jconley

We did consider SignalR with the Service Bus backplane (we run on Azure). We also considered node.js with Socket.IO/Redis, Firebase, and a number of other realtime systems. But when we looked into it we realized we would be duplicating a lot of code on the realtime side that was already there on the RESTful API side. With this approach we're able to do realtime with minimal modifications to our server and client side implementations that deal with our simple use case of keeping a resource up to date. Because we use AngularJS, simply updating the resource on the client side re-binds everything.

This McConnell book[1] is a must read on the subject. Generally developers just fail at estimating at a fine grained enough level and forget about all the ancillary tasks that take up a majority of a project's time.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0735605351

This is why pg says you must have a .com.

We are building close relationships with our investors until we prove ourselves and earn trust, such that they will feel comfortable investing in the future with a click. There is also a significant amount of information available on each property for investors to do their diligence.

That's correct. Accredited only for now. Sign up to stay informed about future offerings. :)

news:yc

I love the PBR China story. $44/bottle. Hustle! "There’s almost no ale in China: I had to smuggle the yeast into the country."

http://www.danwei.org/advertising_and_marketing/pabst_goes_u...

Reminds me of a great Steve McConnell book, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0735605351/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...

Up until recently I worked at a large mobile publisher and we spent out-of-this-world sums of money to advertise games once the LTV was modeled and we had a high confidence level they would be profitable.

Ironically, App Store distribution is becoming nearly as difficult and cost prohibitive as pre-internet game retailing. Everyone is competing for the same limited shelf space and end caps. Once a network of games is built cross promotion is helpful, but entering the market is extremely expensive. You either need to win the featuring lottery, have something that is organically viral, or know your LTV and spend tons on marketing.

Unfortunately it seems the most surefire way to build a top 100 mobile game nowadays is to partner with a big publisher in order to leverage their marketing dollars and cross promo network. Hopefully some of the early indie link sharing cross promo networks will do some good to change that.

Yup that's normal. The key to get through is priority. What is the most important single thing for each person to be doing? Do that. Repeat. Focus.

If its any comfort this isn't even unique to startups. Every software project I've ever done has felt like this. The list of possible tasks to do always far outpaces the resources on hand to do them.

Based on the OP's story, I'm going to assume this was an early stage startup. It is foolish to join an early stage startup as an employee if it's all about the Benjamins from an exit. Hopefully this is common knowledge.

However, being an employee in an early stage startup is a great way to jumpstart your career, whether you have entrepreneurial aspirations or not. In an early stage startup you are going to be rubbing noses with investors, working on interesting/tough problems with very smart people, taking on huge amounts of responsibility, getting in way over your head every day, and generally beefing up your resume.

Think of it as an investment in yourself. You will build character, and you will build varied skills that will carry forward for the rest of your life, and someone has paid you for that privilege.

I'm curious if the OP has seen http://founderdating.com/about/. It seems to be what he was looking for. Not sure how big the presence is in AUS though.

"This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company."

I realize this is probably just semantics but I want to chime in on one little tidbit here. These guys didn't start a technology company in the sense that they needed technology innovation to succeed. They started an innovative cleaning business that uses some technology. They were building software in well trodden territory with a clear scope and execution path.

If you want to revolutionize web search, or be the first company to create an eCommerce store, or run a PaaS hosting business, then you probably have a tech company. If you're starting one of these, you damn well better have a nerd or two around. :)

I'm glad you built this Justin. I have wanted this functionality many, many times in the social gaming world and never had the time/budget to build it and instead hacked something together. I love seeing how XMPP has influenced the design of very useful and much more pragmatic solutions to near-real-time communications.

I have had similar experiences with the Disney IP teams. They mean serious business in all directions, from protecting IP to ensuring they are not infringing. They make sure everyone in the company or affiliated is very aware of IP issues. If the painting is indeed the original work and it somehow found its way onto some merchandise, I'm sure Disney will be amicable.

I think that would be great! Personally I use the news:yc [1] app on iPhone (no affiliation). It works well and the author updates it when there is a parsing problem.

[1] http://newsyc.me/

Amateur hour. Serious Business this is not. Where are the tests? The Inversion of Control? The logging? The analytics system? Documentation? Architecture diagrams? Someone should either fire or promote this engineer immediately.

Nice! A simple 2PC [1] for deals!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol

When we wrote this software, we tried hard to get a follow on contract to fix this 180 day problem using more automation. But, there was no budget, and the claims processors did not want to lose their jobs. We toured the location where they process the claims. They literally had piles of filing boxes containing the submitted claim forms in a secured room. I forget how many they do per day, but I remember being surprised at the volume. The site does many millions of searches per month...

I see there are plenty of posts down below that are complaining about the lack of fuzzy search. By all means, crawl the site and create a better search engine. IIRC it is setup in such a way that new records are always appended at the end of the ID space. Just check every night for new things. At the time we wrote this there were a few companies doing just that, charging a small fee, and soliciting people that were owed large sums. I mean, you've got a $6B market, in just California, to play with where you could probably earn 5% or more as a finders fee to those that don't know this is public record, or might just pay you to avoid the hassle of the paperwork.

There was also a web service interface to this system that returned paged results as plain ole XML, but unfortunately I don't remember the URL. We had wanted to expand and create an interstate network by partnering with Texas and some others, but it never panned out for reasons I forget.

