture - possess strong problem solving abilities - can work unsupervised - can work within a team environment - have imagination

And if the new guy is asking you a question, it's because they're wanting to learn, so respect that as they're trying to be awesome like you.

Disclaimer: Sometimes people make mistakes though, and a dud ends up being 'that' coder that can't code ;)

Patterns of the share market...

Step 1: create fear through speculation

Step 2: investors get cold feet from step 1

Step 3: the tech sector suffers again

And today I eat my words regarding the reliability :)

At my first professional job, the director of the company was a pathologist for 20 years. It then occurred to him that his industry could be run more efficiently so he embarked on developing his own pathology system. With no previous software background, he had his wife bootstrap his development of the system for a few years before he was able to implement it for production use. He ended up running his new software company for 12 years before he sold it for millions!

He is a prime example of someone with no software experience moving into the industry. However, I believe it worked wonderfully for him because he didn't shift from his primary industry where he held all of his domain knowledge.

Congrats if you're wanting to shift professions and industries as it is a brave move. I would suggest surrounding yourself with talented and experienced people in the software industry. There should be Ruby on Rails and web meetups in your area where you will be able to network and learn from approachable people.

All the best in your endeavours!

How is heroku doing these days: Recently acquired by Salesforce and expanding their add-on range means that they will be around for a long time and it is promising that they are catering to a larger variety of developers.

Reliability: They run off Amazon web services which are continually expanding their regions. So they are highly reliable (especially after the EC2 outage in 2010).

Cost: In my experience, heroku has saved me a lot of time and my clients a lot of money. Yes, I can setup and manage my own servers and it can be for as little at $10/month. heroku on the other hand costs up to $100/month for my production servers. Why am I willing to pay this much? Because I put a higher price on my time than $100/month. I don't have to worry about infrastructure or redundancy issues. Furthermore, my clients can afford these hosting costs as I explain to them that $100/month is cheaper than my hourly rate if I have to troubleshoot network/server issues and also perform server maintenance... which none of these I have to do on heroku.

Limitations & hiccups: I've found that I've needed to employ alternative ways of doing things due to some minor heroku limitations. Overall, everything is achievable with some resourcefulness and some extra money.

Overall, heroku is easy to get started with, especially if you've got sys admin experience! Hope this helps and good luck with your job interview!

Thomas, J.P. & Robert, H.W Jr 2004. "In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies", Harper Paperbacks.

Ignore what the critics say about this book because I think this book's strengths is in their case studies on the company cultures and qualities that made them successful decades ago. This is more about how to treat people and direct a company, while providing examples of how these companies had dedicated passionate micro teams who were their "lean startup" champions that drove their innovation and success.

Do you know how your friend feels about the two current interested VC's? Does friend not agree to their terms, are the VC's open to negotiations, does friend want to go after larger funding? If you can gauge friend's response to these questions, then you should be able to answer Q(1) and be comfortable doing Q(2) without burning bridges.

Friend should also give VC's more credit than to play them against each other or use them as bait. VC's are in their business because they know their stuff and can smell a good/bad idea a mile a way... when they don't understand an idea, it's because we as entrepreneurs have failed to help them understand.

To me, it sounds like you're pitching a hobby rather than a start-up? If that's the case, I wouldn't recommend that you quit your day job.

This is a tough question because your ideas fall into many industries and most of them sound interesting so all the answers you get will leave you back to square one... which to pick?!

I would suggest trying to narrow down your choices based on your strengths and weaknesses (and those of your co-founders if applicable) and which ones you believe in the most; which would you buy/use/subscribe to as a consumer? This should give you a short-list where you could then perform a SWOT analysis^^ on each to help you trim the short-list of ideas down further. Get it down to one idea you are passionate about! Bring that to HN for feedback and you'll definitely have a great start!

^^ You mentioned you have done countless hours of research for an idea... Sometimes 'searching' isn't enough. Put your energy into 'doing' instead. If you're technical, create a prototype and unleash it to some people in the industry you are targeting. If you aren't technical, go find your pilot customers you want to target this to and present them with some wireframes and your elevator pitch for the product. Both of these methods will ensure you only spend a few days max but you'll be able to receive invaluable feedback to determine if you need to adjust your idea or try another one completely.

Like @rdon stated, lawyers cost a lot, and that's fine if you have the capital. But if you are in the early stages of a start-up without the resources, all you need is a written document that states your terms that you would liked 'formalized', make a copy of it (prevents people from conveniently misplacing it), then both sign it with dates (consider having a witness sign it too). Then in the event that you need to 'sort' things out, both your pieces of the signed document act as your contact.

Try a simple answer: "Which one would you use?" Answering this helps you determine which one you're most passionate about as well as a foundation for looking into a user-base.

I second @elgato75. If you're concerned now, then you guys aren't right together... Your co-founder has to be of all things reliable. It doesn't matter how smart they are or how many hours they put in, if they aren't reliable and there's no trust then your startup will have a difficult time succeeding.

Hence the reason why investors are just as likely to invest in a tight team as well as a good idea.

If you're serious about your side-business, either quit your "normal" full-time job and ask family/friends/partner to support during the time you need to do what you're trying to do in order to have the best chance at success. Otherwise you risk wasting time, money, under-performing at your "normal" job, only performing mediocre at your side-business and putting strain on relationships with your loved ones because you are trying to do too much... If you don't want to risk it to take the biscuit, then question whether you believe in your idea as much as you think you do.

For me, I love it because I can work with it offline and it's branching and merging rocks compared to other version control systems. Checkout this page for a good detailed explanation: http://learn.github.com/p/intro.html. One last reason why I love it... because github rocks! It's all setup for you with a large range of third party add-ons that I find useful.

I love it! Try looking into these things:

1. CSS Sprites: merge all of your images into one large image so when your page loads, it makes one request for the css sprite. When the right pixels are found by the user, your images will appear straight away without being pixelated as the CSS sprite would have loaded at the start so the web page will not need to load a new request

2. jQuery (javascript framework): This is a great JS framework that is easy to implement that will allow you to start displaying your images using "Star Wars" type effects! e.g. http://jqueryui.com/demos/show/#default

3. source control: if you want to get into programming, you should look into using source control to manage your code... even if you're starting off using html and css, it's good practice. Later on when you start doing some complex stuff, you'll find that it'll save your bacon more than a few times. I would recommend using git because all the cool kids are. Just sign-up for a free account at http://github.com and you should be right with their great documentation

All the best, Star Wars fan at heart!

i dont want to get into a git vs svn debate here so I won't even begin to list reasons for my preference

A main anti-pattern I've observed from self-taught programmers (including myself during my early career as a junior dev) is lack of planning. This leads to being time-inefficient, cow-boy coding and generally misplacing priorities. Furthermore, an individual's personality type preferences contributes to this.