jasoncrawford

I'm sure there were many geniuses among our ancient ancestors! The fact that they had no science doesn't mean they weren't smart.

Our age is superior in the sense of more advanced; that doesn't mean that we individually are superior to them as individuals, except in the sense of being more knowledgeable.

No smugness implied or intended.

Yes, in particular, Amazon is notable for using written documents instead of slides: https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy...

And for their funny habit of reading the document in the meeting (Bezos calls it “study hall”): https://jasoncrawford.org/the-silent-reading-technique

But of course there's lots of spoken communication as well.

I just wrote a 1-year followup to this: https://jasoncrawford.org/what-really-happened-at-fieldbook

Thank you! I have actually spent a good amount of time getting the image layout just right

Yeah, the study by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant is exactly the study that originated the concept, and it's the first one listed in Steve McConnell's survey, which I link to in the post.

Several relevant books here: https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography

More history than overview of current state though.

The one I find myself referring people to most often is actually “Cities and Ambition”: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

You can absolutely return to the job market and get a good job again after failing at a startup. This happens all the time. You are still just as qualified after failing as before – probably more so – and employers know this. I say this both as someone who has done this myself (and seen friends/colleagues do it), and as a hiring manager who is more than happy to talk to candidates like this.

Relocating outside the Bay Area will make it harder to find that job. But there are lots of remote opportunities today, and in the worst case you might be able to relo back here.

Life is short. If you are excited about this prospect, and you can afford to spend the money if it doesn't work out, then go for it.

This could be interesting, and it's certainly timely. Hope it works. I signed up to get an invite.

Ryan Grove (@yaypie on Twitter), director of engineering, says:

“We want Cake to be a place where people have great conversations. That means we’re not interested in being a platform for hate speech, harassment, and trolls, because those things aren’t great. Cake was built with this in mind from the beginning, not as an afterthought.”

https://twitter.com/yaypie/status/977263143817699328

I had the same problem and it turned out to be because I had the experimental Strict Site Isolation flag set in Chrome. Try turning that off.

Tip: On a Mac, you can type an em-dash with shift-option-hyphen. (An en-dash is just option-hyphen.)

It turns out that not having to name things is a feature. Users often avoid naming things and dislike being forced to do so.

The reason is what developers already know: naming things is hard! (Two hard problems, etc.)

Of course, developers also know how valuable good names are, so we like to take the time to pick good names. Users would rather just skip naming altogether and refer to things by letter/number or just by clicking on them.

Doesn't exist yet but definitely something we're thinking about, mind sharing the use case? Can ping me privately (jason@fieldbook)

Good idea, for now one quick thing you can do is enter this in the search bar:

count()

And that will tell you how many rows there are.

Yeah, I've always found it clunky and awkward to upload CSVs to Google Sheets.

Re public: see my response to @jordache, it is either public or “unlisted”, but in either case it is available to anyone who has the link.

This is for sharing, with no account/password required. The uploaded data is made available at a web page. If you choose “public”, it will be included in a public index; the only other option right now is “unlisted”. Unlisted pages aren't in the public index, but are available to anyone who has the link.

For very sensitive data, that you would want to password-protect, don't upload it right now. We may offer accounts and/or password-protected data in the future.

Thanks!

Yes, we have. Those attacks don't apply to viewing data on CSVshare, which doesn't have the vulnerabilities of Excel or Google Sheets. However, be careful about opening CSVs in Excel or Google from CSVshare or any other source, unless you trust the person who uploaded them.

* Faster & easier to upload

* Anyone can search/query like a database

* Data can be downloaded in CSV or JSON format, manually or via API

Hope that helps!

New venture from @mbostock, @tmcw and @jashkenas. Probably based on d3.express, which Bostock announced earlier this year but is still in private beta: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3...

Looking forward to it!

As others have pointed out, there are lots of products that fit something like this description. The challenge with Access and other app builders is summed up in Dietzler’s Law for Access (from http://nealford.com/memeagora/2013/01/22/why_everyone_eventu...):

“Every Access project will eventually fail because, while 80% of what the user wants is fast and easy to create, and the next 10% is possible with difficulty, ultimately the last 10% is impossible because you can’t get far enough underneath the built-in abstractions, and users always want 100% of what they want.”

