vineet

I am not a fan of the how dense the information is presented on the first page, but the other languages are being mentioned only as possible pre-requisites - they are not trying to say that they teach those languages.

Offering to convert themes for free to the first few designers (and just give them money per sale) might help you get out of the chicken/egg problem.

Best of luck with it.

Great idea. But starting with just 1 theme will make it hard to convince potential customers and potential theme creators to use the site.

Perhaps send an e-mail to a couple of handpicked theme creators from one of the other sites to come over - maybe even convert some of the themes for free.

Great. Let us know how it goes. It has definitely inspired me to atleast run a variant of this.

In my experience, the overhead in figuring out a codebase is usually large. So taking 5+ new projects each time would mean that you would be spending a lot of time on just reading code.

Now improving code reading/understanding skills is not a bad idea, it is just that it does not seem to be your goal. I would suggest just taking 1 new project each round.

I guess this also matters if you are working on this full-time or not.

Would love to read your experience report as you progress through the rounds.

Good idea. I particularly like the idea of sharing your list publicly.

Though it might be better if it was fixing multiple bugs in few projects as opposed to one bug in so many projects.

Also, for those of us that have used every language under the soon, maybe the focus should be on a language not used in the last year.

I blog. I don't have much fun while doing it. So, I could possibly be a good customer.

But... I don't get how you are better. You have only stating that you are better. I would also like to see examples of your strength (I know you pointed that your blog is running on the platform, but I don't see anything useful on your blog about how you are better).

Try looking at http://www.smugmug.com/ They have a similar philosophy to you guys (in the photos space).

It is not the responsibility of owners to police their assets. Stealing is a crime. Part of the job of startup founders is to make sure that their team is careful.

I do feel bad for all the bad news that Curebit is getting for small issues. But I am glad that such issues are being highlighted.

I like it.

It did however take me till the last 30 seconds of the video to actually get how this would be useful to me.

Need to play with it to get you more feedback.

I personally do not believe in Open Sourcing as EOLing is going to help anyone. The donating codebase is often a large piece of code where the original developers have been pulled onto something else and therefore the documentation is too limited for generally anyone else to even compile. And the development community just ends up with one more project that PHBs can point to as 'why open source does not work'.

Yeah, I feel like someone needs to write a guide to corporations 'successfully open sourcing a project'. Together with some of Oracle's decisions we have recently had a number of bad examples.

My point was that I believe that Flex would have built a larger community of supporters had they open sourced it first.

Adobe should have done this before the negative news (them announcing that flash on mobile is not going to be supported).

Yeah, they need to simplify their 'messaging'.

Oh, and see here for what an applicaiton server is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server

TorqueBox's home page explains the use-cases well.

Seems like they are talking about clustering, load-balancing, etc.

Glad to see them trying to reinvigorate the site. Hopefully they will add some cool ideas to support the OSS community.

We have done a minor pivot to launch a really cool service. Would love to hear what you guys think of it.

Would you like to see it be easier to use, any particular features, more projects online, or supporting more languages (currently only Java)?

The one I use (happily): http://www.splitmybill.ie/

Talk to potential users and customers to get an understanding of where they feel the pain and at what point it will be something really helpful to them.

Talking to 2-3 of your target customers will help you understand how you need to change the idea. And keep doing it until you get consistency in their feedback.

You also get bonus points if they are willing to pay for the privilege of getting access to it first while you work with your first small set of users.

I was wondering what Aurora is - apparently a release in between a nightly and a beta: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/04/aurora/

They really need to call it alpha - or something else so that the users will not need to do a search to figure out what it means.

Jason, I actually agree.

I did not mean to say that I don't like doing it - just that I have heard it so many times and that making it happen is hard. I would love to hear more people breaking this branding thing down.

This is definitely something that is missing from the startup ecosystem - tips on giving your product personality. All the great companies seem to have a personality.

Surprise is a really good point and something that we can generally apply.

But I am not a fan of the theme/brand point. Lots of people say it, and it seems easy to say once a company is successful - but hard to figure it out when you are in the early stages.

We are paying for a competitor product - which had the realtime support. We will seriously consider paying for Google Analytics when it comes time to renew licenses. And yes, we are hoping that by then they will have a version of their product that is between Free and $150K.

We are not paying them anything. But, we do want to pay them especially if it means that the product will keep getting better (and that it will not get axed).

I trust people more when I know where they are (or planning to) make money. If I don't see it - they have few reasons to be good.

Really happy to see that Google Analytics has a monetization strategy. Hopefully they will start paying to the needs of their users more (and not let it keep on stagnating).

Definitely worth looking at their events recordings: http://masschallenge.tv/portfolio/events/

I do agree that the cliff and vesting schedules help here. But those force you to fire someone even if they are good but not perfect. I have been in situations where an early employee definitely believes that he/she can perform better per plan.

Yes, there is also temptation to ignore rewarding someone when the company has progressed. But, it is also a huge red flag when you have a company where major early employees have left. IMO, one of the biggest responsibilities of any startup CEO is in attracting and retaining good talent.

I am not suggesting giving lesser equity upfront, but more towards making a serious decision based on where the person is. If he is a great coder give him the equity that a great coder deserves. But a great coder is different from a great early team member - and it is hard to impossible to make the distinction early on.

As for the red flags that an employees might have when joining a company with such promises - I am hoping that the rest of the team will be able to vouch for it working with regards to them being in the company.

Having been employee one and started 2 companies - I strongly disagree.

It is hard to find employees/co-founders that (a) have the right skills, (b) the right interests, (c) the right industry knowledge/contacts, and (d) are in the same place in their life to make the same amount of commitments.

And even when you do you find such people, it is hard to give them 10% equity in the beginning and then tell them that they are under-performing, and only deserves 2.5% equity.

Now, I agree, that the definition of under-performing is very different for a startup compared to a more established company. I have also found people are willing to accept when they are under-performing, but contracts and equity that is given is harder to change.

However, I would love to have the right cofounder, and even share the equivalent equity with him if he can take over half my burden.

Perhaps the answer is to find people with a very good fit, start them with low equity (~1%), and tell them how they can get more equity. And then doubling equity multiple times as they are able to rise to a founder level responsibility.

Good point.

Someone (I think Martin Fowler) suggested spending 2-3 days upfront sketching the big architectural points. I generally think that is a good idea.

But I do like OP's analogy of UML being used to make the maps that us programmers will use.

I guess I am looking forward to the day when we don't have to make our maps manually.

Rather than copying each feature of an IDE, I would they rather spend the time in focusing on what developers can benefit from in such a new architecture.

For example, rather than autocomplete, I would rather see support for codereview capabilities and being truly inside a server allows significantly improved team capabilities (think Microsoft Office vs Google Docs).

Yeah, I was also surprised with it. But it made me think that this problem is actually getting so big that even techcrunch is talking about it.

Oh, and I actually like their reasoning - I think the software engineering community needs to figure out a better way to interview candidates.