johnmcauley

It’s a Ruby web server that can we bed used with nginx or Apache.

They decide what to work on? How does that work. Hey Joe, we need the payments module improved. Can you take a look? Nah, I’m rewriting the flux capacitor in JavaScript. Oh, ok. I didn’t know we had a flux capacitor. I’ll ask someone else.

Engineers are great - i am one - but the focus needs to come from the business.

I agree and think that view of Russia is unfair to be honest. I’m Irish and the Irish have a relatively similar history (we had feudalism and colonialism and Russia had feudalism and communism - neither is democracy or “freedom”). Russia, and the Russian people, have done fantastic things in literature and science, and their history is amazing. I met a Russian girl recently and she called me her enemy. I was a little confused, but then she said I was British (I ain’t!) and the British are the enemy of Russia. She was very clear on this, it is how she viewed the world, or at least how she saw the dynamics of global powers. I had a great chat with her and we had great fun, I think, though, I was still her enemy at the end of the night. I think the same can be said of the “West’s” view of Russians, maybe not the enemy but certainly shady. It’s not helped by Putin and the poisonings but the ordinary Russian people are not really represented by him or by his actions.

As an aside, when I mentioned Putin, she called herself, mockingly, a daughter of Putin. Then she said, we had no playgrounds before he was in power, now we have playgrounds. It was a flippant remark, but a telling one all the same. The west neglected the Russians when the Soviet Union broke up. Bush/Regan celebrated a Cold War victory, which was a mistake. They should have embraced Russia and recognised the potential of the Russian people. I think the Russians have never got over being treated like this, which, obviously, has echos of the Germans in the 30s.

Sorry if I went on here, I think it’s an important subject.

No xenophobia intended, the same can happen with onshore. But, there is a tendency to jump off shore due to costs and if you are inexperienced it can go very badly. That’s all. I’m experienced and it has gone badly on past experiences.

Yes! Thank you.

I’m a CTO in a 20 man startup and have been through the ringer on several different projects through my career.

This is a difficult situation as positive founders that you can build a company with are hard to come by (been there) and outsourcing is a minefield. I would suggest not to engage with an offshore outsourcing company, I have had terrible experiences here (they may tell u they are under NDA so cannot share any of their ‘successful’ projects, of which there are probably none), and if they know you don’t know tech, it’s a free for all. The other issue is they will try to bleed you up front and most startups are based on iteration, but you will probably have no cash left to incorporate the feedback into another version. Also, the quality will be terrible and they will not care about your project. What could Work, to get you started, is to find a single engineer you can work with (and pay) to get an MVP up and running, this could be a young guy or an off shore engineer but someone who will to work with you. This can keep your costs reasonable. The only issue here is that you have to think about how to move that MVP into a real product so you are really kicking the can down the road, but this can get you started.

In summary, avoid out sourcing like the corona virus.

We’ve (2 year old boy and 40 year old father) just finished an ancient babylonian opera. So much more rewarding when translated into Farsi, a beautiful language.