Solving problems with startups

Interesting insider Q&A with Paul Sutter, co-founder of Quantcast. Via Hacker News: Q: What methodical process did you follow for your startup? Did you first test the market using tactics similar to the lean startup approach? A: Basically, make a list of known problems that you’re well suited to solving, rank them by criteria, fail … Continue reading Solving problems with startups

Startups: Not for the faint of heart

Early on during this startup adventure, a person I trust told me, “Watch out — startups aren’t for the faint of heart.” Looking back on my personal net income graph from 2009 to present, I can see what he meant. May 2009 is when I entered Dreamit Ventures to begin working on what would become … Continue reading Startups: Not for the faint of heart

The Startup Diet

Last summer, we got our company, Parse.ly, off the ground at DreamIt Ventures incubator program in Philadelphia. Since then, we’ve talked to a lot of founders about our experience in the program. Many founders are data-driven people who are looking for concrete advice about how to optimize their experience at these programs. One of the … Continue reading The Startup Diet

Core Python

When I describe my programming background these days, I say that I code “primarily in Python, JavaScript, Clojure, C… and Zig!” I put Python first in that list for good reason. This is a post about the core Python language, but also the ways in which Python is evolving its single-core and multi-core CPU performance. … Continue reading Core Python

Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view

In 2009, I quit my first programming job after college to work on a startup. That startup eventually became Parse.ly. I’ve written about Parse.ly’s startup beginnings and evolution elsewhere on this blog, including: “The Startup Diet” “What One Does” “Startups: Not for the faint of heart” “Why Startups Die” “Shipping the Second System” It is … Continue reading Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view

Managing software teams: the definitive reading list

Frederick Brooks once wrote: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. In his classic essay, “No Silver Bullet”, he also wrote about software’s “essential” complexity: The complexity of software is an essential property […] Hence, descriptions … Continue reading Managing software teams: the definitive reading list

Parse.ly’s brand refresh

Here’s how Parse.ly’s original 2009 logo looked: Parse.ly has some fun startup lore from its early days about how we “acquired” this logo. I wrote about this in a post entitled, “Parse.ly: brand hacking”: Our first Parse.ly logo was designed as a trade for another domain I happened to own. It was the dormant domain … Continue reading Parse.ly’s brand refresh

Shipping the Second System

In 2015-2016, the Parse.ly team embarked upon the task of re-envisioning its entire backend technology stack. The goal was to build upon the learnings of more than 2 years delivering real-time web content analytics, and use that knowledge to create the foundation for a scalable stream processing system that had built-in support for fault tolerance, … Continue reading Shipping the Second System

Software planning for skeptics

Engineers hate estimating things. One of the most-often quoted lines about estimation is “Hofstadter’s Law”, which goes: Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. If you want to deliver inaccurate information to your team on a regular basis, give them a 3-month-out product development timeline … Continue reading Software planning for skeptics