My First Customer Is Now Dead

First, terribly edited. The paragraph in the middle starting "My room in Astoria had one foam mattress in it..." apparently should come after the very first paragraph.

Second, there is no point to the entire article. It's an interesting anecdote if you knew Altucher and he was just sharing a story over dinner, but as a TechCrunch home page article??

Third, it's a random collection of nonsense. What does renting a hotel room for a year for 37k in cash have to do with anything? He says "Shlomo" always hated him, but the story he gave before does not jibe with this at all - in fact, he makes it seem he loved him before. Then he reveals that he lost the guy a million bucks, at which point they no longer spoke - but that presumably he hated him before that, too.

And the conclusion? Don't get me started. I don't even know what to think: I thought of the girl who worked in his office who had the huge scar down one side of her face. I thought of how I loved her and wanted to lick her scar and be the only one to tell her how beautiful she was. Shlomo’s dead. I am still alive.

Again, WTF? It comes across like the ramblings of a madman. I would honestly not be surprised to learn the author has some form of mental illness.

I've always felt guilty about doing this. As though hacking apart what others have made is somehow worse than constantly generating new code. I think I've heard it called "code reuse" in Dilbert and on the Tribes 2 project, where code reuse was blamed for many of the weird bugs.

>Always add an extra flourish. ALWAYS. No matter what. This was my first client. Of the next five jobs I did, three of them offered me a full time job with double or triple the salary I was making at HBO. It’s because I always delivered the extra something. This is more than “underpromise and overdeliver.” This is using creativity to make the client’s life better. And to always have the element of surprise. They know that when you walk in the door magic will happen. Doves will fly. I was the magician.

I like this. It's sometimes hard to grasp, but not all changes to a project will have the same cost-to-value ratio -- here the automatically-generated certificate images were a small amount of work for the author, but a huge value-add for his client. It's a case of knowing where to "tap the hammer"[1].

>Always talk to someone smarter than you are and get their advice on how to do a job.

Maybe not someone smarter than you, but someone with more experience, or more education, or just other experience or education. Sometimes we know what we have to do, and talking to others helps us realize it, or helps cement it in our heads. Group discussion of problems is a way of social distributed computing, don't ignore its value.

[1]http://problogservice.com/2010/11/24/do-you-know-where-to-ta...

Two of my favorite posts by him

How I screwed Yasser Arafat out of 2 million dollars and lost 100 million in the process

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/how-i-screwed-yasser-ar...

How to be the luckiest guy on the planet in 4 easy steps

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/how-to-be-the-luckiest-...

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/07/the-day-stockpickr-was-...

"When IBM was hosting the live streaming Olympics in 1996 on the web their servers kept going down. Who did they call? Not their 10,000 person IT department. They called Chet in his apartment in the Upper West Side. He took his little computer and wrote some sort of networking protocol between his computer and 20 other IBM mainframes around the world. The Olympics was saved. IBM was saved."

The only appropriate response is: wut?

But in all seriousness this story is lacking some good storytelling and any teaching (besides perl being a good programming language to create websites in 1997).