Impressive indeed. It works out in a way if you'd like to to upgrade to the latest version of HBase without involving a data migration. Am switching to the new version right away.
CentOS is a good choice if you want to run a server for commercial purposes. I use Fedora (its almost the same as centOS) for my development desktop as it mimicks my server setup. I tried Ubuntu for my server and it didn't work out to be that stable. However a couple of my friends in other startups found Ubuntu to be working fine for them on their production servers. Another distro I use a lot is Backtrack ;)
Yes. Thats why companies that can afford have separate build engineers. Maybe one shouldn't be called an expert if they have a poor understanding of how their build system works? My first couple of interview questions for Senior JEE engineers always revolves around their understanding of build and I've found it to be a useful parameter to validate their claims of being an expert.
What's mentioned as drawbacks are powerful features Maven provides to handle the project/plugin dependencies better. It takes a bit of understanding and experience to appreciate these features and to use them effectively. I've used Maven the right way in one of the biggest enterprise environments as well as a couple of startups and the results have been nothing short of phenomenal. Am still baffled by how most of the expert Java/JEE programmers have very little knowledge about how Maven works.
If you are looking for something you want to use right away, check out JRebel. Mechanisms for hot swapping classes is still very premature in the JEE and I'd recommend WAR/EAR deployments in any environment other than development. I find hot swapping more useful for development as it gives me a faster dev/deploy cycle similar to PHP.
Ctrl + Shift + /(on numpad) works enough for me to hide boilerplate code on Eclipse. We also lose ability to add annotations (say for validation on Struts action classes) to the getters/setters.
For starters, I'd recommend 'How to win friends and influence people' by Dale Caregie and 'How to talk to anyone' by Leil Lowndes.
Freelancing to pay bills also turns out to be a big distraction. I'd recommend exploring other creative ways that don't take your focus off of your startup to pay (or avoid) your bills.
Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS) is a good option as well. In addition to recurring payments, FPS also supports aggregated payments for micro-transactions.
If you want the cheapest solution, you might want to try Noca (www.noca.com) which supports recurring transactions but everything happens through ACH and hence it has its own set of hassles.
Its a misconception to think startups don't use Java or C#. I did a search on startuply (YC funded site for startup jobs) for some of the programming languages I know to get an idea of how many openings exist in startups and the results are below. Guess which language has most openings in startups ..