dko

PS. This is Derrick, one of the co-founders of Spin :D

Much like the concierge services (ie Magic) out there, we want The Loft Club to provide simplify people's habits of dining out. The added element of a pleasant surprise - as you mentioned - is something we want to focus on too as we build out the service.

Happy to chat more in person, DM me @derrickko.

The first iteration of the product actually had that kind of flexible scheduling in place, but we decided to simplify it for launch. We do want to add it back once demand scales up!

Our selection of restaurants include both well and lesser known joints - good food exists in all places, and we want to help people discover that.

We noticed a common pattern when we eat out. A cursory Yelp search, perhaps a cross reference dining guides, and finally making the reservation (via OpenTable/SeatMe/phone), only to find out that there aren't any tables left. We then wish we had done all this couple weeks back, but that's hardly practical.

The Loft Club removes all that hassle. Trust us to do the research, and we'll make the reservations for you every two weeks. We've started this small project to scratch our own itch for now, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

I've spent some time at Microsoft, and have only good things to say about my experience.

My qualm isn't with the company, but rather, the content, approach and flippant tone of Kevin's post. Having previously worked there, that's not something I'd expect from the company, which is disappointing.

(cross posted this back to http://blog.derrickko.com/microsoft-and-startups)

Such complex CSS behaviors are probably better off being tested by an integration test.

It would be so great to have unit testing to keep an eye on these kinds of things.

Agreed! The Cactus approach does work well for unit tests.

As a side note, I'll be releasing version 1.1 shortly, which has a bunch of improvements, including the option to use keyboard-distance based string matching. Look out for it!

A mx checking service sounds awesome. Keep us posted if you guys do it.

https://github.com/JourneyForMac/Journey/tree/master/Journey...

Engineering is about making such trade-off decisions, constantly. One of the many traits of a engineers is how quickly and accurately (on hindsight) we can make them.

And back to the blogpost, I feel that the array vs hash and LINQ examples are fairly contrived. In reality, a good engineer shouldn't even consider those approaches in the first place, unless there's a really compelling reason to do so.

Yes, that reduces the pool drastically. You are essentially finding the intersection of students that believe in your challenge over immediate compensation, and do not have financial constraints. But to quote the quoted Chris Dixon: "People who say recruiting is hard are right. People who say it is impossible just aren’t showing up enough."

Reaching out to this group of students is about pitching yourself right. And as the post highlights, understanding the motivations is an important first step.

And plus, getting everyone used to a tool early and making it part of the development process would pay off in the long run. Especially when the team expands.

In the end, it's about adopting what is most effective for the entire team to get the job done.

And I can't help but draw parallels with The Social Network, which incidentally is also an account by an 'ousted' co-founder.