emilam

I've been paid $100/hr with no proof of experience or that I could finish the project.

My school has been primarily blackboard, but some of my classes were actually ported to canvas at the beginning of the spring term. I have to say canvas is a lot friendlier and actually a joy to use. I dont know if its how my school has Blackboard signed up, but just the fact that I stay authenticated for longer than 10 minutes is a nice step up.

Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.

I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.

I'm a big fan of IEEE Software magazine. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/software/home

They have a lot of good authors who focus on different aspects of design and architecture.

I also enjoyed Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck. It is not so much on the architecture of the system, but focuses on the implementation of classes and routines.

Are they a VC firm you would like to work with? It is as if you are taking investment money from them if you are an EIR. I would do the same due diligence you would do if you were taking capital from them.

Talk to some of the companies in their portfolio and see what they think of the VCs.

"... programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake." - The icing on the cake is the important part. A lot of communities forget the base steps such as the meetups and the forums and they jump right to the funding. This limit the growth of the entrepreneurs and the community just as Brad discusses.

Creativity and persistence are great, but the time still needs to be channelled in a constructive way. Otherwise you end up with products no one wants or ruining something with new many scope creep and feature bloat.

I've enjoyed the hackers and founders meetup in mountain view. I really do enjoy how unstructured it is compared to Launch Up and the Web Startup Group.

Another good group is the CTO Breakfast hosted by Phil Windley at the Novell Cafeteria http://www.windley.com/cto_forum

This reminds me of when Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from their users' kindles. It seemed to just piss users off, and is kind of a scary feature.

This is probably a good sign for your app and will improve your "whole product". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_product

I don't know how disruptive your app is, but Geoffrey A. Moore goes into detail on this in his book Crossing the Chasm. He discusses how the support from others(such as this book) boosts your product in the eyes of your customers and future customers.

Are those of us who got denied on a waiting list if spots do open up?

My favorite is "I can't believe I only got 3 hours of sleep last night because of that party".

Now you can claim you are cool cause of your lack of sleep and because you don't need to study.

Shipping a product is a hard thing to do. It takes a lot less work to make a copy of x in 23 hours. The actual "work" of a product often comes right before you release the product. The last 10% of the project is 90% of the work most of the time.

It seems they are doing it because they don't have the willpower to put the finishing touches on and have a shipped product.

I thought this previous post covered it pretty well. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162371

They recommend why's guide to ruby which is a fun book to read through even if you do understand basic concepts. http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

There is a HBS Press book that goes into this in detail. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/142214657X?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Someone mentioned tynt in an earlier comment

authorize.net was bought a few years back and there has been few changes to it. Some of the original developers on the authorize.net team have started mtrex. It is a similar service, but things seem to fit together better. I guess the second time around they know what they are doing.

Rally Dev Community version http://www.rallydev.com is pretty good. We used it with a team of 6 and it worked out great.

"Term Sheets & Valuations - A Line by Line Look at the Intricacies of Venture Capital Term Sheets & Valuations" and "Deal Terms - The Finer Points of Venture Capital Deal Structures, Valuations, Term Sheets, Stock Options and Getting VC Deals Done (Inside the Minds)"

Both are great books. I would read Term Sheets first, but Deal Terms has a lot of great information when you are getting ready to do VC funding. I guess that is if you do VC funding.

This is an excellent idea, and I love the comments so far. It's great to see how open the community is to the idea of others taking a great technology/idea and applying it in new ways. I hope ideas from Academic Hacker News will be able to flow back and influence the original hacker news.

I'll try to let the author of the article know. I was sharing this article and I am not the author of the article.

Not free, but still a great tool is MarketSplash. They let you pick between multiple designs, and you customize it. You can check out their demo at http://www.marketsplash.com/res/packageSubmitSelection.html?...

Their prices are competitive, and they generate very nice logos.

I think this is where a service such as Zinch can shine. It gives the colleges a great opportunity to market themselves and the students to do the same.

I do not remember which podcast it was on mobileorchard, but they discussed how in their free app many people complained because it was not "feature rich" enough. It seems these people wanted a free app, and that they were not willing to ever buy the real app. None of their comments helped improve the application and did not seem to lead to conversion. There is not much a free app can do that a video on review websites would not do if someone was serious about buying the app.

We use MTrex. It was created by some people who worked on Autorize.Net. I've met with the CTO and he seems to know what hes doing. It has most of the same features, and I have enjoyed their tech support.

They have a nice api and their website is easy to use also. I have used authorize.net in the passed and this has been a little bit easier to use.