dko

That's exactly the use case we're going after. Docks work if you happen to near them, and most people aren't within a convenient distance from them. We aim to place everyone within minutes of one of our bikes at any point in time, so you wouldn't have to think about commuting between docks.

This is awesome. :)

Yup, over the past few years, station-based bikeshares like Citibike have done a great job at showing the bikes as a public resource can work, and help develop biking into a legitimate commute option.

We've a few tricks up our sleeves here to make it effective and affordable for us.

Thanks for your support! Which city are you in? (And do sign up at https://spin.pm)

Hey stevenrace, I'm Derrick, one of the co-founders of Spin. Given our roots in the US, we're building our bikes for the local market, and use different tech than the Chinese companies, for example, FCC-compliant devices or networks that are available in the US (3G and newer).

Thanks for the support! Making biking more accessible for everyone is one of our goals with Spin. Where are you based, and what's your local program?

PS. This is Derrick, one of the co-founders of Spin :D

Sorry you experienced that! We just discovered a bug that didn't persist the offer to the end in a minority of cases, and it's now been fixed. And thanks for your feedback about our prices. Our price at launch is actually derived from other services in the reservations space (ie Table8, TableSaavy), but we're always evaluating our price point.

Yup, we'll be getting around to that feature really soon. In the meantime, just email us to let us know!

Thanks Jacob. It's our dream to be able to roll it out in Brisbane, but given the size of our team and how young the project is, it won't happen quite so soon :)

Much like the concierge services (ie Magic) out there, we want The Loft Club to provide simplify people's habits of dining out. The added element of a pleasant surprise - as you mentioned - is something we want to focus on too as we build out the service.

Happy to chat more in person, DM me @derrickko.

Thanks for the feedback! We are actively adding a dining preference feature, so hang tight for that.

The first iteration of the product actually had that kind of flexible scheduling in place, but we decided to simplify it for launch. We do want to add it back once demand scales up!

Thanks! We're starting off with the $40-$60 per head price range, and we definitely want to hit different price points.

Our selection of restaurants include both well and lesser known joints - good food exists in all places, and we want to help people discover that.

Hey everyone, this is Derrick, the creator of The Loft Club.

We noticed a common pattern when we eat out. A cursory Yelp search, perhaps a cross reference dining guides, and finally making the reservation (via OpenTable/SeatMe/phone), only to find out that there aren't any tables left. We then wish we had done all this couple weeks back, but that's hardly practical.

The Loft Club removes all that hassle. Trust us to do the research, and we'll make the reservations for you every two weeks. We've started this small project to scratch our own itch for now, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

OP here.

I've spent some time at Microsoft, and have only good things to say about my experience.

My qualm isn't with the company, but rather, the content, approach and flippant tone of Kevin's post. Having previously worked there, that's not something I'd expect from the company, which is disappointing.

(cross posted this back to http://blog.derrickko.com/microsoft-and-startups)

This looks extremely promising. Setting up and maintaining consistent dev environments are a time suck for any company. Companies like Quora are already doing this internally on EC2 (http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Qu...).

Wells' personal announcement and reasons for the move - http://www.wellsriley.com/blog/2012/im-joining-kicksend/

It seems like it might be difficult to test really complex CSS like drop-down menus, interactive hover effects, etc

Such complex CSS behaviors are probably better off being tested by an integration test.

It would be so great to have unit testing to keep an eye on these kinds of things.

Agreed! The Cactus approach does work well for unit tests.

Thanks for the excellent write up, Andrew. Glad to see that Mailcheck's working well for you! I'll post up your post on our Github readme in a bit.

As a side note, I'll be releasing version 1.1 shortly, which has a bunch of improvements, including the option to use keyboard-distance based string matching. Look out for it!

I totally hear you. The jQuery plugin actually wraps Kicksend.mailcheck, so it's easily decoupled (do fork it!). Since its main use would be on the client side, we released as a plugin for the ease of adoption.

No problem! The Mailgun webhooks helped us collect and analyze the delivery failures, so that was really helpful. Thanks for that.

A mx checking service sounds awesome. Keep us posted if you guys do it.

Thanks! Glad to share it.

Thanks joedev, perhaps I will one day. As mgkimsal mentioned, consultants have to take into account other such considerations when working with more established teams. That said, consultancies like Pivotal Labs make it part of the engagement to impart best practices and effective process to their clients as much as possible.

Do check out the source. It's a great example (and starting point) of TDD/BDD in Cocoa, which has yet to fully catch on.

https://github.com/JourneyForMac/Journey/tree/master/Journey...

+1 to the middle road.

Engineering is about making such trade-off decisions, constantly. One of the many traits of a engineers is how quickly and accurately (on hindsight) we can make them.

And back to the blogpost, I feel that the array vs hash and LINQ examples are fairly contrived. In reality, a good engineer shouldn't even consider those approaches in the first place, unless there's a really compelling reason to do so.

nice! you touched on really valid points. we had the exact same thoughts and decided to try it out at http://yum.sg. still deciding whether to launch it stateside.

The reality is that there are startups out there working on really interesting problems that can't afford the $5k, but would love to get great interns.

Yes, that reduces the pool drastically. You are essentially finding the intersection of students that believe in your challenge over immediate compensation, and do not have financial constraints. But to quote the quoted Chris Dixon: "People who say recruiting is hard are right. People who say it is impossible just aren’t showing up enough."

Reaching out to this group of students is about pitching yourself right. And as the post highlights, understanding the motivations is an important first step.

Definitely a project management tool, even at a team your size. As a project manager, features that facilitate multi-issue tracking, prioritization and estimation will soon become invaluable.

And plus, getting everyone used to a tool early and making it part of the development process would pay off in the long run. Especially when the team expands.

Sometimes it depends on the team dynamic. If the non-developers have the will and time to incorporate git into their workflow, then it makes sense. If not, it's not their fault either.

In the end, it's about adopting what is most effective for the entire team to get the job done.

Set agreements in stone as early possible. No matter how much trust there is, and no matter how awkward it may seem.

And I can't help but draw parallels with The Social Network, which incidentally is also an account by an 'ousted' co-founder.

"If only" - totally agree.

Just building something people need/want, or improving upon what works, is a deceptively simple generalization. It boils down to execution, and that's where our originality still comes into play.