amitt

The FarmVille (#1 app on Facebook) team that is hiring devs and PMs.

Having gone from 0 to 7million+ daily users in 2 months, we're tackling a TON of challenging scaling and engineering problems daily. If you want to work with a VERY fast moving and super driven team of developers working on a fun product that's constantly evolving, contact me. amahajan [at] zynga dot com. Please put HN somewhere in the subject so I know you're awesome :)

Cofounder of MyMiniLife. Was recently acquired by Zynga: http://www.myminilife.com

We had 4 engineer founders, 1 of which volunteered to handle most of the marketing/legal/biz stuff to allow the other 3 of us to code without distraction.

Some background, the 4 of us lived in a house together and took turns cooking meals to reduce expenditure/downtime from eating out all the time. So commute time was a matter of going downstairs. We started off on 'work all the time and take reasonable breaks' for 6 days a week. We burned out really quick on that so we switched to 60hr weeks of flex-time (honor-based work anyday you feel like, send status updates to the team before clocking-out with what you did that day and just get 60hrs in a week)

With the latter schedule: M-F, I would wake up around 11a, have lunch (or cook if it was my turn), work till dinner time, have dinner, then work till maybe 2-3a. After I finished working, I would unwind with a tv/book/games before bed and then hit the sack.

Interspersed would be small breaks/small meetings (maybe an hr or so total of time a day)/phone-calls as well as goofing off on hackernews or reading blogs.

Weekends, unless I was behind on hours, I tended to spend on purely recreation or, if I was feeling the urge to code still, on experimental projects.

In addition, we shared answering customer feedback since we wanted to make sure everyone had at least a little direct interaction with customers. If divided evenly, this took maybe 20-40min a day of everyone's time.

Keep in mind even the "coder founders" were drawn into bizdev/conferences/etc. based on what they felt like attending. Nothing was really off-limits to anyone on the team, it was more about just dividing up priorities to let people get into the zone.

Fantastic article. Having been born in the 80s, I find the author's point about younger generations not seeing the "magic" of automobiles fairly accurate.

Had the read the article carefully to see if i wasn't "getting" the joke. It's legit, and very cool that they were so innovative with their data centers.

the C++ STL library was based off of the header based standard developed at SGI. So if you've used STL before in C++, you're building off the work that came out of SGI.

To echo what was said earlier, the independent projects help a ton. At my previous job we would ask for X number of years of exp. but would overlook that requirement if the person genuinely seemed passionate and intelligent. The way we would figure that out is through their projects outside of their job.

Also, even if a company doesn't have an internship position listed on their website it doesn't necessarily mean they won't hire an intern. Just email them your resume and a cover letter that highlights a couple projects you have done, how the projects may relate to their business/software, and, if possible, a link to an online portfolio with screenshots/demos.

We've had our own set of issues managing user feedback on our blog. Never to the scale of this, though. It will be interesting to see how they moderate this forum.

I've been a beta tester for this for a while. A ton of fun and great for quick games when you're not feeling too inspired to work. The team arena mode is definitely the best of the bunch, though in the beta all of the testers were ridiculously good. Hopefully the matchmaking will be a bit more level now that there's a greater pool of people to play with.

Isn't this already happening with YouTube? People making a name for themselves without going through the normal channels?

Priced competitively with AWS, will be interesting to see how many people adopt this considering the fact they are locked-in on the google stack.

agree 100%! i tend to shoot the blog owner an email when i see this.