Joel Spolsky’s business operating system

Joel Spolsky wrote his first blog post in a year today, announcing Trello, Inc., a spin-off company for the successful project management product Fog Creek Software developed, Trello. Trello has announced a $10M+ venture financing round and they are going to expand the product and team. This was a bit of a surprise to me, … Continue reading Joel Spolsky’s business operating system

Parse.ly: brand hacking

There’s some hoopla lately about “weird” startup names in the Wall Street Journal, with specific coverage of “.ly” domains in The Atlantic Wire: The latest start-up boom has led to the creation of at least 161 companies that end in “ly,” “lee,” and “li,” which is, naming consultants tell us, 160 too many. There’s feedly, … Continue reading Parse.ly: brand hacking

“We’re killing it”

Good post today, A “Third Way” in Entrepreneurship, that discusses the “always be winning”, annoyingly positive veneer of most startup entrepreneurs. This is a community where many founders you meet always share their latest victory and pretend that failures rarely happen. … entrepreneurs are pressured to maintain a totally positive face to the outside world … Continue reading “We’re killing it”

Uninterruptability

Paul Graham, in a footnote from his essay on “How to Make Wealth”: One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking … Continue reading Uninterruptability

PyCon 2013: The Debrief

PyCon US 2013 is over! It was a lot of fun — and super informative. The People For me, it was great to finally meet in person such friends and collaborators as @__get__, @nvie, @jessejiryudavis, and @japerk. It was of course a pleasure to see again such Python super-stars as @adrianholivaty, @wesmckinn, @dabeaz, @raymondh, @brandon_rhodes, … Continue reading PyCon 2013: The Debrief

Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools

Today, I am teaching a tutorial at PyCon called “Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools.” I’ll update this post with how it went, but here are the materials people are using for the course. Video Recording Slides (web) Slides in Note Form (Github) Slides (SpeakerDeck) Code (git) Code (zip) pip requirements

Smaller buckets and bigger thimbles

Just came across this essay I wrote on my morning commute from Long Island to NYC in 2007, while I was a software engineer for Morgan Stanley. I was joking with some friends the other day that my “to read” list keeps growing every day, and it only seems like things are added but never … Continue reading Smaller buckets and bigger thimbles