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pjackson

136 karma · joined June 3, 2008

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/peteonrails; my proof: https://keybase.io/peteonrails/sigs/m9fdvu0jNq-gHJFqX4WO6LnIUEi5oHTtBhYNEjscLyQ ]
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pjackson··on Why Disqus will be huge
Disqus is great. I switched blogging software so that I could have out of the box Disqus integration.

I hope they take their competitive advantage (they're just a little bit better than the alternatives) and sustain it.

FriendFeed and others are catching up, but I suspect with their heavy hitting VCs guiding them, they'll stay ahead of the pack.

I particularly like their open attitude about downtime and service quality. When they screw up, they post about it on their blog, apologize, and explain how they're getting better. This appears to be one item in the recipe for success.

pjackson··on Rails - Simple Asynchronous Processing
I use BackgrounDRb in a couple of apps because it's easy and quick to set up. When I need to scale it up or route jobs to systems that may not be Ruby based, I go with ActiveMessaging connected to ActiveMQ. ActiveMessaging supports a lot of broker types through StompConnect.

The solution outlined in this article looks a bit simpler, though, so it probably worth tinkering with.

pjackson··on Ask YC: What's a typical stock compensation for joining a series A, 6 months old startup?
Ah. In that case, buy them up. I've seen planned increases to market rate go awry, but if you're comfortable that it'll be delivered, it can't hurt to forgo 8 months for another .15%.
pjackson··on Ask YC: What's a typical stock compensation for joining a series A, 6 months old startup?
It's fairly typical, but I'm used to seeing at least a 401K with no match. Most startups I have worked for at this stage started exploring HR Benefits companies and generally the benefits improve slightly.

My advice is not to buy up the stock by taking less cash at that stage. .15% probably won't justify it.

pjackson··on About Gigafollowers on Twitter
"number of people allowed to follow = people following me * N"

Makes it tough to get started on Twitter. If I sign up, I want to find my 10 closest friends and follow them right away.

It'd be good to introduce a formula, but that one isn't quite the right one. Maybe a velocity based solution?

pjackson··on We’re not “resources”
"Resource" is never the purpose for which you are interacting with someone. I'd never even dream of calling the barista "The Resource Who is Making Me Coffee."

While it may not be a straightforward leap from "Resource" to "Code Monkey," both labels are born from the same carelessness: a lack of regard for how the person to whom you're referring will perceive your evaluation of their relative worth.

I do agree with you that it can be taken way too far in the name of not hurting feelings. To spend too much time on each person's unique qualities in passing conversation is a time-waster.

We should pick words that acknowledge that such qualities exist. I think "resource" does not, and "programmer" is slightly better.

pjackson··on We’re not “resources”
I want my vendors to think of me in their customer-specific mindset, too. But I do not want my boss thinking about me as just another "resource" without unique skills and contributions.

I had a boss years ago who called us all "code monkeys" who were engaged in the process of "tickey-tackey" all day.

There is nothing quite so demoralizing as hearing your most creative work -- that you studied for 8 years in depth at a difficult university to be capable of performing -- described as "tickey tackey that monkeys could do."

Which is similar to the feeling programmers get when called "resources," IMO.

pjackson··on Why Project Management is important to startups (notes from Niel Robertson talk)
I'm not a fan of the "Project Management" discipline as described in this article. But neither am I a fan of design-by-prototyping.

I believe that Agile methods are the way to get things done faster with just the right amount of process. Agile teams shouldn't be allowed to get away with not doing architecture, design, whiteboarding, feature planning, user stories, QA, or UAT. Indeed, they are so important that they need to happen all the time.

They SHOULD get away with not having to use the PMP-approved form, with self-organizing rather than have tasks assigned, with not being "statused" every week in a big sit-down meeting where a 200 line project plan is reviewed in detail, and with embracing change.

pjackson··on The three laws of great graphs
I have found the "Motion" advice to be very impactful, and easy to do. Not only do I do it with charts, but if I present an architecture diagram, I use the technique over several slides to show transitioning from the "old" architecture to the "new" architecture in steps.

