Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned by Starting a Web Company
So for those of you that visit daily (I'm sure there can't be that many). You might have noticed that my domain was "parked." That was a shocker! Turns out my domain had expired. This is the first time I've had a domain expire. It was quite the event. It also served as a milestone. It's been four years since I got this domain, and a lot has changed. I think change is the only constant, and I obviously hope that I can look back and use this blog as some kind of a historical guide. For those of you that are reading this, thank you.
The SkinnyCorp method for creating online awesome-ness and other cool stuff too! These two guys are really down to earth, but I wonder if they actually ran metrics that gave them feedback on where they are. Just think how much more they could really optimize their business? These guys are really funny, and talked some mad shit on this site.Lessons learned....
What I learned from "Community Next" video:
Guy Kawasaki hosted a round table with six well known Silicon Valley entrepreneur's. This is some very inspirational stuff, a must see for those that really want to start their own company.
Quite entertaining, I wish I got screenshots from other parts this site that showed different messages. At least "An unexpected error has occurred." is consistent.
Sometimes, one must sit back and take in the view.
MASTER : I see your talents have gone beyond the mere physical level. Your skills are now at the point of spiritual insight, I have several questions. What is the highest technique you hope to achieve?
STUDENT: To have no technique.
MASTER: Very good. What are your thoughts when facing an opponent?
STUDENT: There is no opponent.
MASTER: And why is that?
STUDENT: Because the word "I", does not exist.
MASTER: Continue.
STUDENT: A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously a good martial artist does not become tense but ready. Not thinking yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there's an opportunity... I do not hit, it hits all by itself.
MASTER: Now, you must remember. The enemy has only images and illusions, behind which he hides his true motives destroy the image and it will break the enemy. The "IT" that you refer to is a powerful weapon, easily misused by the martial artist who deserves his flaws.
Man made the money, money never made the man.
LL Cool J
Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Steve Jobs
If you read slashdot or digg, you'll probably have read a TON of articles/blogs about how Facebook has opened their API. What Facebook doesn't understand, is that social networking (as the word "social" should denote) should be about the lowest common denominator. Much like how one of my co-workers XBOX 360 will crash with the "white" screen of death when attempting to play Gears of War! Let me explain that comparsion a bit.... Microsoft still doesn't get the lowest common denominator, they simply understand certain key demographics and not what is common across the board. However Microsoft does create some excellent technologies, and if challenged in the proper arena turn out some very spectacular products. Weather or not they will ever get anything 99% right, probably won't happen until they are VERY close to the end of their reign, and be forced to get it right. With that in mind Facebook opening their API's makes absolutely no sense to the normal, person. But to a bunch of Stanford graduated Silicon Valley or techie people it does. Perhaps this is Facebook saying to the tech world, "Hey, look at me I can do what Yahoo does!" When it comes down to dollars and cents all they have is that ad at the bottom of their pages. An excellent way to get dollars and cents might be to get some REAL content (other than the standard boiler plate social networking features)! I firmly believe the ONLY thing keeping MySpace in the running is the music! Look at Apple and what it has built on just music alone! It has literally propelled Apple into a completely different company. The fact that one of my best friend's 2 year old son could sing Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" should be evidence enough that music spans generations. Lets take a look at MySpace, not only does it have the expected social networking features, but most importantly has a flash based music and video player on every profile page. And anyone that uses MySpace knows that they have thought, "I wonder what <insert someone's name here> profile song is?" I'm not expert, but perhaps the Silicon Valley (excluding Cupertino and Mountain View of course!....i.e. Apple/Google) still has a lot to learn about "people" (i.e. the lowest common denominator) especially when it comes to the internet and more importantly software! HINT: If Facebook really wants to really compete and win in the Social Networking arena, they need to pony up, and give their users a reason to stay on their site.
I will study and prepare myself, and someday my chance will come.
Abraham Lincoln
I found a great "Egg Timer" widget, check it out here.
This is the one game I've been anticipating the release forever now.
My favorite is when Robin Williams did a guest apperance to demo SPORE.
