keithwarren

There was also a BBQ held Friday night at YC offices that some attendees were invited to and others not. This ended up being confusing because not all of us knew if we should go, do something else or what. More transparency would have helped.

I have been to other startup focused events, though normally on a smaller scale and not in SV.

I never felt like any of the people I met were trying to sell me their idea - it was far more collaborative among the people I spoke with. We shared, offered advice etc. I mostly spent time with people from out of town as we all were in town Friday night and used facebook to coordinate getting together for drinks since we were all there early.

I got the chance to attend this year and what struck me as most interesting about the weekend was not the day of speakers but the people I met. I meet lots of people who talk about startups but almost everyone I met was deeply serious and wicked smart. Every person I met, every conversation I had I came away thinking that they would be successful...and I am usually quite pessimistic in that scenario. Ground zero is a great term, I feel I met so many great people and heard so many great ideas that there was almost certainly a unicorn company in that room.

Depends on the nature of the reader, but for some people I have hired who were gifted coders (right out of the gate knew how to approach problems) I would often give it to them on their first day and they ate it right up.

I had been a professional programmer for 10+ years when I read it and it was full of those moments of clarity where disparate things I 'knew' came together and made much more sense.

yeah, my cost with flight, hotel etc will approach 2k dollars. Throw in lost billable time with clients and this is a 5K investment for a one day conf I could watch online. The key is going to be what I make of the hours that I spend not sitting in a seat during that day. Meeting people, making connections etc.

Got accepted, not sure whether to be excited or not. Could be one of those things where most everyone who applies gets accepted because most people don't end up coming. (anyone know numbers on that?) Pretty sure I will go...2000 miles isn't really that far...

I am still waiting for a customer to tell me they don't like my application because it uses a common UI framework. Not holding my breath. Tech people care about this, but only barely and only very few.

A fresh and engaging UI with groundbreaking ideas and techniques could possibly win you lots of fans but for the vast majority of applications (especially lob or ent) this does not make sense.

How do you quantify that (is there really an accurate count of how many of those farms exist?)

The problem I have with this is that I end up using the gross take on projects to float my receivables. In theory your idea has merit, but in practice we all have cash flow challenges and the money I owe uncle sam can bridge those challenges for me.

Why do you think you need VS support. Care to expand? Just a preference or something else; I am just genuinely curious.

I think 'feel fully native' is a misnomer. They are fully native. When you build for iOS you use xib or storyboard for layout (or native code adding views/subviews directly) and the same for Android, you use layout files.

There are lots of great apps out there, Rdio was one of the more prominent early ones and it is also interesting to note that Unity3D games run on the same underlying framework (mono) http://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery

I have come to the conclusion that people A) this sentiment is an edge case and B) people will never be happy.

The last time there was a thread about Xamarin on here the top comment was complaining about the cost of a license, several weeks later they announce monthly pricing.

Now the complaint is we don't get Visual Studio support with indie pricing. Seriously folks? I am not trying to be a Xamarin apologist but the company has to make money and find a model somewhere that makes sense - putting VS support in an up-level SKU makes all the sense in the world if you follow the trends.

Look at it this way, the majority of Xamarin customers who want Visual Studio support are businesses for whom the cost of the licenses is irrelevant in the larger picture (I dont want to provide a math lesson but if they x-plat savings are manifest, the ROI on the licenses is near immediate). That is where Xamarin can find the margin to support the lower tiers. If they had the ability to support the entire company on $25/developer/year then I venture they would because there is value for them right now not in taking profit but in growing the developer base. Alas they are not doing that which tells me they are finding customers in the enterprise more than willing to pay for their product. In order to get TRIPLE the revenue per customer they add one specific sweet spot that they know nearly all those customers want - Visual Studio support. If they put that in the lower tiers they nuke their margins because it is the feature that matters most to the enterprise dev teams who are often filled with people who know and enjoy visual studio above other environments. It also enables them to not purchase a secon machine (mac) for each of these developers which gets beyond the hardware and licensing costs and has an effective cost on IT operations.

So yes, it would be nice if Visual Studio support were included in the indie tier - but it would not be prudent. Besides, how many 'indie' developers do you know are actually completely dependent on Visual Studio? I love Visual Studio and half my consulting revenue comes from the hours I spend in it - but the other half of my time which is usually spent doing mobile development is done in Xamarin Studio because - surprise, it is really pretty good.

Call me old fashioned but surge pricing seems like another term for price gouging.

I would also venture a guess that Apple may know a percentage if not even a majority are only interested in trying a Mac because the x86 proc gives them a bridge from Windows. If you take that away then mac sales may take a hit and possibly a significant one.

Anecdotally I know for me, this would cause me to move from a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina to an Air or even a mini. Time and market has changed to where having a mac is a must for me as a professional developer but I won't spend 3K on a single machine whose primary differentiator is ability to compile iOS applications.

I am actually working on a project that I started for personal use, it lets me define a bunch of ideas and some metrics about those ideas (like market size, revenue potential etc) and then weight and score each of those metrics. I can then share this list with friends and colleagues who can also score the metrics about each idea, without seeing mine or anyone else's score so there is no bias.

