ehurrell

Great advice. Also extends to teams, 'What do we all know well enough to execute?' should trump 'What would be fun?' every time. I've worked in situations where someone saying 'Oh I decided to write this in Clojure, even though I'm the only one here who knows it and we're running out of cash' cost significant time and resources to fix (the fix was rewriting the project in plain ol' Python myself). It just isn't a sensible risk to take.

I've worked with people who burned out and had to take time off days before deadlines doing demonstrably less than others who worked 9-6 and made sure it mattered. Delegation is certainly part of the problem, but I think there's a point at which people start buying into the mythos and cargo-culting a 'no work/life balance successful startup', which is really damaging.

Instaparse is great. I've used it just enough to know how powerful it is, in a weekend project to write an org-file parser.

In situations like that, much like in real life, it's prudent to have evidence (comments, emails, server logs, whatever) to protect your reputation and show the facts, but that isn't necessarily the same as having these things aired publicly.

The ELK stack is great, powerful, relatively easy to use and set up and very configurable. I'd definitely consider it for any dashboard prototyping, given that I've worked places where the 'MVP' dashboard could've been mocked up in days with ELK rather than the months it took otherwise.

Papers We Love is excellent, some great papers. I forked the repo a while ago, was considering hosting one in Dublin. I think here at least the community seems to have a lot of non-CS people who I'd love to hear from too.

I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me some artist friends really like it.

Illustrator seems widely used in brand and web design alright, but for example concept artists and comic artists I know never leave Photoshop, start to finish.

Photoshop definitely wasn't intended for the wide variety of use-cases it now supports, but it is definitely the front-runner for digital painting, 95% of concept artists/comic colourists or similar artists I know or have seen use Photoshop. Krita looks fantastic, really capable, but I haven't had a chance to try it, mainly because all of my brushes and settings are in Photoshop.

I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.

While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment "you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to double-check the results.

Absolutely agree with the first part, have seen this too often, considering it's such an obvious mistake to make. People end up making an 'MVP' that is a whole-cloth beta of what they think people will want, releasing it and seeing it fail, without the necessary focus to get feedback. They are failing fast, but only relative to a big corporation.

I agree, although with enough users this subjective marking effect can be somewhat mitigated. I'll give an example: Steam allowed people to tag games recently, which lead to a lot of 'hardcore gamers' tagging games they didn't like because they had no explicit gameplay as 'Walking Simulator' (Gone Home, Dear Esther etc). This tag is meant as an insult, but for people who like games like this it is actually useful, it's a grouping of games that are interesting to similar people, which is the knowledge Valve presumably wanted to gather.

I would suggest a mix of automated and manual tagging, use both, show the automated or curate the text shown. It should be easy enough to cluster the tags too, one man's walking simulator is another's 'story game' or similar.

Is this the entire story? It's true that there are many times more iOS users than OSX users, but what percentage of each are their target market (who I would call 'power users')? Panic make great apps (I use them on both iOS and OSX), but I expect not everyone using iOS is a potential customer for a (great) ssh client, while a much higher percentage of OSX users use it because they want a Unix that has $Mac_Feature.

I agree with you here, but I think 'stable libraries' is perhaps a good target for a few reasons, right now the culture isn't just bad code, it's "There is no advantage or benefit to showing your code". I would say a difference between computer scientists and programmers is that frequently the work isn't just the code, but still, nurturing something like an open-source scientific community would accelerate a lot of learning.

I think it might be significant, or at least hint at a significance worth exploring. Taxi drivers' brains apparently adapt and grow a much better awareness of maps and routes than the regular person, and this might be the same thing happening with painters and their more precise sensitivity to colour. It's worth study anyway.

One of the best messages I got from the How To Start A Startup course was an off-hand line during the funding class: the best thing you can do for your funding chances is have a great product, and Mixpanel seem to nail this, great stuff. As an aside I imagine the headline was crafted to get the post attention, rather than as a reflection of how they feel.

Especially with games, gameasutra runs postmortems with devs frequently to talk about both successes and failures in their projects.

It seems to take all kinds. If the other party wants to blacklist you they'll usually find a reason to allow themselves to, though usually people are reasonable enough that things don't get that bad.

Absolutely, it's hugely important. The core idea that subjective beings will disagree holds obvious weight, but it takes serious commitment to improving the process to offer up this kind of experiment to prove it.

I've had similar experience, and it can be tough, especially when the lack of interest from a reviewer is obvious. I still joke about the review I got that included the line "English need improving".

Having done a CS PhD it very much depends on the field. Yeah you'd be laughed at for running an algorithm to find out run time, but areas like information retrieval tends to involve humans and their reactions enough that experimental design is at the forefront, rather than big-o.

One of the most difficult things to learn as a CS PhD is that you aren't an engineer, you are a scientist, so you spend your time learning to approach problems in rigorously scientific ways. In some ways it's a career switch. Doing development work after that can be a strange shift.

I continue to feel extraordinarily lucky about my experience with my PhD. It was grueling, it was tough, but I had some fantastic support. I know many who weren't so lucky, and the effects are profound.

From the commentary: "we are always more accepting of an expected outcome", which I think says a lot. Random Forests are great, and work well, but sometimes it feels like there's a world of difference between Kaggle-contest-style short burst projects and long-term "we need maximum accuracy" projects.

Other approaches always have a place, and the skill is in knowing when they should be deployed.

Thanks for the resources, my current hobby project is attempting to recreate deep learning in Clojure, have been burning through material, cheers!

I've never used it, but the way it came to my attention might be telling; hearing of a startup thinking people were posting about them on Secret. A 'pay what I want to reveal who I am' model could be interesting, rather than just pay to reveal. One of the only ways I can see adding payment into the idea of anonymous posting that doesn't disincentivise posting altogether.

Nice! I'm continually impressed by the Shiny stuff I've seen, very quick to make something impressive.

I was wondering why I hadn't seen ye about :P Irish people going abroad to start companies seems to work well, good luck :)

Great read, I think a lot of startup blogs skip the ...start bit and jump to "here's how we scaled!"

Glad to see an Irish company talking about this stuff too (though I wasn't sure if ye were Irish until I read that Darragh was your first hire :P). Good luck to ye!