winslett

I like it. I like that it encourages human-to-human meetings through technology. I like the simplicity of it.

Given LinkedIn screw us with permissions to access contacts, I always cringe when an app requires access to contacts.

His management has already nudged him to find a new job.

In a city like B’ham, with little ability to provide public transit due to low density and high per-capita costs, something like Bird fills a gap.

There are a few side-affects of technical debt that drive me nuts. These come from companies where developers are autonomous, self-choosing of time investment:

* continuous complaint without action (i.e. pretending to be a victim of the system you’ve built)

* lack of measurements for a system (technical debt or not, how is it working? Are you improving your measurement system after each failure to further understand the system?)

* unbuilt is better than unmaintained (this builds off the previous two — tell me what we learned from our previous attempts. If you didn’t understand the quality of the previous attempt, then how do we know if we actually improved?)

I’m down with fixing technical debt, just show me some metrics that prove that it was an improvement.

The school is looking forward to your job application to be a preschool teacher. You'll have the following benefits:

* $32k annual salary

You'll have the responsibility to take care of the most precious little things that have every walked the earth. Your management are the parents, or as they like to call themselves "the people who pay your salary". These management want you to know they would do nearly everything you attempt to do differently than you do it. They want you to know they would do it differently, but they would never actually do it.

You'll need to show up at 7:15am sharp. You'll be able to leave as soon as the last parent picks up their child, which is sometime around 6:15pm. We are happy to have you on the team.

Edit: in education, there is asymmetry of requirements (similar to the asymmetry of bullshit). The boots-on-the-ground educator has 70-years worth of legal duties to be performed. This educator is working with a wide variety of incoming supplies (i.e. the little humans). Additionally, nearly everyone thinks they are capable of being a teacher, and their own recommendations and their own requirements.

The flippant demand that we should prevent $3.50 Glade plugins in a classroom in the scope of all the other things that matter is asymmetrical bullshit. A kid had a runny nose. Medical advice was to remove tonsils. The parents pushed back and found the real problem.

Maybe the $3.50 Glade plugin covered for another kid who was being bullied because of body odor? Or, maybe it cut down on distractions from nearby human pollution odors? Perhaps, the preschool is the lowest cost preschool around because the parents are cheap and do not want to pay market-rate for childcare. Thus, to be able to break even, the preschool uses a building used has a mold and water problem.

Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors.

I was riding my bicycle a lot at the time trying to figure out a availability solution with Postgres. I'd ride my bicycle (40km) 24 miles one-way to work -- each leg took a little less than 1.5 hours. I really only coded and prototyped about 3 hours / day. The 3 hours I spent at a keyboard were incredibly productive. The time on my bicycle allowed me to digest information and let my brain relax. By the time I sat down at a computer each day, I knew exactly what I was going to code or test. I'd test and have information. Then, the bike ride home would be thinking about the results. I was proud of the outcome: https://github.com/compose/governor

‪If you know me and you know the experience, I don’t think any one person was to blame in that scenario. It took behaviors from a participants involved to make it as painful as it was.

The example I gave of subversion wasn’t just one bad actor—it was all involved.

Nails it...

> The co-founder dysfunction impacts everyone in and around the company, but mostly the team underneath the founders. It is like being in a family where mom and dad aren’t getting along. There is stress and strain, messed up decision making, and everyone is walking on eggshells.

I’ve been apart of an org suffering from founder relationship dysfunction. It was detrimental to achieving potential and took a toll on everyone emotionally. Frankly, it sucked...

There are disagreements which will happen...which is child’s play compared to this experience. There were attempts to undermine the performance of the team to derail the success of particular founders. One founder would shut down like a child when another founder had control. There is “ not getting along” which is okay, and there is “locked in a death cycle of subversion.”

Another startup I’ve been part of had the quote: “do you know what kind of ship doesn’t float? A partner-ship.” He’s a reasonably successful loner-as-a-founder because he’s been burned so badly in the relationships.

I’ve heard many scenarios like “transfer of human organs” as a scenario for blockchain, but I’m skeptical that blockchain solves problems in the tangible world all that easily. It is my perception that blockchain is great for trustless information assets, but not great for trustless tangible assets.

Blockchain can’t stop a human from stealing an organ and replacing it with a different organ. Even tracking shipping containers, which was high profile a few years ago, only requires a human to make a mistake in loading a boat to throw off the database.

In tangible-world-to-information-storage scenarios, the hard part is not the information, but the guarantee that information matches the real world. In my view, the claim that blockchain solves for a trustless tangible world is naive.

I've got my money on Redbull buying them.

Ha! Thanks :)

The "genius class" on YCombinator isn't my intended audience. Those folks can go jump off a cliff.

My intended audience is the average person who jumps in a car and drives without thinking what is beyond the windshield. I think these people are interesting because they are making to-the-second economic decisions while driving. Given that:

* road space is a fixed asset

* information about upcoming road conditions is uncertain

* people can use devices to gather best-effort information from Google

* a driver can only choose one route

* the choices drivers collectively makes a market

* drivers choose to be risker to save time

The write up today is really just a foundational observations.

Cheers, Chris

I do recognize I have large gaps of data missing. This was written as a hypothesis on travel and randomness. To support kids activities in a southern US city, random time/source/destination of drivers is removed. Most people have to drive to the same location at the same time to send their kids to school or other activities. Thus, the event yesterday added more randomness to the travel patterns by removing the kids activities.

I don't have real-time flow of all data, thus I could be completely wrong. All I have for traffic data is a few Google traffic maps.

As a member of the Compose product team, it feels good to launch this product. It has been a product that we've been working toward since Compose started.

Like any product launch, this is the beginning, not a finish.

Cheers to the team!

IMO: Heroku is a bad example of vendor lock in. To use Heroku, no code changes were required which would prevent it from running else where. A counter-argument to my counter-argument, Heroku limitations (i.e. 30-second HTTP request timeouts) required code changes for any and all web apps to work on Heroku. Anyhow, code that runs on Heroku can run anywhere.

Parse, on the other hand, was both the code and the infrastructure.

EDIT: p.s. love your newsletters!