HN user

sauldcosta

217 karma

Founder and CEO @ https://next.tech. Working to make it easier for anyone to succeed in tech.

Posts29
Comments31
View on HN
saulcosta.com 3y ago

The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

sauldcosta
80pts51
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: How do you train your developers?

sauldcosta
2pts2
www.hipcamp.com 6y ago

Hipcamp – Airbnb for Camping

sauldcosta
2pts0
www.digitalattackmap.com 7y ago

Iran Is DDoS'ing the Internet

sauldcosta
3pts0
cloud.google.com 7y ago

Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

sauldcosta
134pts69
next.tech 7y ago

Deploy to Azure Functions from VS Code in your browser

sauldcosta
2pts0
dev.to 7y ago

Tracking System Metrics with Collectd

sauldcosta
2pts0
next.tech 7y ago

Show HN: Next Sandbox – Launch Linux containers in your browser in 2 seconds

sauldcosta
10pts0
venturebeat.com 7y ago

Microsoft partners with OpenClassrooms to recruit and train 1k AI students

sauldcosta
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Packt and Next Tech partner to bring interactive tech education to developers

sauldcosta
2pts0
medium.com 7y ago

Firebase outages and misleading status reporting

sauldcosta
143pts49
www.nature.com 9y ago

Smartphone data from 68M days of physical activity

sauldcosta
2pts0
medium.com 9y ago

This Picture Will Change the Way You Learn to Code

sauldcosta
11pts1
medium.com 9y ago

An End-To-End Sales Stack for Non-Salespeople

sauldcosta
2pts1
medium.com 10y ago

Coding with George Strait

sauldcosta
2pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Skills Speak Louder Than Badges

sauldcosta
1pts1
medium.com 10y ago

Why You Should Write Tests

sauldcosta
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Storyboard by Codevolve – Build interactive programming tutorials without coding

sauldcosta
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Show HN: Codey ― A chatbot for learning to code

sauldcosta
9pts3
techcrunch.com 10y ago

Apple Acquires Perceptio, an Artificial Intelligence Startup

sauldcosta
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Go home Google Maps, you're drunk

sauldcosta
4pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Coding is Three Dimensional

sauldcosta
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Code Is Not Written in a Vacuum

sauldcosta
3pts0
www.gradetrain.com 11y ago

Show HN: GradeTrain Build — A Free Cloud-Based IDE for Beginners

sauldcosta
3pts0
medium.com 11y ago

How to Hack My Bank Account

sauldcosta
2pts0
medium.com 11y ago

The Programming Trifecta: Three Tips for Absolute Beginners

sauldcosta
1pts0
medium.com 11y ago

How to Survive 80+ Hours of Programming Every Week

sauldcosta
28pts61
www.gradetrain.com 11y ago

Teaching Programming: You're Doing It Wrong

sauldcosta
17pts2
www.gradetrain.com 11y ago

Show HN: GradeTrain – Automated grading for programming courses

sauldcosta
10pts7

If your analytics show almost no usage and you're not required to by any SLAs or similar, I'd say go for it. We did recently and it's definitely reduced the mental overhead in our development process.

Our official SLA now is to support the current version and one prior for Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. We also don't support any version that is no longer receiving functionality updates.

The most important thing though is communication. If your site isn't going to work well or at all on certain browsers, alert your users to this with a popup. There are lots of libraries for doing user agent detection that makes this trivial.

Disagree. If managed correctly a large customer can help grow your startup in some great ways:

- cash to invest into growth, especially if you can derive a higher profit margin than average from the customer

- increased stability ("battle tested") in the eyes of other large companies

- pushes you to build a scalable and secure product earlier on

In my experience with Codevolve (where we prefer to work with multi billion dollar companies) I've found there is a balance between how much they need you vs how much they are willing to bend to your startup mold. If they want you enough, they'll concede certain points to you. Some important things to stick to your guns on are:

- included support (you want to provide as little as possible, and get paid for it as much as possible)

- non competes (you don't want them to get one, or at least not for very long)

- pricing (leave yourself room to grow the account, especially if you have a product that can be used across multiple departments, and you're just starting with one)

The best way I've found to do this so far has been to go "bottom-up": find a champion in the company who will actually use your product. They're much more likely to work with you than an exec.

At 24, kids are a long way off for me. But when they do come to pass, my hope is that I can give them a childhood like the one I had: full of rocks, sticks, mud, and band-aids. Thank you for the reminder of how important that is to strive for.

Just want to clear up a few things, since this is getting more attention that I thought it would.

1) I am not saying you should do this. I code this much because I'm a co-founder of a pre-funding startup and am working hard to get my company off the ground, and because I enjoy coding. 2) Programming 80+ hours a week is absolutely insane. I'm not saying I'm anything special because I do it or that people who do it are anything less. I'm just another SV entrepreneur working hard to turn an idea into a company. 3) I wrote this post for other founders like me who are in worse shape than I in hopes that some of the things in here might help them.

Sorry, I really didn't mean for this post to come off how a lot of people seem to be taking it. I just figured there might be other people out there who run into the same issues I do, so I figured I'd share what has helped me.

I make sure to exercise every day: bike + swim + p90x occasionally. I think that exercise is just as important as the rest of what I'm talking about here, I suppose I should have gone into more depth on that in the post.

I think early in your career as a programmer you spend a lot of time researching, and then as you gain more experience and learn more about the languages, tools, etc. you're working with you end up spending more time writing code and less having to read S.O. answers :)

Agreed. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone should program this much. But I think some people are forced into this situation, especially in certain settings. My goal with this post is to provide a list of things that might help alleviate side effects.

Sounds like a plan to me! Sites like CodeAcademy have gotten pretty good at creating lessons, but we've built a product that works with any coding lesson.

If your girlfriend is interested in monetizing those tutorials have her email me at saul[at]gradetrain[dot]com. We'll be opening up a marketplace for content just like that later this year.

Python support is coming soon - which I'm super excited for because I love Python :)

If you get a sec, shoot us an email at contact [at] gradetrain [dot] com. Would like to hear more about how you'd be using these languages - we often find that our users have different ways of utilizing the language than we do as developers!

Great question! Some top tier universities do have things they like to say do automated grading, but even students and teachers I've talked to at Stanford, UC Berkeley, etc. say that they don't work well and are very difficult to use. They also don't have any of the awesome code feedback tools that GradeTrain does :)