jwwest

Could someone explain what the point of Dropbox as a company is now? They literally own their space, everyone loves them, and I'm sure they're making money hand-over-fist.

However, they raised another round? Why?

Link bait title aside, I'm a little bored with these "We don't like x, so you shouldn't use it" articles.

The main downside of MongoDB is that it's new. This means less knowledge of best practices, incomplete or missing support in third party integrations, and feature-lacking tools. It also takes a different approach to architecting systems than you would take when using a SQL approach.

or remove useless buttons like the calculator and timer buttons

Pure opinion here. Personally I use the calculator a lot on my phone, and love having a quick way to access it. The timer icon is actually the clock app, I got confused by the icon too.

After playing around with the Beta for a while, I can say that the design doesn't make sense until you actually use it. Give it some time.

...and those of you who were laid off will no doubt be reading this email on our website as security has shut down your network access and escorted you from the building.

I really liked this part:

>Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.

Basically Jobs is saying "Hey, we can be in this together. Let's just give it a try." - which is rather humanizing in a way, and masks the negotiation as a soft sell.

You're making a pretty big assumption that everyone works in consumer-facing markets, and not with small- to medium-sized businesses.

The app store model is broken because it has too much Internet in it. Anonymity + Platform = arsehat. Dealing with clients one-on-one is really rewarding.

I'm an iOS developer in Dallas too. Without going into too much bagging on our terrible developer community, I will say that you have a couple of choices:

1. Bag a few freelance gigs. Build up your skills and confidence.

2. Try to get your foot in the door with a creative agency. Dallas has a lot of agencies and they generally are always looking for iOS developers for projects. The work is usually pretty simple.

3. Get in touch with Bottle Rocket. They're a local iOS development shop and may have need of junior developers.

If you ever want to grab coffee let me know. My contact info is in my profile.

Someone coming in cold to freelancing will spend time building up to this level.

They may need to take $50/hr jobs for a few months to build up a portfolio and references, and gradually raise your rates. Good, reputable clients will stick with who they know before hiring someone from the 'outside'. After that, referrals from their current contractors, then friends at other companies. You'll be working at this tertiary level for a while when you start. It sucks, but you just have to put in your time.

As a general rule of thumb, I also do not recommend taking gigs with individuals. The line can be blurry, but generally 'guy with an app idea' is not anyone you want to work with.

> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail and Gmail in front of it.

I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.

Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.

Pretty common in BigCorp land. The problem is that many of these IP Agreements are very badly worded. The spirit is that you should not take work you do for your employer and turn around and create a product that directly or indirectly competes with them in the same industry.

I'm not sure how enforceable these agreements are. Like anything with our legal system in the US, they're used often to bully people into submission with the threat of legal action, regardless of the company's actual intent. In California, there's a wide range of employee protection laws in place that would make these difficult, if not impossible to enforce. Not sure about elsewhere in the country. (standard IANAL disclaimer applies)

One place I worked at had a pretty boilerplate IP Agreement. I worked with them to change some of the wording so it was less vague. There is often a section on these things where you can provide "prior inventions" that are excluded from the agreement. I took the opportunity to list every idea (as vaguely as possible) I might want to pursue in during the expected course of my employment.

Where are the lies? Where's the fraud? How is any of this misrepresented?

This is more of the ever-popular "eat the rich" sentiment. Frankly, until someone can show that:

a) she doesn't have a daughter, or sons for the matter.

and

b) she pockets the money instead of spending on her daughter's hobby

there is no fraud. Basically if the mother wasn't worth north of a million no one would have batted an eye at this.

> Assuming I Am Only The Last Thing I Was

I can't tell you how much this annoys me. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, and I've done a lot of things: C#, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Taking a look at my resume, you would assume a rational and logical person would say: "oh, this guy's been in it a while, he could probably pick up anything" -- but this rarely happens.

I get it, you need deep technical expertise in X framework working with Y platform. Actually, no, I don't get it because a decent developer will pick up and run with anything you hand them, regardless of what they've worked on professionally in the past.

> Care

Passion != Success.

Look, I know you're oozing passion for building Twitter for Barnyard Animals, but don't expect me to show enthusiasm for your niche. Honestly, I've probably never heard of it before now. Maybe in time I'd come to really understand it and be interested in it, but right now I'm more interested in the scaling issues and optimizing my productivity through my tools.