The gist is, finding an objective (or as close to it) way to evaluate ideas within a simple structure.

Anyone else interested? Anything better already exist?

Basically, I had too many ideas and could not decide what to work on.

I love me some 538 but I cannot read it without noticing how they gloss over some major factors that create variables in the systems they are trying to examine. Feels like Malcolm Gladwell for Statistics.

Google buys Airware

Microsoft buys Rackspace

Have you actually built a universal app? There is actually quite a good pattern for the separation of concerns here, you should check it out.

spoiler: It is not like what you are thinking, quite clean actually.

Instead of looking for someone else with an idea I would just build for something you love. For example, lets say your hobby is hiking. Build the hiking app you wish existed. Imagine the future, 10 years from now - what would a hiking app do? Just try to build that now.

If you try to build someone else's idea the passion will be hard to find. Your idea, your passion will be what keeps you up at midnight when you would rather head off to bed.

The bogus delivery story at the end made the whole thing worth it. This day and age it might even merit a visit from Homeland Security!

You would have a case if he said PC first, Phone first as they are both client consumption mediums.

Mobile first, cloud first is a rehashing of spector if priority for their devices and services. They are saying when we build new versions of Windows or Office we will put the priority on mobile devices. When we build server software, the focus will first be on our cloud varieties.

Take for example Service Bus, software they make for Windows Server and their cloud offering. New features are added first to the cloud offering and later trickle down to the licensed on-premise version.

I almost gave up when he said "I don’t mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first? Only one thing can be first."

If you don't recognize that those are two different areas then you are either dense, or being intentionally contrarian. Given the earlier statements he made it is clear the latter is certainly true and quite possibly the former as well.

I completely agree, when I read that part it virtually invalidated everything else specious that was said, that is simply nonsense.

Another thing that colors my perspective - I have been on my own for 15 years. I don't have to consider the company, legacy or other devs in the shop. It is me, whom I choose to sub-contract to and what jobs I choose to take on. There is a level of freedom in that I often take for granted.

30 days. 100% Risk Free, Unconditional money back guarantee.

Lets just get expense out of the way because that argument is actually invalid. For professional devs like us, if you cannot learn something new enough to make a decision on it - in 30 days, then we have bigger problems than license fees.

If that is the case for you then money is not the issue, it is time. Having 30 free days for me to spend learning a tech is a unicorn, it does not exist.

I understand your frustration because there are so many amazing techs out there I wish I had the time to learn but just don't. I made the decision to invest my time in Xamarin when I realized that the custom mobile dev market is slowly eating the custom web appdev market I was doing so well in. I made a conscious decision to make a bet on Xamarin (mainly because I knew C# very well) because I saw value in their approach vs others.

I have been very successful financially in my career so it could be that I look at time and money different than others, especially college students learning CS, but my statements were aimed at pro devs.

(an aside, I think Xamarin offers very steep discounts to students)

Being honest, there will be very little learning curve going from VS to Xamarin Studio. They tried to make that switch as painless as possible.

You are right, there is a factor of learning that needs to be baked into your consideration but there comes a point where you put a little trust in people who came before you and tell you 'I have done this, I have been where you are - follow me and you will be fine'.

On the flip side, Nat Friedman is incredibly approachable. I am sure if you simply email him and tell him your concerns he will accommodate you with a longer trial period or some kind of money back guarantee, that just how he is.

It amazes me that the constant complaint on here is the price. Seriously folks, if you are a professional developer (by that I mean your primary ability to earn money for you and your family is the development of software) then the cost of a Xamarin license should be looked at as a factor of time.

How much time will it save you? Lets imagine your current project to build an iOS and Android app of identical functionality you are estimating at 6 weeks for each platform. 12 total weeks. Lets say that Xamarin tech gives you a 10% boost (it will be much higher but lets be conservative), that means over the 60 business days, you get back 6. Assume you have 8 hours of work per day and you just bought 48 hours of your time. The basic license which does nearly everything most people need is the Indie license and $300 per platform. Six hundred dollars to buy 48 hours of your time back means the purchase is viable if you value your time at more than 12.50 per hour.

If you value your time less than that, you have bigger problems than which mobile tooling to use.

The truth is the productivity factor is much higher than 10% and the license is good for a year, pick up a couple other projects like this through the year and that number collapses. For me this year I will probably do 4 cross plat projects with Xamarin and my productivity diff is north of 50%. The purchase is a no brainer.

YMMV but for me, there was not 'learning' of Xamarin. There really is no Xamarin framework - there is the mobile frameworks themselves for which there is an almost 1:1 translation. CalculateFoo in ObjC or Java will in nearly every case be CalculateFoo in C#. In the cases where the recommended method is to use a higher level abstraction (like for table data in iOS), the option to use a mirror of the ObjC pattern is there but there is an easier approach available if you choose that.

The key for me was understanding the idiosyncrasies of both Android and iOS and their patterns and then using C# to craft as much reusable code as possible. It drives my approach and I failed to get the re-use level I wanted on my first true cross platform app build, but since I have learned those lessons I have gotten much better at it.

(note: I have yet to use Xamarin.Forms, this experience is based on Xamarin in the past 15 months)