August 2011
8 posts
Making Sausage vs. Making Sayings
Recently, I tweeted how including video in a landing page increased conversions by 50%. A successful friend, whose advice I greatly respect, cautioned me that “only creating value matters”. Despite my respect, and surface-agreement, it’s necessary to point out that making sausage is what creates value, not quote-sharing.
Creating value is #1 on a startups todo list, but for that...
Symptoms of Startup Crunch Mode
Having trouble deciding if you’re in a Startup Crunch Mode? Victims usually suffer from any number of easily identifiable symptoms:
Buying H&M underwear-packs weekly to stay ‘afloat’
Witnessing consecutive day-night transitions from your desk in a single standing
All food in your fridge is past its expiration
Violently compressed postal mail in your overflowing mailbox
...
“at Boundless Learning, engineering sets the pace. We get shit done, we get it...”
– Ben M Greene: Why Continuous Deployment Matters
True that; it’s great defining your startup engineering culture deliberately. Our team decided to have a scalable, auto-deployed infrastructure from day #1, and it’s paid dividends in a big way since then.
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Insidious state of State / Python ruins weekends.
TL;DR: the worst bugs involve state. Prefer functional languages, and you’re far ahead of the curve.
This weekend, I went to visit a good friend in NYC. Unfortunately, there was a lingering bug in a part of Boundless Learning’s code that was gnawing the back of my mind. Some of our data collection was corrupt, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.
Like all epic...
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