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Comment by sg_gabriel | Hacker News Reader

Hi Nate, thanks for sharing your story. I think it's interesting because my co-founder is also my wife. And it's an interesting dynamic to say the least. If you don't mind me asking, what are the roles that you play individually? Just curious ;)

For myself, I'm the backend engineer and devops, while my wife does the design and front-end engineering.

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Roughly speaking, with Zen (and now again with our new startup TaskTorch), I was in charge of the technical side of the business, and she was in charge of anything non-technical (finance, marketing, support, etc.)

Niki is an industrial-organizational psychologist, so her viewpoint is completely different from mine as a software engineer. As a developer it can be hard for me to see past the software sometimes, and Niki's perspective helps quite a bit.

Very cool! I can totally see where you are coming from. I also tend to get stuck in the minutiae of software sometimes, and it may be empirical data at best, but I feel that women are sometimes so much better at seeing things from the user's point of view, and have a better sense of empathy for the user.

I'm glad to see that you managed to have such a close and complimentary working relationship with ur SO. All the best for your new startup, and am looking forward to Chapter 2 of your blog post!

So basically, you've build the entire app yourself, right?

What kind of lang/framework did you use?

Zen was ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, and a big mess of jQuery. TaskTorch is React, Node, and RethinkDB.

Zen looked nicely done. How would you compare these two platforms?

The new platform is light years ahead of the old one. Part of that is six years difference in technology, part of it is that I have another six years of experience, but mostly it's a difference in mindset. RethinkDB and React in particular are fantastic.

How do you feel about Meteor.js?

You also seem to have a knack for writing. Reading the beginning, I got the

  The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

feel.

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