51 karma · joined May 21, 2010
previously chopped wood and carried water at Sun Microsystems, various online fashion companies, MotoLogic, and most recently as Director of Engineering @ Etsy.com
twitter: @gpmack
Just a few years later, I bought one of these: http://www.mindflux.com.au/products/io-display/iglass3D.html
It was crude and required way too many cables, but playing Descent was awesome.
That said, there are a lot of questions about what the philosophical, cultural, sociological and political underpinnings and implications might be. Creating a friendly environment for discussing those could be a worthwhile exercise as well. For example, what is the interaction between individual wellbeing and longevity, and the quality of world in which you live? Perhaps it's a two-way street, a wholistic set of factors that includes social wellbeing in addition to medical health, taking for example the case of that Greek island with famously long-living people (Ikaria).
As someone said, it's not the years in your life, it's the life in your years.
Be as hard-core about your negotiation skills and awareness of employment terms, as you are about your coding skills.
But what's stopping people from voluntarily posting the procedure_code=>price information they obtain? Are there contractual/legal reasons that prevent you from sharing that information? If patients get that price in the normal course of getting healthcare, then why not share it all, and force transparency in the market?
We started out with Hudson, but after observing the unethical shenanigans from Oracle (particularly the erasure of the author's contributions from their wiki), we moved to Jenkins.
2: mount the whole setup on a walking robot.
3: ??
4: apocalypse
Etsy is successful, ultimately, not because of some putative secret sauce (though we do have very powerful and unique behind-the-scenes tech).
We are successful, ultimately, because we are providing tools that support and enable the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, help their artistic and creative achievements be seen and recognized around the world, and subvert the common shopping experience people have to add a personal connection to the creators of the goods they buy.
If anyone were to identify a similarly unmet need, another ignored and under-served community, and created a place online that had a positive impact on the lives, they would also succeed. What "business model", which metrics or revenue streams make sense, depends on that community's characteristics, and it doesn't have to be complicated or some sort of trick.
That all said, it's of course crucial to have reliable, flexible, scalable, rapidly evolving technology behind you. I have been working here relentlessly to get our team to the point where we are free to innovate as much as we can. To be honest, there is already abundant information on the web and elsewhere about what works, and what doesn't; it's not really a mystery.
But you need the resoluteness to actually execute on these best practices, and the courage to innovate even in the face of occasional mistakes.