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jeffclark

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I make Internet. Product guy during the day. Designer and developer and future billionaire at night. And lover of nachos. And enjoyer of run-on paragraphs. And maker-upper of phrases like "run-on paragraph".

jeff (at) http://www.clarkle.com

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NYC Slice 4 years ago

I’m sad to learn that Mary Chung’s is gone. There was little better than a double order of extra spicy suanla chaoshou with a can of coke on a cold day.

How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)?

My best advice is to try to make the sale, even before you have something ready. You'll learn what parts of your pitch are connecting with them, and which are confusing to them.

But more importantly, you're going to understand if you get the problem as well as you think you do. And you're going to understand if they like your solution to that problem as much as you hope they do.

So, email a few of these potential customers. See if they'll take a call with you. If none do, you're not there yet. But if even one does, you're about to get a ton of information in 30 minutes. Good luck!

  - clear understanding of the problem I am being asked to solve

  - major influence (if not outright ownership) of the solution to that problem
Good bullet points for anyone who works, not just software developers.

I believe that people want help finding "smart home" devices that will work well with the existing equipment in their home, and that they would pay good money for that because buying the wrong equipment is a frustrating (and expensive) mistake.

I'm building a way to help you pick the connected equipment that will work best for your home, based on what you want to control, how you want to control it, and the equipment that already exists in your house.

For example, I've got an Ecobee3 thermostat, Lutron Caseta lights, a SmartThings hub and an Echo Dot. My system will tell you the best connected door lock for your home that will work with that setup.

Non-photo blue 11 years ago

It's more likely that they require blue ink so they can distinguish the original from a photocopy.

Complete guess on possible engineering teams that could make up that 250-350 people: SEO/acquisition, various "admin"/marketplace functionalities (adding, removing, updating products), analytics, financial reporting, marketing reporting, payment processing, probably some kind of "core" team, general bugs/RTB, etc etc etc etc.

My favorite part: "The next step involves complex analysis of historical bathroom visit data, to allow for statistical insight into bathroom habits. Oh, and a 💩 icon for when the bathroom has been occupied for more than 5 minutes."

[dead] 12 years ago

Wow. Imagine the author's blog post when something actually significant happens in his life.

If it's really just a front-end bug, chances are they're getting lots of calls just like yours. You may just be part of a pile of callback tickets once the bug is fixed and all the refunds are processed. Or, they could still be trying to track down the root cause of the bug in the first place.

Card management API 13 years ago

I swear that Stripe is monitoring my private repo. It's like they know exactly what kind of hacky workaround I just implemented on my project and wrote something to support it in an elegant way.

First ACH, and now this. Nice work, again, Stripe.

You're not wrong, but continue your thought process and think bigger picture.

If you do actual research on older computer users, you'll see that many prefer a desktop environment for the sole reason that they can get a monster monitor.

"But my Grandma!" you might say, and you might be right.

But expand your dataset and you'll start to understand why desktops and iMacs haven't become obsolete.