It really drives the point home and makes it easy to understand.

pjackson··on Worst Idea Ever: SSHKeygen.com
Guh. It doesn't even send your private key back to you using SSL. Not that it would matter much. I don't want my keys escrowed!
pjackson··on Ask YC: Ruby Hosting
I think that answer is generally a good one. But when you're simply doing development and haven't launched yet, a hosted developer account can take a lot of headache out of hosting.

I don't want to be the UNIX admin for my VPS when I'm focused on development. So a REALLY important feature of any hosting provider for me is the ability to start on a $5 shared server account, and eventually ramp it to a 1024MB VPS, painlessly.

pjackson··on Ask YC: Ruby Hosting
RailsPlayground, though many of my friends swear by SliceHost.

I used this resource when choosing a hosting provider:

http://www.railshosting.org/

pjackson··on Silicon Valley VC confidence index falls to new low
This may be a little nit-pick, because the data are certainly interesting, but the graph is a shining example of how you can use graphics to exaggerate your story.

The drop-off at Q307 looks really really drastic because the x-axis is pinned to the number "3" rather than zero. If the next data point is lower than three, are we in some kind of negative territory? No, we aren't.

Otherwise, the article was certainly interesting.

pjackson··on Ask YC (and PG): What books do you have on your bookshelf?
Wow. I forgot to mention Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Don't miss it.
pjackson··on Ask YC (and PG): What books do you have on your bookshelf?
I recently read Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group and The Nothing That Is: A Natural History Of Zero by Robert Kaplan.

Both were great reads and left me energized. Neither had much to do with technology or startups. But I felt more prepared and motivated to solve problems after I read them.

pjackson··on [dead]
I can't remember who said it, but the quote "Fail early and often so you can succeed sooner" comes to mind.
pjackson··on Ask YC: What's the greatest number of projects you can work on at once, successfully?
If you're talking about coding projects, then I like one at a time. Sometimes I split that to be one at work, one at home.

I find that when I flight a lot of other ideas when I already have a major project in the works, I end up with a lot of sparse git and svn repositories.

That's just my preference. I can handle a handful (5 or 6 maybe and still be effective?) but the context switching saps my productivity pretty fast.

pjackson··on Where can a guy find freelance work nowadays?
I know some people who have had success with odesk.com and elance.com. It looks like a bidding war on those sites, though, so you have to build some reputation before you can command higher rates.

For my money, the best people to talk to about freelance work are design firms, boutique consulting companies, and recruiters. They always seems to have some expertise they're missing and willing to subcontract out.

Make some calls to firms you trust or have heard of and ask. It may be harder in terms of effort, but I'd bet you'll land a better gig that way.

pjackson··on Ask YC: Non web startup - solar?
I think it's a good idea. However, as with any venture, do your homework.

Research the market size, the barriers to entry, the competition, how you might differentiate yourself, the threat of a disruptive technology making you obsolete, etc.

The solar panels currently in widespread use are:

* Expensive * Limited in Capacity * Fragile-ish

So if I were you, I'd be looking at third-gen solar and finding ways to bring that to people in ways your competition cannot.

pjackson··on How removing shell calls sped up GitHub
The improvement is noticeable. As a paying user, I appreciate it. I also appreciate that R1.0 was out the door so fast. So no demerits for the shell calls. :) Glad they're gone though.

When I am hacking something together and can't find a library or don't have time to write one to do something that UNIX does really well already, I use the shell too.

When performance becomes an issue, you rip it out and do it better.

I appreciate the visibility into the service issues and the related fix. That was a good move on GitHub's part.

pjackson··on Pay someone
I know nothing at all about the "bug" being discussed, but it seems to me that the attitude displayed by the initial two commenters is poor form. I'm not sure what the guy from RedHat has against the guy from SuSE, but it seems like a private phone call could have cleared it all up.

When you work for a company that maintains open source, makes money from open source, and has public discussions about issues with the code, I think you're held to a slightly higher standard. You ought not act like that when your bug tracker is public.

pjackson··on Ask YC: Normal Options/Equity for Employee Number 1
Without knowing much about your particular business, I'd say you should expect to yield 2 percent of the equity and hold out for a proven rock star.