This is an interesting article, which covers the rapid growth of MySpace.
Regarding MySpace, Murdoch acknowledged the obvious. "It's grown faster than we expected," he said. "Advertising has gone from basically nothing [when we bought the company]."
The monster that is MySpace just keeps growing and growing. Check out the article here.
"I've been surprised how nimble they've been for such a large company," says Gold. "The big thing is it's global footprint. We could never have expanded like we have without News Corp's footprint. We were a small entrepreneurial company and surprisingly they have stuck to that entrepreneurial spirit."
I found this on a website, somewhere but I closed the browser tab!
If the mark of a good team programmer is the ability to work (usually grudgingly) with the code of others, then the mark of a great team programmer is the ability to produce code that other programmers on the team will gladly use.I found this on a website here on how to interview a programmer. My favorite excerpt is below:
Good citizenship is probably more important than technical prowess, because if you have people with the right kind of attitude and demeanor, you can help them gain the technical knowledge and software development habits. But if you have people who lack humility and maturity, it can be extremely difficult to get them to cooperate in reaching a goal, no matter how bright they are or what they've accomplished in the past.
Randy Stafford
This kind of comedy in some sense is completely wrong, but if one can take a joke it's funny.
Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.A really interesting read from Steve Jobs, on DRM and three possible paths for the music companies to take, in creating an open music market. Check it out here.
Steve Jobs
A co-worker in the Windows group continues to poke fun. One day they will learn!
The fun part of interoperating between the Windows, and Linux worlds is dealing with old skool and sometimes very ghetto standards. One which every programmer knows is storing date/time information in an epoch. The one most commonly used epoch is the unix epoch. In .NET they came up with a very cleaver way of dealing with Dates and Times via the DateTime class. Below is a code snippet in C# that I use to handle date/time information stored in unix epoch.
DateTime unixEpoch = new DateTime (1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0); DateTime someDate = DateTime.UtcNow; TimeSpan span = someDate - unixEpoch; int timestamp = (int) span.TotalSeconds;
I went out to dinner with some Sun Microsystem representatives sometime last week. The comical moment of the night was, when we meet these guys at "Fogo De Chao." It's a group of MySpacer's dressed in t-shirts and jeans, and a bunch of suits attempting to be business "cool", with their slacks and button down oxford shirts, the rest of the patrons at Fogo were all dressed in very posh 90210 attire. I was able to ask some very outlandish questions. And in return I got my ear talked off on how Solaris is THE best platform. I'll reserve my comments on Sun hardware and Solaris. But THE best question I think I asked all night was, "So why is Scott (McNealy) such a duchebag, and is Jonathan (Schwartz) any different?" The response I got from the Sun representative, was very boilerplate, standard politically correct kind of a response. But he did level with me after I just said, "Just come out with it already.." He said that McNealy held on the the reigns for too long. But the way that Scott, and Jonathan conduct themselves to their employees was something he had never seen before and one of the main reasons why he is still with the company. He proceeded to tell me about how he visits the main campus up in Santa Clara and how Jonathan always asks about his children and how they know exactly what he's been working on. He even mentioned how one time Jonathan actually came out to a potential customer's office to help convince the customer to buy their product. That's pretty compelling. I've been at organizations where if I was armed I'd want to take a gun to the CEO's head (of course I don't own a gun, and I'm not in any kind of a rush to get one). So the coolest part of the night was when chatting with the Sun representative he mentioned about how he was involved in a defense contract, way before he was at Sun. He said there was an instance where there was this radio that the marines were using, and the data coming in over the air was not getting parsed correctly by a program that was written by another defense company. He said that when the four star general originally asked him how long it would take, he responded with 6 months. The general stated that you have one month, and you should use the "Rush to Failure" method. It's a method in which you get there as quick as you can, and try to make the thing break as many times as you can. With one other programmer he set out to do it. In exactly one month, he got it right, and got on a plane to the pentagon to demo his success. He was awarded a 5 million dollar contract, and the rest is history. He said, the one most important things he learned throughout all of that was the "Rush to Failure" method.
