I love this. We are truly living in great times.
15 karma · joined March 18, 2010
As an engineer, my observation and pattern matching skills are pretty good, so I am only describing what I observed by analysing "successful" entrepreneurs. I'm probably different, because I arrived to the Bay Area only five years ago. It may not be clear to you if you always lived and worked here.
In any case, depends how you define success? The author of the thread is also an engineer that codes, so I am guessing his definition of "come to fruition" would be an exit where he can cash-in more than $10mm.
What's the aggregate number of engineers who made a satisfactory exit? Is it "statistically significant" to you?
I did that formula for the past year and was very lucky that it worked before 5 years. Although, I was planning to "exit" in 10 years.
I just googled "startup persistence" and look what comes out in point 5 and 6: http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
Are you able to focus on only one thing and for more than 5 years? Almost nothing extraordinary can happen before 5 years. Even if you sell before.
Example: I am 99% sure I can make millions of dollars if I go on my yard and start making a hole in the floor. Although, here are the constraints: - working 18 hours a day. - every day and 7 days a week. No vacation.
Are you able to accept the constraints?
This come back to this: passion never fails.
I wish you the best luck on your next thing.
structured - If you see dirty points showing your hands resting while thinking.
go with the flow - No dirty points. You usually go to grab a tea or coffee whenever you want to think more deeply.
Now doing a new startup. Launched on November, so help us grow: http://www.allthecooks.com/download
Anyway, you MUST make commit an habit. If you're into gamification, force yourself to do that and you won't regret.
If you got a C&D as well and isn't happy about it, you should go ahead and make a better product. Otherwise you can go to work for one of their competitors. That's the beauty of being a hacker.
Just make it sure that online classifieds is your passion.
Aside from the passport, when I first rented a server there I had to send a ¡PHOTOCOPY¡ of my credit card and send via FAX. That was the truly weird thing :)
I tried everything to not send things via fax, but then I understood that they must receive hundreds of request from fake people with fake id and fake credit card. If they don't have at least the photocopy of those it means that you're probably a fake trying to get a server with someone else data.
In the end I decided to send the data anyway, since it's a huge corporation and they're based in Germany. If it was based in some shady place, I would never send the data.
Hetzner prices are great for any software engineer. Having that powerful server waiting for my projects is one of the reasons that I had the chance of succeeding. I used to say that this is our profession and having a dedicated server is a mandatory thing.
Even with one server from hetzner I was able to virtualize it into 8 machines and create a real production environment that made it easier to scale. After you learn XEN it's faster than going through amazon interface.
From my past experience I always worked with people who wanted to use amazon or google appengine. I was always against it and said that the prices were ridiculously expensive. My colleges said that they didn't wanted to manage servers and the cost of appengine was only $2 per day, etc. This is a real story and when the time of high traffic came the $2 became $50 and now we pay $1500 in something that could be handled with ONE $100 hetzner server. After using hetzner I would NEVER advise appengine and I would only advise amazon if you must have the servers in the US.
For those who say that the site would have too much latency if it's in hetzner: just use a cdn for static content, http://www.maxcdn.com is very cheap and probably much better than just hosting in the US.
Just be smart and make profit with the app fever while you can.
ESI is really cool and can be easily integrated as a normal include with the common frameworks. For example, cached file including when developing and ESI tags when production and stagging. Having ESI is very good to cache and distribute in parallel different parts of the page, that can have different CPU usage. Also it's really good to cache stuff even when the user is logged in.
You probably don't really write that if you use eclipse.
I guess that writing articles and articles about how java is bad and ruby is much better doesn't really deliver apps. By the time all these frameworks are written it will be already outdated and the person who wrote it loosed the time to the android market.