I'd avoid any instant-vesting grants if it comes up unless that employee is bringing you customer #1 or #2, or a significant partnership out of the gate.

pjackson··on 200 Highest Paying Search Terms
The CPA in my industry is on the order of $300+ and the lifetime value of a customer in wireless isn't much more than 2-3 times that.

Lawyers are getting off cheap for these qualified leads. (But then, their business scales with how many hours they can work.)

pjackson··on BASE: An ACID Alternative
I think the key is "eventually" consistent. As long as you can determine when the data are consistent, I think it bears some consideration.

I don't generally care about today's sales in real time. But tomorrow, I want all the data to be consistent, and I want to know it is consistent when I get my reports.

I don't think that BASE is at odds with that concept.

pjackson··on Ask YC: Normal Options/Equity for Employee Number 1
As with most things: it depends.

How much risk have you taken out of your business? What is the market size and upside potential? What is employee #1's contribution expected to be? Is employee #1 your chief technologist, your CMO, or something different?

Have you closed angel or A-round funding, or are you paying them out of your pocket?

I am an East Coast startup person. Employee #1 at a post angel pre-A startup out here wants at least 1-2% with some hedging against dilution when the VCs enter.

Equity at the startups I've worked for is 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff and monthly vesting at month 13. Most savvy negotiators will want a nut of options that vest immediately on acceptance.

If your product is not complete and you can't show that the market is itching to buy your product, a revenue-share-only package will be impossible to value.

But then again, same with the options.

pjackson··on Ask HN: Adding SMS Integration to Web App
Most carriers have integrated SMS-to-email. If you can bother your users to send their SMS messages to an email address instead of a shortcode or NPA-NXX style number, you'll be way better off in terms of integration and cost.

This only works if you know the carrier that your user uses, because presumably you have to route a reply back to them through an email-to-SMS gateway.

I don't personally know of any frameworks in PHP that will help you, but for Rails there are SMSFu and MMS2R, both of which are good at handling gateway SMS traffic.

You might peek at their code to see how they did it. Both are MIT Licensed.

pjackson··on We've been working really hard on our startup and now this
YouTube didn't give up because Google launched Google Video. And as it turns out YouTube did it better and sold to Google.

Press on!

pjackson··on Ask YC: Fewer lines of clever code or more lines of clearer code?
I won't comment on the design concerns. Many people have done that and I could swing either way on your choice of implementation strategies. Instead, I'd like to comment solely on the code.

As an agilist, I'd say: "The code works, so it adds business value, and therefore the rest doesn't matter." However, I am not solely an agilist. I believe this code is too hard to maintain.

This code is terse, which is often good. However, it is also too clever for me to follow in a few minutes. It's a library function, so there isn't much to gain from being terse or clever.

You could do one of several things, but here are the two I'd consider:

1. Keep the logic the way it is, and attempt to use formatting and commenting to make it easier to follow. Use more vertical lines and maybe use sidebar commenting to make each line clear in its intent.

2. Follow the advice of the folks who say that you're not really saving compiler time and unroll the logic into more definitive chunks that use variables to illustrate what you're up to.

In this case, I prefer #2, because I suspect you may have put more effort into writing fewer lines than you may have been able to put into a solution that used more lines. If you consider the cost-per-line-of-code, you may not have saved anything.

That said, congratulations. You may want to consider entering an obfuscated code content. :) (Just kidding).

pjackson··on Interviewing for startups : are formal cover letters + suits necessary, neutral, or harmful?
I interview a lot of people. When candidates ask me this, they often say "I'm coming from work, and I don't want to over-dress and tip them off that I am interviewing. May I dress casually?"

I never say "no." This is always acceptable to me.

pjackson··on Interviewing for startups : are formal cover letters + suits necessary, neutral, or harmful?
I agree with the first paragraph and disagree with the last sentence.

For me, it's less about the typing or language skills and more about proving that you can produce a complete work-product. A typo-laden resume indicates to me that you failed to have at least one native speaker of the language review it.

If you have a known weak area (English is not your most fluent language and is also required for the job), I would expect a thorough individual to seek help.

Just like I would expect a rock-star hacker to call tech support or post on open-source forums for help if they have a particularly difficult bug that they aren't making headway with.

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