eddyparkinson

The book learned optimism covers the value of both optimism and pessimism. He wrote the book to help people become more optimistic.

The main thing I learned from the book, is knowing when it is good to be optimistic or pessimistic. There is a time and a place for each. But, on average, optimists tend to win, because they keep trying longer.

Formula calculation speed.

I am interested in talking, as I work on ethercalc.

The big issue I have seen is formula calculation speed. I understand render speed is also an issue. I don't know your use case, but the use cases I see tend to have formulas. It is hard to makes formulas fast enough with JS.

The main speed problems with ethercalc are loading the data from the server and calculating the formulas. I did strip down the code to remove these problems to make web apps work.

Web apps as simple as spreadsheets. My aim is to make it easy to add a UI to a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets often have a UI bottle neck. I have seen many spreadsheets that would be much more valuable to business if it had a UI, as more people could use it. So I added UI formulas to ethercalc http://sheet.cellmaster.com.au/examples

Eddy.

UI formulas - to build web apps http://sheet.cellmaster.com.au/examples

I added these :)

A JSFiddle example would be handy. A record and replay example.

Very much like these two:

https://assembly.com/gridspree (github hosted. a bit more plug and play in style. I did write a bit of code for this)

https://plugins.jquery.com/sheetrock/ (just source for putting on your server)

Or

www.cellmaster.com.au (mine)

Looks good, lots of details all in one place.

Lots of stack overflow posts one this, but most answers are in snippet form. Would be good to have a single place to point people to for answers.

Guess you have seen this python version that gives javascript read/write access: https://assembly.com/gridspree

availability: you need a retry. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22099780/unable-to-comple...

Not quite the same as gridspree, but has a lot in common.

blockspring has SQL like commands in the client. gridspree has data formatting in the client.

https://assembly.com/gridspree

Send e-mail with formulas: Demo

https://radiant-bastion-1152.herokuapp.com/i3pqpufosc

Many people want to send e-mail with a spreadsheet. Requests get posted on spreadsheet forums all the time. The same question is posted again and again, week after week. So I decided to create some formulas for it.

Not sure is a big pain point, not sure people would pay, but happy to finish it off if anyone can think of a way to cover costs.

Hello again. Why are you into spreadsheets?

is this gridspree, looks almost exactly like gridspree

https://assembly.com/gridspree

Also a simple spreadsheet API: https://assembly.com/gridspree

The two look to have a lot in common.

Cool - Lots of simple advice in there.

I doubt we have the numbers in Adelaide to make this work, but I posted to our FB group. Maybe ...

I like ethercalc.org an open source google like spreadsheet that puts spreadsheet data into an online database.

I do wish people would write blog posts rather than books. Sorry, but, almost all great books I have read, contain just one good idea. An idea that would easily fit on a blog post.

There are exceptions, e.g. books with many authors.

Sorry, just my point of view. Good luck with it.

Michael Stok's 3 questions (from hardvard i-lab): 1) who is it for 2) what is the benefit 3) what makes it unique

trello.com or Google docs spreadsheet?

There are lots to track time spend on a project, I use Paymo. But I have not seen anything for project planning. Sound like you want a collaborative project planning tool, I can see the need.

Lots of blogs/reviews for that kind of thing: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/4141-12-Project-M...

In depth knowledge of the problem matters with an ideas list. ... When I was doing my PhD, I had lots of ideas, but limited knowledge of the subject (Logistics) and limited knowledge of what needs to be in a thesis. So my lists of ideas were child like. They had little value. I soon moved on. After I had done lots of reading about logistics and what people expect to find in a thesis my ideas changed. I had a list of ideas that were connected to knowledge of the problem. It was very easy to rank the ideas and work out what gets done next and throw out the rubbish. The list of ideas were not some random guess, but informed and clear. These days I try to ensure my list of ideas is based on indepth knowledge and if not, then the top item is "get some indepth knowledge". This tends to mean the other items in my list have no value a all.

What can be done? We know spreadsheets have mistakes from time to time and even very large software projects fail because of mistakes. Quality control is a problem. Tools help a little but teaching is what has a big impact. We have known for a long time that we can teach people how to control quality. It is sad that with so much money spent on teaching IT skills, we still struggle to teach this simple skill.

Am sure PG did a post on that topic, he said maybe. He said, it depends if they would make a good co-founder, do they have the co-founder skill set (self starter, etc)?

If the mistake had been made using pen and paper it would have been called human error.

I wish I had your design skills.

My spreadsheet sideproject: www.cellmaster.com.au

Small business wants to automate. At the moment they use spreadsheets, email and web forms to interact with customers, but want these to work together. I have seen 20 requests a week, on a single forum, for small bits of code. Code to do very simple automation tasks. I am making it so they can automate with only basic spreadsheet skills.

Happy to chat with you eddyparkinson after the at add gmail dot com

Looks nice and simple.

Two, more advanced, Mail merge programs for google spreadsheets:

1) Yet Another Mail Merge https://sites.google.com/site/scriptsexamples/available-web-... 2) FormEmailer https://sites.google.com/site/formemailer/

How long ago?

I monitor HN for the word spreadsheet, but can't think of anything that matches your description. Have you got more details.

Will this work? www.cellmaster.com.au - I have a few early adopters using it.

What is the problem you want to solve?

Excel means you don't need to explain things to a programmer and you can change your mind as things evolve.

One problem is, no user interface. I am working on a way to add a user interface to a spreadsheet. A few early adopters are using it, see www.cellmaster.com.au

"Make something people want." - is on Y-combinator t-shirts. It is not about class, it is about solving a want or a need in a sustainable way.

>Second-system effect Thanks, never seen that one before.

I wish there was better rule for deciding what feature to put in. Maybe for every added feature i should have "a use case" . ... Um, an "add feature rule", to create a good rule, maybe I need some use cases.

I know some people who create videos/short movies. They said, people will forgive bad quality images, but not bad quality sound. They said getting the sound right matters more than the visuals.

I love it - I do this by hand so often.

Quality control: Tools and experience get you a long way with quality, although two calculations are key to understanding how to control quality. 1) Percentage of defects remaining. 2) Defect removal rate of a quality control process. - When you understand these, you will see it is the manual process that has 80% of the impact and tools 20%. Your tool looks like it will speed up the manual process no end.

Maybe use "Making Spreadsheet Formulas Understandable." Or something that makes it clear the focus is on formulas and not say graphs. "Spreadsheet Formula Visualisation"?

Good luck - I am working on improving spreadsheets - www.cellmaster.com.au - drop me a line and I will add you to linkedin - or something.

LicenseSpot or other License tracking software? But will take a day or 2 to get it setup how you want it.