pschlump

In my last startup we used 3 Measures for productivity. Number of functions/procedures/methods, Number of lines of non-comment code and the number of defects found in the code. I wrote far more code than anybody else in the company. I took on all the really hard stuff that other developers had already failed at. My number of defects per line of code and per function/procedure/method was always lower than all the other developers.

So I would choose to politely disagree. You can measure productivity.

I have looked back in the notes from my last startup. I was CTO and I had to spend time doing fund raising, making sales calls, editing documentation and designs, going to customer meetings. I was never full time in development. I wrote 69 times as much code as the least productive developer and 12 times as much as our "Lead Programmer". Based on my experience 10x is a low estimate. I would say that some people are 100x as productive as others in developing software.

This is the best list of JavaScript tools I have ever seen.

I remember when SVN came out that it was designed to fix CVS not as a big improvement over CVS. CVS had some terrible flaws. SVN fixed them. Git was designed to make source code control better. Git is a huge improvement over SVN or CVS. Since it is an improvement you have to do some learning. It is worth it!

This is a really good checklist on how to market your product.

I believe that there is a universal law of compensation. You get what you give. You help somebody - then some time in the future somebody will help you. This "universal law" is what makes open source work.

I support a small business with 3 PC's (XP, Vista, Win7). One of them has an intermittent problem that I have spent 50 or 60 hours tracing. Chrome OS would solve 99% of the support problems that they have - reducing all of the support to just "Are you connected to the internet?" I so wish that all the apps that they use were available as SaaS.

We sold everything bought a sailboat and have been up and down the east cost of the US and the Bahamas for 4 years now. My children are 11 years old.

I built a successful angel funded start-up company. We had 2 other competitors in our "space". One that had $10 million in funding and the other that had $50 million. We had $50,000 at the time. (Yes 50k). We continued. In the end with customers in palace we had raised a couple of million in funding. We sold the company. We were successful. Our competitors couldn't sell the company for enough to even recoup the investment. They folded. They failed. One of them was killed by the VC that funded them. Just because they have 20 people and millions will not make them beat you. You may have the advantage. If you can get to a profitable state you can overcome. Lots of markets can support more than one product in the market. Don't quit.