Everything seems to come back to that good ol' fashioned advice:

"Do what you love and the money will follow"

It's pretty cliche, but the point is that you need to actually enjoy what you're doing and worry less about the money (unless you're in love with money, in which case go get a job on Wall Street). Sure, the chance to cash out big is a huge plus, but as Mark pointed out unless you're a founder it's very unlikely.

This is most likely a contributing factor to the talent crunch in the Bay Area. No one wants to take the chance on being the #1 or #2 engineering employee since the odds are weighed heavily against you. I imagine most sane people would look at it like this:

C-level / Founder: Risky, less salary now but larger option grants. Lots of hours.

Early employee: Riskiest. Less salary and less options. More hours.

Later employee: Least risky. Salary approaching market rate. No significant options. Hours that approach a normal work week (~40).

Rob's book and the Micropreneur Academy is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned "hand waving" I've read the book twice, and subscribed for several months.

I found that their advice consisted of two things:

1) Find a niche using Google Adwords.

2) Rank #1 with SEO.

And that's about it. It's incredibly vague and frustrating, especially when most niches are oversaturated these days. I reached out to Rob about this, and he replied "yeah, it's hard to find an untapped niche". The entire premise of building a product in his materials is based around finding a nice that's underserved and that you can rank easily in Google for. Anytime someone tells me to solve marketing issues with "just use SEO", they're immediately discredited in my mind.

That being said, the rest of the book was solid. The problem I have is that there is very little actionable information on selling a product outside of Magic SEO-land, which everyone knows is a myth.

Is there a decent resource for learning how to sell a product? Most of us can code and implement the technical parts of a business, but what we need is a Codeacademy for marketing. Something that's not run by slimy "internet marketers" or contains vague advice full of handwaving "use Google's Adwords tool lalala~"

The problem that we all face, especially when we're new is that of discovery. Until you reach a certain level of notoreity online, creating your own little sandbox doesn't make sense. I could create a little programming blog, host it myself and revel in the twelve hits per day, or start a coderwall account and start showing up in targeted searches right away. Is Coderwall taking advantage of me in order to sell job listings? No, there's an equal trade of exposure - at least to start.

Working Remotely != Working from home. Often when I'm working remotely, I'm either in a coffee shop or a co-working location, vary rarely at home. I don't like driving, so being able to control when and where I drive is huge.

The big issue is that of being able to control my own environment. If it's too hot, I can work someplace where it's not, same if it's too loud. When you require everyone to work in one shared area, this control disappears and you're often left to the whims of either the weak common denominator, the highest paid person, or the loudest (ie the small thin woman that keeps the office incredibly hot)

If you want dedicated employees, don't run a shitty company.

Are unpaid internships something that's uniquely common in NYC? I scan Craigslist all the time for freelance opportunities and almost every single unpaid gig in New York is touted as an "internship". I have never seen this in listings in Dallas or Austin. Internships are incredibly murky things. You cannot, legally, get free labor from someone for the sole benefit of the business. The DoE has cracked down on this type of thing before. One would assume that in a strong liberal city like NYC, this sort of nonsense wouldn't happen often.

The reason I'm upset, is that it sets a precedent for other companies: "Oh, look at Yahoo not allowing remote employees, maybe we shouldn't either" which sets our industry back 10 years.

The author of the piece, Penelope Trunk, has a well-established pattern: write a highly flammable headline followed by a long, off-the-cuff piece intended to grab attention and generate page views via controversy de jour.

The article does not even broach any of the important issues being discussed around telecommuting: trust, productivity, team gelling, etc. But instead takes advantage of a recent controversy and adds a little spin from Trunk's tired routine in order to generate page views and comments.

She once wrote that travelling is a waste of time (for her, but she projects it to everyone). After reading this a few years ago, I actively started to dislike this person immediately.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/08/17/4-reasons-travel-fo...

Let's discuss the actual message of the post. Two paragraphs in I'm already in full rage mode. Giving up your life for a company is ok? I understand dedication, even the occasional extra few hours, but what Mrs. Trunk is proposing is literally living at work, which we all know is unmaintainable and unhealthy for most of us. Research has shown that there is a tiny portion of the population that can get 4 hours a sleep and maintain 16 hour days, but that's only about 1% of us. The rest of us have bodies and lives to maintain.

