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hansef

187 karma · joined February 26, 2009

CTO at Bletchley (http://bletchley.co)
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hansef··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
We are. Ruby on Rails shop (http://turingstudio.com) - we essentially operate as an external engineering team for startups. Current projects include a well-funded, pre-launch social networking project for preteens, a web-based CRM for non-profits, lots more in the pipeline. Distributed team, smart people, desperately need more engineers. Hit us up at jobs@turingstudio.com.
hansef··on The Next Big Trend? It's All About Curation
The syntax and diction of these types of fluffy, circle-jerk blog posts make me want to stab myself in the eyeball.

Brandstreaming? Curating tweets? Really?

hansef··on Ask HN: Marketing to non-techie professionals
Any suggestions for approaching communities, once I've identified the ones that exist for my target market? Signing up for forum accounts just to post "Try the great thing I made for people like you!" messages seems a bit spammy...
hansef··on Ask HN: Marketing to non-techie professionals
Let's say, for example, we have "brokers with 2-4 person offices doing less than $500k a year in sales, who would be willing to pay up to $150/mo for a good web-based CRM"

How do you go about reaching these peeps, in this case? :) The insurance broker thing is just an example, but I'm curious what strategies people have more generically employed for similar types of situations.

hansef··on Business Lessons I Learned This Year
+1

As a self-professed generalist I just didn't want to sound too self-serving. ;) OTOH, I believe that striving to develop particular excellence in a few things IS a hallmark of good self-discipline...

hansef··on Business Lessons I Learned This Year
Although I agree that the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none personality type doesn't make a good hire, the corollary to this is that you need to watch out for people with advanced not-my-job-syndrome. Over the years I've worked with designers who consider any mention of production of their work "techie speak", developers who think design is just "making things pretty", Flash guys who get the creepy-crawlies if they have to interface with Javascript, marketing drones who completely lack any understanding of how a web application is built, etc. Claiming to be a "specialist" is often just cover for a lack of intellectual curiosity.

People should of course always excel at a few specific things, and play off each others' strengths, but remember: specialization is for insects.

hansef··on How Indian Immigrants Have Changed the face of Silicon Valley
Agree. I was willing to roll with it through the couple of introductory paragraphs, thinking this was just how the writer chose to set the stage for their piece. However I abandoned reading half-way through after realizing that every sentence in the article was going to be a throbbing, oozing purple jumble. Metaphor should be the spice of writing, not the base, otherwise it loses all power and simply becomes cloying.
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