agmiklas

This is actually one of the big reasons we built PagerDuty. SMS is not as reliable as people think -- messages get dropped or delayed by hours all the time.

We've found the automated phone calls to be a much more reliable way of getting the alert out. We can tell right away that the message has been received by asking the listener to press a button on their phone, and repeat or escalate as needed if we don't hear the tone.

Thanks Omar. With Baskar, I think we might also have the distinction of being the first Comp Eng 2006 startup on TC, too :)

Thanks very much! It's always great to hear that PagerDuty is working well for people.

Thanks Danielle! Twilio plays a big role here at PagerDuty. You guys have been great. More importantly, on the few occasions where's there's been service hiccups, we've never had problems getting hold of someone at Twilio. Can't say the same about other providers we've tried.

FWIW, Canada has no estate tax [1], but from what I recall, it scores better than the US in terms of wealth division and social mobility.

[1] There is no estate tax, but death does trigger the capital gains tax. So the estate pays tax as though its assets were sold on the day of death. Capital gains work differently here than in the US, but they will usually be (much) lower than 44%.

You can determine the spherical nature of the Earth using your own observations -- but you do have to be perceptive.

The way the stars and shadows change with even a small shift in latitude was a dead giveaway to men ~2500 years ago. Even if you never left home, you might notice that the masts of ships on the horizon come into view before the hulls. And on second thought, why would a horizon exist on a flat world anyway?

For this example at least, you certainly could rely on first-hand evidence. You might need people to put the pieces together for you, but you can make the raw observations yourself fairly easily.

As an aside, this reminds me of something Fred Brooks mentioned in one of his essays in "The Mythical Man Month".

I don't have my copy handy, but he was explaining that the great cathedrals of Europe (some of which took hundreds of years to complete) were only possible because generations of architects were willing to subjugate their own sense of aesthetics in order to maintain the original architect's vision.

If each successive architect decided to start from scratch, the building would never have been finished. And if each decided to build their part consistent with the styles of the time, the building as a whole would be a mess.

His argument (IIRC) was that programmers need to adopt the same mentality: overall consistency in the design takes priority over "doing it your own way", even if your way would be better (if the whole system were redone from scratch).

You might want to consider Beanstream -- they're based out of Victoria and offer services broadly similar to Braintree (data vault for CCs, etc).

IIRC, it is possible for a Canadian company to use Braintree and other US based payment processors, but you need: a) A US EIN number b) A US chequing account

The US chequing account is easy -- you can get that through Harris (www.harrisbank.com). They are actually a subsidiary of BMO, and so are used to opening US accounts for Canadian individuals and companies. You can work with them entirely by mail/e-mail (including the account opening process). I know foreign companies can apply for an EIN -- but it's not something we've done, so I can't speak from experience there.

Canada actually uses this system -- we have 13 SEC-like entities: one for each province and territory. The consensus view seems to be that this adds a lot more headache for very little gain.

The federal government has been trying for ages to get the provinces to give up their regulatory authority in exchange for a national regulatory body, but they've never been able to get it done.

We use Beanstream for our Toronto based company. One nice thing about them is they support something like authorize.net's CIM feature, so you can do recurring billing without having to store CC numbers yourself.

One thing to be aware of, though. It is nigh impossible to get a USD American Express merchant account in Canada. If you plan to charge exclusively in USD, this can be a real problem, as you won't be able to take AmEx. We're soon going to go through the hassle of setting up an account at authorize.net or Braintree so we can take AmEx -- too many of our customers insist on paying either by AmEx or cheque.

For more info about the USD-AmEx-in-Canada problem, see: http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2008/09/25/freshbooks-now-acc...

Note that it is possible to use a US payment processor for a Canadian company. The two things you need to do are:

a) Get an EIN (we haven't yet done this, but apparently it isn't too difficult, even for foreign corporations)

b) Open a chequing account at a US bank. We've done this using Harris Bank (http://harrisbank.com). Since they are a subsidiary of BMO, they are used to opening accounts for Canadian businesses.

Out of curiosity, have you found that having a PE licence has been useful at all in your work?

I studied Software Engineering at an engineering school accredited by whatever organization regulates the practice of engineering in Ontario. I remember at a few points in the program, they made a point of saying that once we graduated, we could apply for a licence (after we spent time apprenticing), but it was never clear to me why having a PE licence would be useful. I don't know anyone from my graduating class that's bothered to apply for a licence either.

I'm not sure this is correct, but I had the impression that "Eire" in English was used to talk about the island of Ireland.

I think this is something I just sort of picked up though -- so it's entirely possible I'm totally out to lunch.

One way to fix this problem is with a shareholder's agreement that guarantees shareholders the right to participate in future funding rounds on a proportional basis to the shares they already hold.

So, assume you hold 99 shares and your employee holds 1 share. If you sell yourself 1B shares for $100, you'd be obligated to offer your employee ~10M shares (10101010, I calculate) for $1. If he accepts, your employee would continue to own 1% of the business.

I'd have to say Canada's immigration process is better (for the immigrant) compared to the US.

The usual US process:

1. Find a company willing to employ you, even though you are not a US citizen / GC holder.

2. Find some way to start working for this company. For some nationalities (ex. Canadian), this isn't actually too bad. For most nationalities, though, if the company wants you to start working right away, they'll have to base you at a foreign office until you become eligible for an intra-company transfer visa, or are able to get an H1-B.

3. The company applies on your behalf for an H1-B. The big problem here is that there is an H1-B quota which is usually exhausted very early on. In years where the quota is exceeded, the system switches to a lottery, so even if you've been trying for the visa for many years, there's no guarantee you'll get it this year if the quota is exceeded.

4. The company applies on your behalf for a Green Card. There's a whole pile of stumbling blocks here:

-- There are overall quotas for the number of GCs that can be issued by way of employer sponsorship.

-- There are national origin quotas. If you're from western Europe, you're probably OK, but good luck if you're from India/China.

-- The employer has to do a labor market search to show that they can't employ a US citizen / GC holder for your job.

5. Apply for citizenship after 5 years

Usual Canadian process:

1. Apply for permanent residency. This is done on a points based system. The calculator is here: http://www.cic.gc.ca/EnGLish/immigrate/skilled/assess/index....

Some permutations that will let you through:

-- BSc + MSc + 2 years work experience + excellent English skills

-- BSc + MSc + 1 year work experience + excellent English + basic French

-- BSc + 1 year work experience + job offer in Canada (requires labor market check) + excellent English

-- BSc + 3 years work experience + excellent English + basic French

-- BSc + 4 years work experience + excellent English

2. Apply for citizenship after 3 years

Advantages of the Canadian system:

- The Canadian system has no quotas (either based on visa class or on national origin). Apparently, the government publishes "targets", but they don't cut off applications if the target is exceeded.

- In the Canadian system, no one is "sponsoring" you -- your flow through the immigration system is a matter between you and the government. This removes a whole much of incentives your employer might have to keep you at certain stages of the immigration process.

- Once you're admitted as a PR, you can work for anyone you like. There's no period where you are stuck on visas that tie you to a particular company. If you feel the business you're working for isn't paying you enough, you can simply quit and take a job elsewhere without jeopardizing your immigration status.

- Once you have a few years of experience, you don't even need a job offer to get PR in Canada. This lets you enter the country first, and then once you've settled, start looking for a job.

A pay-as-you-go pricing option might be useful. The monthly pricing model works well if you plan to run the tests every day/week, but I'm guessing that a lot of people will want to run the cross-browser tests on every new deployment, but perhaps not between deploys.

Consider this, though. Even the most qualified H1-B candidate can end up getting paid less than they should simply because of the way the green card application process works.

Once an H1-B holder has filed for a GC, they can't be switch employers or be promoted. Since most companies have pay caps based on job title, this means the H1-B holder can't get raises past a certain point. The end result of all this is you have H1-B "junior engineers" who've worked at the same company for 5+ years really doing the job of a intermediate/senior engineer.

The joke is that the company is not "gaming the system" at all. By not promoting someone with an outstanding GC application, they're doing exactly what the law requires of them.

I think the easiest way to fix the problem is to do exactly what you suggest -- decouple a person's immigration status from their employer. I'd do this by scrapping the H1B program and instead simply offer a green card to every person that has a letter of employment from a US company. The government could continue to apply various filters (total quotas, country-specific quotas, educational or experience requirements, language competency, etc). [1] However, at soon as a person is admitted to the US, their immigration status should have absolutely nothing to do with their employer.

Under this system, a company can't pay an immigrant less than their worth, since the person is free to work at any business that is willing to pay more. It also fixes a whole bunch of other subtle problems that come up with an employment-based immigration system.

For example, right now once a H1B holder applies for a GC, they can neither changes companies nor change their job title (e.x. be promoted) without abandoning their GC application. Since this process can take years and thousands of dollars, immigrants are not only shackled to their sponsoring company, but to a particular job (and often pay-level) within that business.

I should point out here that I'm Canadian that may one day be working in the US... so perhaps I have a bit of a pro-immigrant bias here.

[1] Personally, I'd get rid of most of these too, but that is the subject of a different rant.

We're using AWS EC2 mostly because they're the only hosting provider we were able to find that offered high-speed connections between their data centers. We use this capability to synchronously replicate every transaction to at least two data centers. The plan is that we should be able to cut over to another data center without losing any committed transactions.

We support two-way (i.e. we send you a message on an alarm, and you send back a message telling us to suppress, resolve, or escalate the incident) SMSing to most of the world. Unfortunately, we can only do phone calls to the US and Canada right now. We're looking at adding international phone calls in the near future, though.

There are a few problems with the phone handoff idea, though. One of the problems is there's no safety net: if the guy who has the phone doesn't pick up for some reason, the alert can't auto-escalate. That might be fixable with something like Google Voice, but I don't think they give you a way to manually escalate an alert if you know you can't handle it in time. In both cases, you probably have to manually roll over the number when someone new comes on-call, instead of having the system do that automatically from an on-call schedule.

We've actually been anxiously waiting to try out Google Voice up here. Unfortunately, they haven't yet extended their coverage to include Canada.

Hi, this is Andrew, one of the co-founders of PagerDuty.

That's an interesting idea. We've actually thought a bit about adding phone-based triggering to PagerDuty (via a 1-800 number + access code). The idea was to make PagerDuty useful to non-IT businesses like plumbers that also have the concept of out-of-hours on-call duty. From your comment, though, it sounds like this kind of feature would be pretty useful even in the IT world.

I carefully read my patches before I commit them. Probably sounds pretty obvious, but I find that I can catch most problems by simply running "git diff" and then carefully and slowly reading through the output.

This is especially true when I'm editing existing code rather than checking in new functionality. I read the diff while mentally asking myself "is this going to change anything other than what I intended it to change".

There are ways to encourage businesses to pay wages ahead of other debts, though. For example, Ontario makes directors of corporations personally liable for up to six months of unpaid wages (and some amount of vacation pay too, IIRC).

You might be thinking of blinding, which lets you do stuff like affix a signature to an encrypted message in such a way that the signature can be "moved" to the plaintext version of the message (I think that's how it went, anyway).

What I'd appreciate seeing is the YC shareholder's agreement. It will be time for us to incorporate soon, but we've been putting it off because we don't know how to handle setting up things like a dispute resolution mechanism, vesting, terms in case one of the founders wants to sell to a third-party, etc.