aclimatt

We work with clients to help build products and brands to ultimately grow revenue and make their organization more efficient. We're a team of three that work together with the coherence of one.

We typically help our clients with:

- Visual Interface, Interaction, and User Experience Design

- Product Design and Consulting

- Web Application Development: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java (backend) and HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS (frontend)

- Mobile Application Development: iOS and Android

- Security Consulting

- Business Intelligence

- Operations and Scaling: Apache, NGINX, PostgreSQL, MySQL, open source (no Microsoft)

- Well-versed in every framework under the sun: Django, Rails, WordPress, 3rd Party APIs, et cetera

Latest projects include writing BART's parking system [1], co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [2], helping jumpstart a web malware and anti-virus plugin [3], and working on a web-based property manager [4].

Let's work together!

hello@bitmatica.com

http://www.bitmatica.com/

[1] www.select-a-spot.com/bart/ -- BART's online parking reservation system (we wrote it from scratch in Django)

[2] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[3] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[4] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

Density allows these P2P start-ups to succeed with a lot less hassle, and from there they can grow the capital they need to expand.

There are some products that don't necessarily need that level of validation ahead of time. There are some founders who have networks so wide, that they can start with a userbase of 5,000 people regardless of what they build. But for everybody else, proper validation of your assumptions might be the one thing saving your start-up from failure. And not telling anybody about it seems like a pretty easy way to get there.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/33-startups-that-died-reveal-...

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/03/19/warning-7-...

[2] http://jamesmaskell.co.uk/2013/why-vinetrade-failed/

Does iOS have some ridiculous implementation? Because for Android and SMS users to get horribly inconvenienced by the sound of a text message at 10PM with information about a child abduction sounds quite insensitive. At best.

The backscatter machines were replaced with millimeter wave scanners, which are far safer and less intrusive than x-rays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner

http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The parallel to curing cancer was mainly drawn from this paragraph:

I could've become a doctor. All signs pointed to me likely being a very good one. In doing so, I would have gone to work and done my best to save lives every day. In that context, how is some programming environment a greater contribution to the world? Truthfully, it wouldn't be if I just set out to build an IDE. But that's not what I did - Light Table is just a vehicle for the real goal. While an IDE probably won't directly save someone's life, the things people are able to build with it could do exactly that.

To your main point:

If a new "text editor" ends up providing us a much more efficient means of creating things like Watson, in what way is that not just as important as curing any one disease?

Absolutely. I'm not arguing its importance, I'm arguing its effectiveness at achieving a mission, which I interpreted as curing cancer / saving lives. If you "increase everything by 1%", that is fantastic! And it has furthered many different missions 1% closer to their goals. This is very much important and necessary to the advancement of society, but its mission specifically should be put into context.

A microscope is a fundamental tool to help scientists do their best work. Thus, a person setting out to build one, in my opinion, has the opportunity to profoundly impact science's understanding of the human body and the world we live in. This understanding, further, can help scientists achieve their missions of curing disease, et cetera. But while the microscope plays a very important role in science, I believe it is unfair to the scientists for the microscope maker to believe that he is accomplishing his mission of curing disease by inventing one. Rather, he should be achieving his mission of helping our understanding of science, and/or furthering the missions of his users.

There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctors who are curing cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the medical companies who are helping the doctors who are curing cancer. And so on.

Having "a mission" is of paramount importance to succeeding, but it bothers me when we believe we're on a mission to solve a problem that we're simply not solving. A photo sharing application could say they're improving the lives of cancer patients by allowing them to see photos of their grandchildren, and yes, by the letter that is a true statement, and honestly maybe that's all the patient really wanted -- to see photos of their grandchildren, but to me it seems like an indirect drop in the bucket toward solving the real problem.

