I think your last sentence is absolutely right. The author works on a team whose responsibility is to make programming easier for everyone in the world. That's a luxury most startups don't have.
1,524 karma · joined February 4, 2010
twitter.com/jonas
This answers the question from a management perspective. Facebook has a lot to gain from a small number of huge success stories like React. This makes up for the cost of all the failed little tooling projects.
Would love to hear more details if you can reproduce the issue.
The main difference is that Simple didn't have a banking license and didn't write the core banking system themselves. They had to work with a legacy bank (Bankcorp) and were constrained by their policies and technology. It sounds like this was rather frustrating. We are building the entire bank, including the core banking system and the regulatory approval. This is what we mean by "full stack". A good example of something we can do better because of this is the signup process. You will be able to sign up from your app and use your new account within a few minutes.
From a product perspective the biggest difference is that they weren't mobile first. But that would have been a bold move five years ago :)
Most challenger banks don't pursue a banking license and have to work with an existing licensed bank. This means they are constrained by their processes and legacy technology (think cobol on mainframes). We don't have those problems because we own the full "stack", from the user interface and the connectivity to the payment schemes all the way down to holding the actual funds with the central bank.
Reading some of the posted jobs, I can't tell if these are actual engineering jobs or $20/hr variety.
Some of entrepreneurship's biggest successful outliers seem to have exhibited those traits and thus they became part of silicon valley lore. I think it's important for people getting into startups to understand that you don't have to turn yourself into a stone cold shark. Some business decisions will be tough, but that doesn't mean you have to be an ass about them. Your ambition can be to be successful, but that doesn't mean you have to "crush your competitors" or disregard other people entirely.
An article I once read cited a study showing that on average, people are more financially successful AND happy, if they are considered by their friends to be good people. I tried to find it just now but couldn't. Has anybody heard of similar results?
Edit: What are some examples of extremely successful entrepreneurs that were known to be extremely kind?
Edit: I posted this just FYI. I thought it'd be useful to know. Perhaps this is a consequence of splitting the project across a large number of repos, where some of them don't get many commits.
From sitting in on some calls, it became clear that a large source of issues were misunderstandings between the client and developers. Usually those misunderstandings were around technology.
This is one category of issues that would be less likely to happen if the client has some technical knowledge.
Anecdotally, I agree with that. I once built a product on GWT because it impressed me so much on paper. Static typing, compiling permutations of your app and loading only what's needed, optimization of stylesheets, rendering only on the client etc. It seemed perfect. IIRC the two main issues at the time, a few years ago, were a) terribly slow tooling for any decent sized app and b) the usual interface-hell of Java. This may not be a problem if you're used to it, but for me it was an issue.
If you ever wanted to upgrade form delayed job, this could come in handy for you.
The issue I have with posts like this is that they are decidedly NOT just about thinking up wild new designs. Instead, they claim that these designs are somehow BETTER. Unless you can give me a real world use case, I won't believe you.
I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't realize that the time only moves when I move. It was difficult, but I still managed to beat all levels. I'm curious to see what level design they come up with that utilizes their game mechanic.
I do have a few questions that went unanswered, though:
- What's the performance impact, both in terms of initial page load and in terms of tracking stuff.
- How big is the buffer of "events" in the timeline?
- You charge per hit. Is there a way I can load the javascript from my own CDN? Does it ping your server upon load?
- What prevents somebody from going to my website and triggering a large number of "hits"?
> I'm not a "privacy is gone, get over it" sort of person, and I fully support people that want remain unobserved, but that means disengaging from many opportunities. The idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me.
> Being data driven is a GOOD thing for most companies to be. Everyone cheers the novel creative insight and bold leadership that leads to some successes, and tut tuts about companies ending up poorly by blindly following data, but cold analysis of the data is incredibly important, and I tend to think the world will be improved with more and better data analysis.
> I have never felt harmed by data mining, and I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this? Be specific.
I find this slightly alarming. Apparently John Carmack was lucky enough not to have been unfairly prosecuted and doesn't have any secrets that could cost him for example his job.
But what happens if one day John Carmack's activities and opinions become illegal? This has happened many times in history and there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.
The scariest thing about data collection is not what is currently happening with it, but what oppressive regimes could do with it. Imagine what if the gestapo or the stasi had all the information at its disposal that Facebook has? Or the NSA even?
If you're interested I'll send you links to the components on Ikea
Even though I wouldn't have designed rails the way it is (remote forms and .js.erb views anyone?), it works really well for a large class of applications.
Of course you may eventually hit a wall, but that happens when software outgrows it's original requirements. That doesn't mean you have to build a system for millions of concurrent users from day one. Especially not, when you're making accounting software or a crm or some other run-off-the-mill webapp.
In my experience, rails "improvements" are often suggested, when a developer is faced with a large mudball of a rails application that doesn't do things according to convention. This can quickly happen, because rails is deceptively easy to learn. Many developers I know (myself included), started writing a serious app in Rails, without learning a lot about it. Heck, if you're a rails developer and honest with yourself, you probably didn't even read all of the rails guides. In addition to that, I recommend reading a book such as "The Rails Way" front to cover, joining the mailing list, following the core team's blogs and potentially even going through the code. I also DON'T recommend taking your patterns from random blog posts or stack overflow. Rails is very well documented and you can generally find what you need in the docs.
As infuriatingly dismissive as his tone sometimes is, I've actually found it best to follow dhh's advice. Not only because I generally agree with it, but also because it's likely to be the best supported design in future rails versions.
It was never designed to add arbitrary spacing to your layout, though ;)
Would it be okay for another country to conduct such drone strikes on US soil? If not, which countries are allowed do do such things, and where, and why?
How can you prove that lives were saved by the drone strike?
Thanks for writing this post! I finally took a moment to enable FileVault :)
Best of luck on your travels!
I once went through the official channels, too, and it was much easier than I thought. I didn't have a passport photo either, so I went across the street to get one taken. Then I came back the next day and picked up a working sim card. It's only a bother if you need the sim card right away.