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The author has some serious design and coding skills. I just wish they were more precise about what it is (a window manager? an gnome user theme?) rather than trying to brand it as a javascript-based operating system.

I do a lot of work helping early and mid-stage companies scale their workforce and technology. Some companies scale by the seat of their pants: they hire people for specific needs as they arise (e.g. servers crashing, or too many sales requests coming in). Other companies scale in a more organized, planned process, like having a big vision of becoming a global company in 5 years. In both of these scenarios, especially because you don't have a co-founder, you're going to find that it's hard to give your #2 hire a sense of agency. You'll likely feel disappointed in their style (different coding practices, different customer interactions, etc.) and want to micromanage. To help with this, start them off on a non-mission-critical project (like expanding to a new region or building a feature that's been in the backlog), and be clear with them about what "success" means for that project. Having the definition of success be written by them, in their words, will also help ensure a two-way communication here. After they have a successful project under their belt, you'll find it easier to trust them with more important work. Also keep in mind that right now you have a product, but when you hire your second employee, you'll also be establishing a culture, so it's worth putting thought into what culture you want to promote.

Markov chains are much simpler than Markov models. The lecture starts off with the simpler idea to motivate the more complex one that you're describing.

I clicked on this link expecting a conversation about commenting in code, which is broken for several reasons. Commenting on this post seems to work for me though.

I'm picturing something like this http://www.soundboardarchive.com/game/603/George-Takei.html but with audio and recording functions as well?

A quick google search turned up http://www.mobilepodcaster.com/ which is somewhat similar. What's the killer feature that sets your idea above this one ? Also, what are your ideas for an impressive demo of this idea?

We stuck with facebook to keep it simple, but I agree it would be really nice to login via twitter. This is definitely on our roadmap, but I don't think we'll get to it for this time. If you have a great idea and think you can get people to vote for it (where they're on facebook), then feel free to email it to appoutloud@coshx.com and I'll try to enter it in on your behalf.

I completely agree with this. One skill that I pride myself in is being able to internalize others' ideas. For example, I'm working on a startup right now (it helps that I have equity), and am pretty happy when I'm still up coding at 5am because I just want it to work perfectly.

Part of the reason for requesting others' ideas for this, is that there are so many domain experts for domains other than technology that I want to meet,learn from, and ultimately help.

Thanks for reporting this. It looks like the database connection went down just as you were submitting. I'll switch to a better database tonight to ensure the connection stays up. Would you mind trying to submit again?

http://calacanis.com/2015/01/27/why-hackathons-are-important... is great for inspiration.

You're right, if the winning idea is "build the control software for a self-driving boat that can search for a missing airplane," then the tech certainly will not be easy (and would be pretty awesome). What we were getting at with that line was that there are lots of great business ideas that can be prototyped without solving monumental technical challenges, and having a solid prototype isn't enough for a startup to succeed - it's only the beginning.

Sorry about that, we had the permissions set too strictly. It's fixed now, and I want to thank you for bringing this to our attention before the competition starts.

I don't see any ethical issue here, but if there are hard feelings involved (like you're leaving his investment high and dry), he could make things difficult for you at company B. I suggest talking to your new boss at company B, asking them the same question, and if appropriate for an introduction to the investor. Mr. X will likely want to know why you're leaving company A (is there something wrong with his investment?) and will appreciate that you're checking with him about ethical concerns.

This is what I love about consulting - I can experience different team cultures and projects, and learn what works and doesn't work for various teams.

These are great specifics, and I agree with all of them. On a more general level, I don't consider someone senior until they can take a complex problem and break it down by choosing appropriate technologies for all the pieces. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In the case of rails, this means choosing the right testing framework, making good scaling choices, choosing a the right ORM, etc. which coincides with the specifics from your post.

If you go out on your own and contract with that same company, chances are good that you could easily pull in $100/hr (I've heard numbers much higher than that, but am trying to be conservative here). Now, there's a higher risk for contracting, and you're on your own for paying taxes, but if you work from home and have a home office, you can claim lots of deductions. Still, assuming a 35% tax rate with no deductions, and spending only 75% of the year doing billable work, that's still a nice salary of $101k.

If you don't feel confident to go out on your own, or need stability and/or benefits, you can always start shopping around at other places (lots of companies are hiring for your skillsets in the DC area). This can be a good opportunity to practice your negotiation skills, and see how high of an offer you can get (tell them what your current salary is and that you know you're underpaid). Then you can either take the new job or go back to your current company and get them to match.

I'm experiencing some wonderment, does that count?

We used clicky with custom events for analytics, which I like better than google analytics, but doesn't have built-in support for cohort analysis. I'd love to hear recommendations for better tools based on others' experience doing similar analyses.

I tend to prefer having face-to-face interaction with interns, because it lets me determine more easily what they're understanding and what they're struggling with. Physically being in the same space can also create a more helpful environment where interns are comfortable to ask questions as they arise. Still, this is becoming less and less important with virtual offices, and tools like StackOverflow that can be better than asking a coworker anyway. Also, I've found that with introverted interns, communication can often be better through email than in person. Since I work on a distributed team at Coshx Labs, feel free to ping us about our intern program and if we'd be a good fit for each other.

Is "Documentation" just an implementation detail for what you really need: "Communication"? If I can have a smooth learning curve and a well-understood contract, then I'll have an API that developers enjoy using and integrating into products. Now granted, I don't see how this can be done currently without proper documentation (even if that just means naming the routes well, and providing illustrative examples), but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

I guess most of my beef is with "You're Cuking It Wrong" for giving such a poor example, which I think only furthers your point that we tend to develop bad code with cucumber and then tell clients that this is how they should be communicating.

I've seen this with developers who are trying to practice TDD with cucumber features, and so they _engineer_ the feature as well as the steps, often in a DRY effort, and we end up with this creature that's neither a good scenario nor good code.

I use cucumber because I feel a good feature conveys enough of the business value (the why behind the feature) to guide development decisions, while leaving development/ui/ux teams to autonomously determine the _how_, and at the same time conveying objective acceptance tests. This communication gap between requirements and specification has always plagued engineering, so I find the user story a nice compromise for web apps. This compromise is only effective, however, when the communication channel is there, and as you point out in your post, it often isn't.

I'm curious what your thoughts are in terms of bridging this gap so that developers build what the product owner has in mind. It's one thing when everyone involved is a great communicator, but how do you play the game when, for example, you have a client who says something like, "As an admin, I want a button in the upper left corner, so I can click it and be brought to a list of posts"?

I don't think the example story in this post is good for several reasons: 1. it was written by developers instead of the product owner -- good stories are all about business value 2. it seems that it was thrown over the wall instead of communicated -- the whole idea of user stories is about communication 3. it specifies the _how_ (adding subpages) rather than the business goal (you could argue that it's about organizing the information across themes on various pages, but this is a fairly abstract goal, and it's not clear that the goal is achieved).

So it's my belief that this is more of a straw-man argument, taking a feature that's an integration test rather than a user story, and using this to argue why using cucumber isn't good for this sort of thing.

I agree, don't use cucumber if all you want to do is write integration tests. But if you're trying to communicate good user stories and acceptance tests, and the communication is there, then I've seen this work brilliantly first-hand, saving costs, and providing business value quickly.