egometry

At IMVU we had feature toggles rolled into the A/B Experiment system. It proved to be a vital part of Continuous Deployment.

Basically: Wrap every new feature in an Experiment Toggle. Deploy to production (once ready for 'non sandbox' testing). Turn on for test users, test. If good, start the rollout to experimental users. If after weeks the numbers worked out, turn it on for everyone...

...but if at any point unexpectedly bad things happened, just flip the feature toggle switch. Most of the time if "bad things" were happening in a relatively new feature, this would stop the panic and let analysis of the root cause of the problem happen without the pressure of everything being on fire.

He dwells too much upon the age and cruft of email, but this article reads more like a layman learning for the first time about Hofstadter's law, general programming project mis-scoping, and dealing with technical debt he himself created... which is kinda cool to hear about from "the outside".

Webhooks are pretty pipe-y... but not every service implements them.

Not necessarily. 3D modelling and sprite artistry are very different skills.

Getaround (http://Getaround.com), San Francisco, CA, Onsite

We're looking to expand our web team, so we're looking for several good full-stack engineers!

The web portion of our product is largely Python/JS stack sitting on top of GAE. Looking for experienced engineers right now.

Apply at: https://www.getaround.com/jobs#ecc909fb-3383-406c-ad54-fa3a6...

Luckily, this isn't Europa, so we may attempt landings there.

Pretty god. I've been recommending David Weekly's short e-book on this matter for years... specifically as mandatory reading for engineers taking their first or second job.

Learn from our mistaaaaakes!

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Stock-Options-David-Weekl...

The site has a quality to it that the design world would frown upon, a roughness closer to tabloid design than Apple.

I wonder if this "plays better" with some demographics? Feels more honest and less highfalutin?

I've been wondering about these sorts of design questions (e.g., is "bad" design sometimes good depending on your audience) since 2007's SXSW where there was a High Class vs. Low Class Design panel, but while the panel raised some interesting questions, no answers were given and no data was cited...

These two posts are not incompatible. That 13.5% of kids needs to live somewhere. I'd bet that a heatmap would show "kid locuses" in some neighborhoods and "kid voids" in others.

I see what you did there.

(Shibboleth is one of my favorite pieces of esoteric vocabulary, but it's at least $10.)

A lot of my silicon valley peers and I opted to live in the SF area and commute south for work because we found SF & Oakland far more entertaining on nights and weekends.

As more and more tech jobs became available in SF itself, we started taking them.

The 'expert' comment at the end is interesting and sad... speaks to the fact that any field that deals with non-obvious knowledge will basically be saturated with people who present themselves as knowledgeable but provide little utility.

...what dating sites have trouble getting people to upload pictures?

"Show HN" should be one of the nouns. ;)

(I was at IMVU for almost four years, just left last week, and was originally on-boarded there during the last six months of Eric's stay.)

The tone of testing everything, revalidating assumptions, and relentlessly refining process after mistakes stayed with the company well after Eric left, and is going strong to this day.

Just because he self-promotes doesn't invalidate the fact that he has keen insights worth learning. After practicing these "lean startup" habits for the past four years, I can't imagine working without them.

(Was going to respond to the grandparent message before I saw Dusty's response, figured I'd chime in anyway after seeing it.)

For a very broad cross-section of design, I like to read http://designyoutrust.com

A better question: is THE UNIVERSE lisp?

This has been shown off a few times at SuperHappyDevHouse lightning talks doing livecoding demos. The ability to pause the game you're working on, edit attributes and resources, and resume the game is neat (and needs to be shown off better).

/* Don't believe the comments lies. */

NPR. Always.

A lot of the problems I saw at the most recent GDC seemed to stem from a lack of test adoption by game makers.

It's encouraging to see a game development platform supporting and encouraging tests right off the bat.

Annoying how? Too flippant? Not a fan of camel case?

I have found SHDH to be the consistently least arrogant gathering of technical people I partake in.

Arrogance (in my experience) tends to come from a small myopic subgroup where outside ideas are shunned. SHDH is far too big and has far too many people who like different things to have much of a cohesive snob element.

Nothing in common except that we're all people who hack in our spare time, and he does seem to take some time describing that this worldview is alien to him and that he doesn't enjoy being a software engineer...

I moved from Austin to the Valley three years ago.

When I came here, I missed Austin a lot. Now, although I know I'll move back there some day, I'm going to miss the Tech Culture of the valley.

Austin's missing populated hackerspaces like the Hacker Dojo and Noisebridge, and generally lacks technology meetups and hacker parties. The tech-based people are there, but there's not much of a cohesive culture yet. (This is a solvable problem!)

Of course, Silicon Valley is missing out on the Alamo Drafthouse... which is one of the best reasons to live in Austin.

If "startup-like hacker culture" means "engineering-driven", I doubt you'd have trouble filling seats.

The thing that seems (in my experience) to drive engineering loyalty the most is making it known to the coders that their opinions are valued by the non-engineers, and that the engineers can drive actual product change (as long as they can prove their ideas legitimate.)

Hiring blindingly smart people and then telling them to stop thinking about the aspects of the business that don't involve writing code is short-sighted and demoralizing to the staff.

I know of at least one YC game company: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/koduco-is-bringing-old-scho...

189 comments (and counting) on a self-reflective post? The old chestnut about the media liking nothing more than talking about itself comes to mind.

If you follow delicious hotlist, you'll find some of the unusable-but-pretty designs he mentions... but you'll find more of the pretty-but-usable ones.

The usable get rewarded for their usability by being used.

It makes sense in PHP. (Thinking in PHP is a terrible thing to do to your mind.)

I believe OP is trying to say: Money is an incentive. But it isn't the only incentive.

(== in php isn't the equality operator insomuch as the 'kinda like' operator.)

Communication is always an issue with larger companies. This is one of the awesome benefits of 0th/1st stage start-ups: the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing.