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knighthackeron Your First Hire Should be a Sysadmin

Having a DevOps first was THE reason we were able to focus on building the product and not invest time figuring out infrastructure.

knighthackeron Your First Hire Should be a Sysadmin

I completely disagree. Traditionally, Sysadmins are what you bring in once you've grown enough that operational issues detract from development. Not only this made sysadmins feel terrible over the years having to deal with nasty production environments, but also developers were always slowed down because "Ops" were the bottleneck. And they were the bottleneck because developers didn't think like sysadmins when they started. It keeps going back and forth.

I hope the audience is smart and intuitive enough to understand that if none of the co-founders is a coder, then obviously your first hire can't be a sys-admin. With that assumption, having a sysadmin early on will only improve the productivity of the development team as is the case at Crowdtilt.

I guess the better word than Sysadmin is DevOps. Because what the author did at Crowdtilt wasn't just deploying and maintaining servers, but actually impacting and streamlining the development process.

knighthackeron Your First Hire Should be a Sysadmin

The post was changed by a moderator. Our blog post title is what we stand by

knighthackeron PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

Using more than one payment processor is definitely a smart move. Not only to avoid unpredictable consequences such as this acquisition, but also because it will give you a negotiating advantage as payment processing becomes more and more of a commodity.

knighthackeron [dead]

Here is the open spec to the current version of the API: https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec

knighthackeron The One Lesson Every Entrepreneur Should Learn

I agree with you. Knowing what's the current status of the "odds" is a good piece of information to have in order to to know how to adapt/change the inputs.

But my main point from the post is I want people to be OK and accepting of "failures". Because in reality, it isn't a failure. It is a lesson that you learned for your next attempt.

One day someone asked Thomas Edison “Aren’t you ashamed that you have failed 99 times?” Edison replied “I have not failed, rather I’ve learnt 99 ways in which an electric bulb would not lit up”

^^ This is what I mean by not fearing "failures"

knighthackeron Standups are Not Poisonous

I should have read your comment before I posted mine, but I agree 100%

knighthackeron Standups are Not Poisonous

I appreciate the author taking the time to write the article, but my opinion is that the whole purpose of a daily standup is to open a line of communication between team members. Well, if you have this line of communication open 24 hours, emails, chat (xmpp, irc ..etc), phone, and so forth, why do I need to wait till tomorrow afternoon for the scheduled daily standup to talk about a blocker in my code?

knighthackeron A Note from one of Cloudflare's upstream providers

Exactly. The author already said "10-15% larger than other similar ones we've seen inthe past". Doesn't that make a record-changing by definition? :)

knighthackeron Show HN: Launch your own hosted SelfStarter without writing a line of code

I think as an entrepreneur, you are gonna need to do your homework and figure out how to get the attention to your project regardless of using Kickstarter or not.

Lockitron was a perfect example that used Selfstarter to fund their project and got a lot of attention from users without the help of any organization like Kickstarter.

knighthackeron Perl is 25 years old today

Happy Birthday, Perl :). At Crowdtilt, we are proud to have the majority of our stack Perl based. w00t w00t CPAN :)

knighthackeron Show HN: Crowdtilt announces the first Crowdfunding API

The Crowdtilt API can easily power something like Selfstarter and significantly improve its features by offering support to multiple payment processors instead of just Amazon Payments. It also provides collaboration tools for the supporting community as mentioned by my co-founder http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911765

Selfstarter is really cool for a one-off type of project such as Lockitron, but with the Crowdtilt API, you can also build a "kickstarter-as-a-service" type of product, which I would really love to see built one day.

(disclosure: I'm one of the Crowdtilt founders)

knighthackeron Reading someone's Gmail doesn't violate federal statute, court finds

Agreed. More than likely, it is in violation to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

knighthackeron Stripe Button (beta)

Agreed. Paypal is flat out painful. But they certainly have a huge advantage when it comes to international payment processing.

knighthackeron Verizon is Selling Your Personal Data

wow. At least they gave you the option to opt-out haha :)

knighthackeron Stripe Button (beta)

I love it. Well executed. My only comment is to make the text on the button customizable.

knighthackeron Measure results, not hours

I think bottom line, don't work at a place that cares more about the amount of hours you work as opposed to the results that you produce. Life is too short for this shit. There are a lot of job opportunities in companies and teams that understand results and care less about even showing up to the office as long as they are highly productive.

knighthackeron NoPassword

I agree with you. Those big names, for better or worse, became the identity store on the internet. Most websites tend to support at least one of them if not all of them.

knighthackeron Show HN: Screenleap launches simple API for adding screen sharing to your site

Yeah, that's what I used it for. I've used it every day for about a week and it dropped maybe once or twice. At which, I created a new connection.

I should add that I did use a screen session to share vim though.

knighthackeron Show HN: Screenleap launches simple API for adding screen sharing to your site

This is super cool. I used screenleap to try it out with my remote team members and I am very impressed personally. I wanna mess around with their APIs a bit.

knighthackeron Why I'm done with Scrum

Having a dedicated team is definitely important. I had a similar experience to yours and I am not entirely sure why.

I think a big part of it is that once you dig into complexity points and time estimates and all that other stuff, people tend to be on the safe side and add a lot of buffer. But when the whole team is in the hacking mentality and just wants to get sh*t done, you don't need to have everything in sprints. You just need a highly motivated and a dedicated team.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

As long as you get the job done, we don't care where you are. I don't think many companies care anymore. Or maybe they still do.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

You, sir, will be quoted some day :)

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

It is so hard to know that @ means array and % means a hash (key/value pair) haha.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

frameworks, libraries,

This is basically what Modern Perl and CPAN modules are all about. Checkout Perl Dancer as a web framework for example and you'll see simplicity.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

Exactly. MooseX::Declare is a good example.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

You are exactly right. But for some cases, it is a great thing. You obviously need to know when is the right time to be explicit. I remember doing the Stripe CTF and I was like, I wish all people would learn to be explicit about those parameters.

Thanks for the feedback :).

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

I second the reference to the book. It is a must read for all new devs at Crowdtilt. Excellent book @chromatic.

knighthackeron Why Did I Choose Perl When Building Crowdtilt?

I definitely recommend reading "Modern Perl". It is a game changer.

http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html