Seeking Work, Dallas - Remote

Full stack developer: Node, PHP, Ruby/Rails, SQL and MongoDB Mobile: iOS

I'm a super-generalist. I've done everything from developing for obscure ERP systems, to social networking sites, to mobile devices. Recently I've been pulled into the Node.js world where I've been designing data services and web services with Express and Restify on top of MongoDB.

I have immediate availability for most small projects. We can discuss longer-term engagements if needed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/km8p1xybl698gg1/jwwest_resume.pdf

The best interview I ever had, I was given a problem to solve with a system, a whiteboard and 20 minutes.

I sketched out a quick ERD, and explained the high level architecture of the system. No code was written -- it was assumed that I could implement said system if I could design it.

The worst job interview grilled me on low level algorithms (I'm not a CS grad) and wanted me to sketch out a quick sort. Of course, I can describe a quick sort now as a result of said interview, but since it was all C# I doubt we were going to have to implement our own sort algorithms.

Another terrible interviewer asked me about projects I did in college. I finished grad school 3 years ago, and have 8 years professional experience...

Objective-C is a very verbose language. However, the author seems to be intentionally not using any of the features that Apple has built into LLVM that makes it more concise particularly the "dot syntax" which gives Objective-C the ability to call methods and set properties much like C# or Java does.

Additionally, 90% of the code shown here is old C APIs. You will never hear a Cocoa developer defend those. They're particularly frustrating to work with, but have nothing to do with Objective-C the language.

It's disappointing that Yahoo = Mayer now in the media. I'm sure that plenty of talented people spent a lot of time on this, only to have it sound like Marissa Mayer coded the whole damn thing herself.

It worked for Foursquare. If I recall correctly, they had sold Dodgeball to Google then turned around and created the exact same product.

So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.

I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?

When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.

It may be a flash in the pan, but I'm starting to see the commoditization of programming talent here. Back in 1999/2000 we saw a rash of "learn computer repair and network administration by CD!" companies, accompanied by "certificate mills" pumping out brain dumped-MCSEs by the boatload.

These days we're seeing a similar pattern with mobile development: "learn to program for the iphone! Make lots of money!" and to a lesser extent general computer programming.

The cynical part of me believes it's another sign of a bubble, but it may just be circumstance.

SEEKING WORK - Dallas, TX or remote

PHP / Ruby / Objective-C (iOS) / Node.js Developer

http://treehousemobile.net

https://www.dropbox.com/s/km8p1xybl698gg1/jwwest_resume.pdf

This is why there's so many products for designers and developers, honestly it feels like we're a bunch of naval gazing, self-important idiots who never learn to market correctly because we're too afraid to.

My biggest concern with the approach of picking something you have an existing audience with or is in some corner of your wheelhouse is that it leaves a lot of opportunity outside.

Is there not a huge competitive advantage in selling to underserved markets? You may believe market saturation is "bullshit", but it's much harder to get noticed in an already crowded field.

There seems to be two fields of thought on researching and marketing a bootstrapped product:

1) SEO and niche marketing. This is the sort of thing that Rob Walling talks about. Basically the idea is you research through Google keywords that you can rank highly for and build a product around that, regardless of what you yourself are good at. The problem with this is that the internet is full of scumbags and many online audience "niches" are already taken. PPC is extremely competitive as well.

2) Content marketing and "become famous". This is the approach that I think Amy and Ryan Carson recommend. This has a longer path to success, years in some cases, and is highly subject to survivorship bias. To be frank, it's hard to get noticed in our little world unless you're a) an extreme extrovert and b) extremely charismatic and/or c) really lucky.

There's a middle ground that Patrick McKenzie occupies that combines traits of #1 and #2, but also introduces the free radical of underserved markets. Actually, the reason for his success is that he initially started with an underserved market, and then used that to gain SEO knowledge and internet fame to leverage #2 to some extent.

I've emailed with Amy on this regard, her tone has been basically "Well, it works because he's Patrick". I disagree with this sentiment because it sets up a "Golden Calf" mentality that we mere mortals can't follow the same path.

This is the second product they've launched in the last few months that does not have a recurring subscription, but a one-time fee. I'm not sure how this will scale for them in the end.