I wrote most of this app on a contract nearly 10 years ago. We used it as a mentorship exercise to train state worker programmers in the SCO department on the (then new) ASP.NET Framework and SQL Server 2000. The DBA was familiar with Oracle and mainframes, but not SQL Server. It was written in ASP.NET 1.1 and used SQL Server 2000. From what I can tell it hasn't changed much at all.

"Programmer and database types will notice one problem immediately - no fuzzy string matching."

Yeah, I really wanted to implement that. The problem was we had to use Microsoft SQL Server and no third party database/indexing systems. SQL Server's Full Text Indexing run took too long during the nightly import job on year 2000 commodity hardware. We also had to do all of this within the constraints of training state workers and handing off something they could actually maintain.

Ah, the joys of state contracting.

This is great to see! IMO it's something that should be configurable and built into http in node.js.

IIS [1] and other mature web servers like nginx [2] or apache [3] do this kind of thing for you and provide simple configuration on it.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943891 [2] http://serverfault.com/questions/412323/nginx-503-error-in-h... [3] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mpm_common.html#maxrequ...

If the project requires a team it works best when the whole team is remote and/or extremely conscious of using written communication. That is, if you want the remote person to feel like they are a part of the team. If you have outsource contractors it doesn't really matter. You just tell them what to do in meticulous detail anyway. But, if you want a contributing team member that buys into the company, make sure they are included in all communication. The easiest way for this to happen naturally is if everyone is remote.

I've worked remotely off and on for the last 10 years. I'd say at least half the time I have been out of the office. I have managed remote teams in Mexico, Ukraine, India, Arizona, Switzerland and even randomly dispersed developers/artists all over the world. Remote teams can work very well.

What doesn't work very well is having a few remote people and a large mass of people in an office all working together on the same project. There is significant high bandwidth communication that happens when people are together physically. This leaves remote workers out to pasture. Things get missed. Tension builds.

The same effect occurs when you have multiple offices working on the same projects. I've been in the middle of this first hand as well. You can quickly end up with teams doing a lot of internal communication without talking to the teams in other offices. Rivalries will build. It will probably become an "Us vs Them" situation as animosity over small things snowballs.

This can be combated largely by explicit written communication. Use chat rooms. Use good issue tracking. Use internal social networking.

I'm not so sure it's as much gloom and doom as the author portrays. If Microsoft doesn't try to maintain it's business division software dominance on the most popular platforms, that line of business is doomed. And it's not a small business [1]. If Microsoft executes well on these apps and ties in Office 365, SkyDrive, Lync, and/or Sharepoint, this would leave them with a very nice recurring revenue stream and continue their productivity application dominance.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/microsoft-1q13-earni...

Fond memories of the movie Minority Report spring to mind. Startups are, in fact, working on this exact end-game facial recognition based ad technology right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-ZLw2Q7U2M

and the company: http://www.immersivelabs.com/

I've been in the same position as this James guy and as a founder doing the hiring. No founder is going to find an over-achieving experienced engineer that will work for pennies on the dollar, make a statistically stupid bet with your equity, and work on something she is not ridiculously passionate about. One, or all of those, have to be flexible if you want the top talent.

On the surface it seems financially ridiculous to have not given the tiny bit extra James wanted. I have to assume the culture clash was the main driver. If he were truly exceptional, he would have been potentially worth more than 10 other guys you will hire that are not negotiating with you. He would have attracted more great talent. He would have pulled off many heroic acts. This short sighted thinking, more than anything, is what frustrates me about the job market.

There comes a time when you reach that point in your individual contributor career where some lightbulb turns on and you realize how valuable you are. You realize you don't get what you don't ask for and start negotiating. But if you're in the job market you have to be able to back up your lofty compensation requirements. This is obviously not a newly realized situation and it has been discussed endlessly in the past. There's a reason great talent in Hollywood makes 100x more than the rest of the cast and crew, and great sales people can do the same, even though they are just employees. The top performers are obvious. The talent in software doesn't have this luxury without going out of the way to self promote. Unfortunately, putting enough proof out there is only possible when you work largely on your own and promote that fact for people to see. Otherwise there are too many varying factors and nobody can know if you were the core reason for the project success.

So, James, go do something on your own, publicly. Make it not suck. Then watch the above-market salary and equity offers come rolling in. Or, start your own startup.

And for all you founders out there. Either loosen those purse strings and be ready to terminate employees that don't work out, or work on truly interesting problems. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a whole bunch of average or inexperienced engineers. Not that there is anything wrong with that talent strategy, just know that it will happen, and realize the implications of that situation.

Who else thinks we need Software Engineering talent agencies?

It seems like you're still making a lot of decisions without knowing why. You know what they say about assumptions...

Without analytics data you really have no idea if this is a positive, negative, or neutral change. The vocal minority of complainers are loud in the consumer software world. They are one of many signals to help make product decisions, but should not be considered authoritative.

Get real analytics data and trust it within the appropriate level of significance.

Our teams share code by not coding in Unity projects. All the assemblies are added as plugins with a build script. The games have very little code actually accessible from within Unity. You lose the nice edit and continue, but for a big project with a lot of assets the Unity IDE explodes under pressure anyway.

I'm no YC dude, but if I were a betting man, I'd give them money due to:

1. History of shipping stuff 2. Huge ass market 3. Solving a real pain point for indie game devs out there 4. Simple, easily understood, business model 5. Domain experience