This is why the product I'm working on, Fieldbook (https://fieldbook.com), avoids the “app builder” approach and focuses on just being a spreadsheet-like information tool that supports querying and relational modeling.

Fieldbook co-founder here, thanks for the mention. If anyone has a particular need for lots of API calls, message us and we might be able to work something out!

Cool idea, but not sure why it's a new-tab thing? When I open a new tab I'm usually going to do something, I don't want to be distracted. Would make more sense to me as a one-page site where you just reload to get a random book. Anyway thanks for sharing and best of luck!

I read it when I was in high school. It was fun, especially the dialogues. I don't recall it being heavy.

Apparently this is not a joke:

“The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.”

https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836656664635846656

Fieldbook co-founder here, thought I would weigh in. I agree with Howie that he doesn't spend much time using Fieldbook, since we already have many of the features he mentioned.

IMHO Fieldbook has the best user experience anywhere for building and working with a real relational data model, including many-to-many relationships, sophisticated queries, and aggregated reports. We've done a ton of iteration with real users and hundreds of usability tests to make these features natural and intuitive.

Fieldbook customers use it on a daily basis for their core business information and processes, and they're very happy. Read our reviews here: http://www.capterra.com/database-management-software/spotlig...

But there's no need to be gripped by indecision! Just try them both, it's free. That will tell you which one works best for you. Message us in-app if you have any questions, we're happy to help you get set up!

How was Constructor better than IB? And how did it deal with the issues I mentioned?

The best current real-world example to look at would be Apple's Interface Builder for iOS. Why doesn't everyone use IB?

The biggest reasons in my experience are:

* Limited logic. A builder is fine for a simple static layout. How should that layout change depending on the data to be displayed? How should it adapt to different screen dimensions and orientations? Pretty soon you want to write code to control the view.

* Doesn't play well with source control. Even if the GUI builder spits out a text-based format like XML, it's hard to read and understand diffs, and it can be difficult to impossible to merge.

Why don't use tools to make writing HTML/CSS less boilerplate? To some extent we do. We have CSS preprocessors and HTML templating.

In the end, the front end is just code, and no one has yet come up with a graphical form of coding that is superior to text.

There are plenty of apps that are pretty close to what you're describing, basically MS Access for the web. They're usually called “app builders”. Knack, Zoho Creator, etc.

The real problem is that this way of creating 1.0 gives you no path to get to 2.0. Dietzler’s Law for Access:

“Every Access project will eventually fail because, while 80% of what the user wants is fast and easy to create, and the next 10% is possible with difficulty, ultimately the last 10% is impossible because you can’t get far enough underneath the built-in abstractions, and users always want 100% of what they want.”

From: http://nealford.com/memeagora/2013/01/22/why_everyone_eventu...

I worked there 2004–2007. I had a great time and I learned a lot. If you like the team that made you an offer, and you're excited about what you'd be working on there, then go for it.

A few things I've written about what Amazon is like:

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cultural-faux-pas-when-w...

https://www.quora.com/What-allows-Amazon-to-be-so-innovative...

http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza-teams

Fieldbook | https://fieldbook.com | San Mateo, CA | Software Engineer | Full time, Onsite, Visa OK

Fieldbook is a new information tool that combines the best of a spreadsheet and a database. We're pursuing a big vision to bring the power of relational modeling to non-technical end users. It's an ambitious project with deep technical challenges—but one that will transform people's relationship with the tools they use every day.

Our four-person team has backgrounds from Amazon, Google, and Facebook. We've raised a total of $2.9M to date from investors including Accomplice VC, Pear VC, Naval Ravikant's AngelList syndicate, Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Steven Sinofsky (ex-Microsoft), Eric Ries (Lean Startup), and John Collison (Stripe).

We were #1 on Product Hunt with over 1600 upvotes: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/fieldbook-2

We have a modern tech stack including a continuous deployment pipeline with a full automated regression test suite, so it's always easy to ship code to production.

This is an early-stage opportunity that is perfect for someone who wants to optimize for ownership and impact.

Apply here: https://fieldbook.typeform.com/to/MkjYOJ