I feel like this thinking is actually poisonous to the ecosystem. It prevents us from solving the real problems we've set out to solve by deluding us to think that by building some indirect tool for people who may help people who may help people who may actually solve the problem, we've accomplished our mission. We haven't. It's a text editor, and you have to see it for what it is. If we want to cure cancer, we need to sit down, understand the problem landscape, and solve it without five layers of indirection. Otherwise, we shouldn't be stealing the thunder of those whose actual mission is to cure cancer.

Only a tablet?

Before, Opera "copied" Trident by implementing the same quirks so pages behaved the same way. They were not standards compliant, and Trident was not standards compliant. Trident failed at certain implementations, and Opera deliberately failed at those same implementations to achieve the desired effect.

Can’t live with the daily offerings from Banana Republic, Nordstrom and Fab.com, and yet can’t live without them?

So when one of his business school buddies left his $700 glasses on an airplane, the idea of selling inexpensive eyewear directly to consumers became crystal clear.

Students pay $1,499 per eight- to ten- week course, which include video conferences with career coaches and real world professionals.

Fashion, shopping, and luxury goods for wealthy individuals. There's nothing wrong with creating a business to serve your local market, and in fact that's precisely what you should do -- start with the market you know best. But when people like Bloomberg want to see more hard-core technology coming out of New York like other competing areas, it's a long hard road requiring a massive cultural shift. The engineering school will help, but it's going to take decades to break away from fashion, finance, and food.

But the best part by far:

...we would never speak badly about our city, but the rent is too damn high.

Yeah, well, growing the market for designer underwear sure isn't helping.

People come in all breeds, and I know that some people absolutely cannot get work done unless they are around others working, whereas others need quiet and the comfort of their own home to be the most productive.

What it comes down to is if you want to hire remote, you need to make sure that your talent is self-motivated enough to do their best work at home (or wherever). If you require an office, make sure the culture fits, otherwise you'll have employees constantly distracted and grudgingly coming into the office every day.

You can have mixed teams, and it doesn't even matter the ratio. I've been on extremely successful teams where only two of the 30+ engineers were remote, and they did their best work remotely. For others, separating work from home greatly improved their productivity.

Don't forget -- your empty house can be the most distracting environment you have access to. It's all about personal culture and fit.

Good photography undoubtedly improves the visual appeal of a site, but I often find myself in a position with just layouts, text, and a few assets. Being able to turn your basic tools into a visually appealing site is what I see as excellent web design.

We're a team of three highly skilled technologists specializing in solving an organization's most difficult problems. We like to work closely with companies as hands-on members of the team to design technical solutions, implement and deploy maintainable systems, and meet business needs to deliver a compelling ROI.

While we are certainly capable of implementing spec sheets, we typically are not black box coders for hire -- our value is working with you to design "what to build" as much as actually building it.

- Web app development: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java (backend) and HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS / Sencha (frontend)

- Mobile development: iOS and Android

- Server/infrastructure: Apache / nginx, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, open source (no Microsoft)

- Well-versed in every framework under the sun: Django, Rails, Sinatra, WordPress, 3rd Party APIs, et cetera

Latest projects include writing BART's parking system [1], co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [2], increasing revenue by re-writing the advertising platform for a privacy company [3], re-formulate the value proposition and rebuild the platform for a financial product comparison engine [4], and working on a web-based property manager [5].

We're based in San Francisco and can do on-site visits as well as remote.

Let's work together!

http://www.bitmatica.com/

http://www.bitmatica.com/BitmaticaResume.pdf

[1] www.select-a-spot.com/bart/ -- BART's online parking reservation system (we wrote it from scratch in Django)

[2] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a high-availability, scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[3] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we re-wrote the ad delivery platform, built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[4] www.knowyourbank.com -- Financial product and information comparison service (we worked with the founders to re-define the value proposition and rebuild the service so it better aligned with the needs of their customers)

[5] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

I personally would love to start such an organization.

