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Comment by nathanmarz | Hacker News Reader

Founder here. Excited to announce Red Planet Labs today. I'll try my best to answer any questions here.

Also want to emphasize that we're a fully distributed company, and we're hiring! If you're a strong Clojure programmer we would love to hear from you (though we're open to non-Clojure folks as well).

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Thanks very much for your post. I'm intrigued, but to be honest, your post set off a lot of warning bells in my head in that it talked about things very much in generalities, but I still don't really know what you intend to do. Perhaps that's just because you want to keep your cards close to your chest for now, but how should I think of your company. Is it like Firebase but instead of "consumer mobile" focused it is enterprise focused? How should I think of it in comparison to the PAAS offerings from AWS, GCP, Hiroku, etc.

We're revealing very little about the technology at the moment. For now, I can say that it's a single tool upon which you can build nearly your entire backend. It will be kind of like Hadoop or Storm in that it's infrastructure that you deploy and then program your applications using a Java API.

Congrats on the launch and sorry if my question is not directly related to your announcement.

I’ve known you as creator of Apache Storm and author of the manning Big Data book, and was impressed by what you achieved, so impressed that I was wondering for the past years what was the stealth startup Nathan Marz is working on, and whether it will introduce a new paradigm the way Storm was a paradigm shift towards streaming.

What is your advice to someone who just started his career (~2 years xp) and not sure how to invest his time, to be able to reach your level of mastery in the next few years? Should one focus on the basics, algorithms and data structures? Or should one try to be very proficient in one programming language? Or try to learn a bunch of technologies/frameworks/databases etc and become most productive with them?

Thank you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it takes a long time – thousands upon thousands of hours. I think the best way to utilize those hours is to spend them building real applications, and to always be pushing your comfort zone in some way. That could be by utilizing a new piece of infrastructure, working in a new language, or working on a new problem space that's very challenging to you. Make sure to seek jobs that enable you to consistently push your comfort zone like that! If you keep doing that, after many years you'll become a very strong programmer.

This looks like a recruiting post, but the type of people you're pitching to are the kind of people who are quite passionate about the specifics of functionality and workflow and architectures. Are you planning on providing more information than "software tool" to help developers decide if this is something they want to help build?

We're still keeping the technology mostly under wraps. We're hoping that the strong track records of everyone on our team, as well as our amazing group of investors, will interest people in applying.

Well, a strong track record was enough to get me to toss $10 into the Light Table kickstarter, hopefully it will also be enough for you to find developers willing to dedicate a couple years of their lives.

Why did you choose Clojure?

Clojure's a fantastic language. Writing our code in an immutable style leads to much more robust code, and we heavily make use of the expressive power of Clojure (e.g. macros, protocols, etc.)

Any challenges raising the round given the team is distributed?

Congrats for the raise!

I only had one investor who even raised that as a concern, and he still offered to invest. What I was more worried about was raising as a solo founder, but that didn't turn out to be an issue.

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