zinssmeister

You are absolutely right, trials are difficult when there is a integration step that might take a week. We consider the trial to start once you are fully integrated, not when you sign up.

A Freemium model is something we are interested in! We wanna support smaller projects with a free tier in the future.

This is most likely not going to happen and if it did probably going to end badly: What if nobody showed up for these briefings and press conferences anymore?

Thank you! I'm glad our efforts are visible. There was a time where it wasn't clear for us if this youtube channel would be a good ROI. But we decided to stick with it for some months and it eventually started paying off.

We are a marketplace for great projects looking for great designers (https://www.designinc.com), something that needs to grow on two ends. What has worked really well for us is putting out high quality content marketing. Our YouTube channel has a weekly show that is shot with great sound and video quality. When we write blog posts we try to be very specific and insightful rather than pushing lots of cheaper/easier content every week.

Another great channel for us is SEO. Here we also take the high quality over quantity route by building fewer but more insightful landing pages. We want people to spend more time on our content and get value from it.

Thank you! The team has been hard at work on this and I'm happy you had a chance to try us out :)

Michael, I appreciate this. I'm sure ClusterHQ was at times brutally hard work and you and team have worked hard on making things happen. I'm sorry it didn't work out and hopefully the future will be brighter with new lights.

So much truth in this series. A lot of what he talks about I can back up with my own experience building and running SaaS apps. "I want you to understand first hand that building a SaaS startup is mostly a marketing optimization problem — not something that you can just code your way out of."

Part 2 & 3 can be found here

https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-no-bs-approach-to-bui...

https://hackernoon.com/make-it-rain-building-an-mvp-for-fun-...

That is something we have thought about a lot. Right now all designer on the platform are invite only. They have to apply, we review their work and make a decision. That has worked out very well for us so far.

I agree the spider-caffeine-thing is "weak". But it's a popular argument and I don't have anything more substantial at hand. Most people I know, that still drink coffee/caffeine do tell tales of feeling "wired" and "scattered" after consumption.

I think caffeine is great in the right dosage and setting (recreational). I don't advise using it at work if you are after high productivity http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm

I think humans when exposed to new technology tend to do stupid things for a while until they get smarter and figure out what to actually do. The early decades of the 20th century brought many new and powerful abilities, mostly fueled by the combo of war and technological advancements. It wasn't clear to leaders then that giving soldiers meth or even taking it yourself wasn't such a smart move.

Humans are much smarter today (about substance abuse) and we are slowly walking down the list eliminating over-use of less damaging substances like sugar, caffeine. Products like coca cola are facing a huge consumption gap in certain, very developed areas.

what does PFYs stand for?

React Server looks fantastic!

For some reason this week I stumbled over many great React.js articles, so I started a collection here http://deepreact.com mostly to save&share things with friends, since a lot of us are getting deeper into React now.

That's exactly why putting up this vote to remain or leave was a very poor decision in the first place. The drastic change of leaving the EU, decided by half the votes, many of which were very ill informed about what that actually means, is a giant political mess. I don't think I have ever seen such a unfortunate outcome from a political decision in my lifetime.

Going forward, the UK should look at the referendum as a very weak signal by the public. There will be no "revolution" and definitely not a violent one if the government looks at the effort and outcome of leaving the EU but ultimately decides to remain.

I read the german version of this article a few days ago and paired with my own experience (I was born and raised in Germany and lived there until the age of 25) I came to the conclusion that: a.) being poor in Germany is much much better than being poor in most other countries (incl. the United states, where I reside now) and b.) When you are poor in Germany you can drastically improve your cash flow by not living in one of the expensive cities. Living out in the country in a small village will enable you to stretch your welfare checks compared to living in Munich, where most things and most people around you are much more.

I also think Germany has a unique opportunity here to tackle the problem of social mobility and could improve the way they deploy the welfare budget. For example supporting a young family with many children before they face sliding into "poor status", due to one parent staying home to take care of the family. The article did a great job highlighting three interesting situations and their challenges/opportunities.

Rails is great. And of course it isn't and will never be perfect. Obviously the author would love some alternative frameworks, mainly so he can use some more and some less exotic code patterns. Maybe after almost a decade of writing CRUD apps in Rails he is a bit bored? I can't blame him and seeing the Ruby community so focused on basically one framework is a tiny bit sad.

So I definitely see where he is coming from with all this, but truth be told it was never Rails' indent to be a precision instrument. It has been a reliable framework that makes a lot of Developers very happy. A great reliable car for the masses so to speak. But not a Ferrari.

Nice little list. Would love it if each bot had a short description of what it does

follow me on twitter @zinssmeister and send me a DM

Highly recommend getting out of there and looking for a new job. Depending on your financial situation I'd either get out this very moment or try to hold on another paycheck or two while sending out resumes and taking phone screens. Judging based on your pastebin I'd say that K is incompetent both on a technical (busy work and response times of backend calls) and on a people level (highly political, doesn't bother with proper requirements/communications). You can't change K and it might be a long time before she will get herself in trouble and eventually fired. So, waiting this one out is not an option, good luck finding something new, ping me if you need some leads.

Office Parks are dying because the way our careers are going has changed. Many people change jobs every 2-3 years rather than dedicate their life at a single Big Employer. Living in the Suburbs and working at an office park is a very inflexible setup. Working in SF and commuting in from Oakland for example will enable you to change jobs more frequently without uprooting your life.

excellent post.

You can exercise a portion rather than your entire batch of options.

You can possibly arrange with the IRS to pay your tax bill over time.

You can find a buyer that will allow you to sell right after exercise.

If you anticipate a architecture with many micro-services, sure docker might be a good win for you. But my own experience was a win-loss scenario so I'm now back to keeping things traditional (for now). Docker made it easier to start the environment with a single command but it failed in other areas and it was a pain to maintain.

depends, you can do it in a few days if you want. Oliver Samwer famously did his in 5 days when Rocket Internet went public in Germany.

This is a great post, especially the section about product USPs. On Ivyleads we are still testing a few variations because we believe it is very impactful. We also saw a huge uplift changing the CTA from blue to green.

great read. Pomodoro really works quite well if one can stick to using it regularly.

got it. They have a pretty good roster products already.

Very cool I just added https://ivyleads.co and now browsing around. It has some rough spot on the UI but not bad. Where are you looking to take this?

did we miss something? Can you elaborate?

Hi guys, founder of Ivyleads here. Feel free to ask me questions and give me feedback. And thanks for checking out Ivyleads :)