I'd be very interested to see a group acting as a "liaison" between these communities to help solve problems more efficiently. Example: You're developing a sensor network to measure rain levels across cell phone towers? I have an algorithm that can measure this data effectively and correct for error so you don't have to. We already do this today with the overload of SaaS startups -- you're building some monitoring platform? Use Librato to capture the metrics. You need a disaster response application that can aggregate data and display the most severely affected areas? Use Parse for the backend and OpenStreetMaps for the geo -- no need to do it yourself. If you're solving a problem, there is a 70% chance that somebody either solved it already, is currently trying to, and/or has a good idea about how to solve it. Increase the collaboration to a more personal, local level, and you've got something big.

Compared to most groups in life, this is a very rare breed of "yes I know I'm amazing, but I know the people around me are REALLY amazing". Which I'd argue is shockingly healthy for such a large group of people so smart and under so much pressure.

There was App Engine, there was Google+, there was Android, there was Voice, and a long host of others.

Many people, myself included, want to use all of the personal services that Google provides backed by their own domain, not Gmail. You used to be able to do this sans hosted email, but that feature got removed a year or two back. If you wanted to use your own domain, you had to sign up for an entire Apps account, when it really should have been the same as before + some MX records for hosted email.

Perhaps using your own domain for a Google Account should be a paid service anyway, and $50/year isn't incredibly pricey. But a 99.9% uptime SLA and phone support aren't necessary for what can really be just a vanity. (That said, phone support in Google's ecosystem is kind of nice...)

It's really true how non-committal Google is with various projects, and like a research lab (not unlike the backgrounds of those who work there), they are constantly testing various proof-of-concepts to see which ones will bite. Other than search and their foray into geo, Google seems to keep playing an exploratory game where they know the desired outcome but not entirely how to get there. And they're in a great position to develop expensive proof-of-concept projects to see which gets them closer to their goals. Street View is an example of one that worked out handily but easily could have been cancelled in an alternate world; Wave unfortunately didn't make it.

It's this flat, "try everything independently" structure (with funding from some massive revenue) that makes Google a very unique and interesting company.

- Web app development: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java (backend) and HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS / Sencha (frontend)

- Mobile development: iOS and Android

- Server/infrastructure: Apache / nginx, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, open source (no Microsoft)

- Well-versed in every framework under the sun: Django, Rails, Sinatra, WordPress, 3rd Party APIs, et cetera

We're a team of three that work together with the coherence of one. Latest projects include writing BART's parking system [1], co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [2], increasing revenue by re-writing the advertising platform for a privacy company [3], re-formulate the value proposition and rebuild the platform for a financial product comparison engine [4], and working on a web-based property manager [5].

We're based in San Francisco and can do on-site visits as well as remote.

Let's work together!

http://www.bitmatica.com/

http://www.bitmatica.com/BitmaticaResume.pdf

[1] www.select-a-spot.com/bart/ -- BART's online parking reservation system (we wrote it from scratch in Django)

[2] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a high-availability, scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[3] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we re-wrote the ad delivery platform, built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[4] www.knowyourbank.com -- Financial product and information comparison service (we worked with the founders to re-define the value proposition and rebuild the service so it better aligned with the needs of their customers)

[5] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

Would he have done better if he had just "launched something himself"? Perhaps. How about being a fantastic coder and orator too? Certainly. That's not the point. He had persistence. When it comes to running a company and trying to be successful, there are few traits more valuable than persistence -- and he has more of it than the majority of extremely smart people I know.

I know a lot of absolutely fantastic coders. Many of them are very creative too. But the lack of persistence and drive is what will prevent them from dealing with the emotional rollercoaster and disappointment that is running a company.

Somebody with persistence and intelligence can learn any skill. And most importantly, they can keep performing their skills when everybody else -- even those 50 times better at it than they -- have quit.

EDIT: And I should have included: Amar, hats off to you. You're going to go far.

Does the X1 Carbon come with 8GB of RAM, a Core i7, and a battery that lasts 6+ hours? Do you know of a single laptop other than a MacBook (and the Samsung Series 9 15" which is too huge for 1600x900 resolution) that carries those specs? If you do, I'll buy it immediately.