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martharotter

186 karma · joined November 15, 2010

Just another nerd
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martharotter··on Ask HN: Where is the best place to find a co-founder
Networking & meetups are great, as mentioned. I am also seeing a lot of people on good tech mailing lists start to reach out as well for co-founders.

Groups like NY Tech Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/), SF New Tech (http://www.meetup.com/sfnewtech/), various regional founders groups on facebook are all places I've seen people connecting to talk about working together on startups.

I don't know how useful it is, but I've also heard mention of Founder Dating (and there are regional meetups for those as well): http://founderdating.com/ Good luck!

martharotter··on Tools of the trade, 2012 edition
Trello (https://trello.com/) - task management

Statsd (https://npmjs.org/package/statsd) + Graphite (http://graphite.wikidot.com/) - monitoring & graphing

Kippt (http://kippt.com) - link and article saving/sharing

Zapier (https://zapier.com/) - like ifttt for business

Heroku's Hosted Postgres (http://postgres.heroku.com) - DB as a service

Also definitely agree with Intercom, Dropbox & New Relic, all great services.

martharotter··on Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?
No, but that sounds like a great fit, thanks! Have signed up so I know when the next round opens up for applications. Thanks, great pointer.
martharotter··on Ask HN: Rejected from YC? Who are you?
We got rejected also. We're a designer & developer in Ireland, both early 30s (one American, one Irish). We've built a platform for designing/building magazines & newspapers once and publishing them everywhere (epub, .mobi, html, ipad, pdf, etc.)

It's called Woop.ie (Write Only Once, Publish It Everywhere), and we have a small number of customers at the moment. We just have a holding page here: http://woop.ie but our demo page was live and allowed magazine creation, issue building, previewing, etc. It got some visitors from yc. Unfortunately guess it wasn't enough this time around.

We'll keep working on it obviously. Considering applying to Brooklyn Beta summer camp, actually, anyone else?

martharotter··on Should I learn Python, Perl or Ruby?
Sites like Scraperwiki work great with Python, PHP and Ruby. Take a look at their examples and see which ones make the most sense to you.
martharotter··on Ask HN: What tech podcasts do you listen to?
The Big Web Show - http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow Founders Talk - http://5by5.tv/founderstalk

I used to listen to a lot of the TWIT / Leo Laporte ones but they have gotten really long & I don't have time for them anymore.

martharotter··on Do we need a women-only tech space?
Segregation is definitely unsustainable, but I definitely agree that mentoring and support groups can make a huge difference.

I've often been the only woman on otherwise all-male teams before and it's never bothered me. But I always appreciated having strong role models who were respected, technical women and open to mentoring and supporting others.

martharotter··on How many tech books do you read per year?
For me the electronic versus paper thing comes down to what I bought the book for.

For a book that I just need to reference occasionally, epub is usually fine. For a book where I'm starting from scratch, learning new things and coming back to the same bits over and over again, I prefer a paper version that I can write in.

Sounds like a cool project though - good luck!

martharotter··on Ask HN: Python 3 or Python 2.7?
Depends what you want to do with it really. If you're planning on using Django or Python Image Library, start with 2.7.

If you're not using any dependencies or frameworks relying on older versions, start with 3.

Either way, as long as you work at it continuously, moving backwards or forwards won't throw you off too much.

martharotter··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2011)
Nomad Editions - New York city area (remote may be an option for this role) http://readnomad.com

Web Developer for Digital Magazine Startup

Nomad Editions, a startup creating digital weeklies for mobile devices, is looking for an awesome web-standards focused HTML/CSS/JS developer to help build our content on top of Treesaver (treesaver.net), one of the most exciting new open source frameworks for digital news and magazine publishing. The developer will be responsible for taking wireframes and translating them into standards-compliant web pages in Treesaver.

We're seeking: - Expertise in standards-based web development with HTML/CSS/JS - Ideal candidate would also have design skills - Interest in working with a very exciting company doing something no one else in the digital publishing industry is doing: making digital content look amazing everywhere

If you're interested or have questions, please e-mail Martha Rotter at mrotter@readnomad.com

martharotter··on Goodnight Zune
I think the best point he makes is at the end: Ballmer is not a product strategist. He is in fact a fantastic salesperson, he closed amazing deals for Microsoft when I worked there.

But he has no business defining product strategy, creating or killing product lines or trying to imagine what the public will want or what's attractive to customers. That stuff should all be left to Bill Buxton.

martharotter··on Airbnb
I am trying it for the first time, I just reserved an amazing-looking houseboat for a week in Amsterdam while I'm there for the Mobilism conference. Can't wait!

However I had tried it before in Paris and New York, and many people's places looked like they usually cater to couch surfers and are now doing the same but charging (often the same amount as a reasonable hotel!).

I think Airbnb has done a good job of curating certain lists (there's a collection of treehouse apartments/houses, for example, and cool, design-y places in London) and I'll probably look at those more than the regular area searches.

martharotter··on Write even when you have nothing to say
Great advice! I find the hardest part is just getting in the zone where I'm not distracted and constantly alt-tabbing to other things.

Ommwriter (http://www.ommwriter.com/) is a great writing tool to keep distractions at bay and focus you on your writing. There's a free version, but the better version is also quite inexpensive ($4 I think).

martharotter··on Happy Hackers Love Whiteboard Wallpaper
I use this in my home office - it sticks on any wall via static and wipes clean. It comes on a roll so you get 10 or 25 giant whiteboards which you can reuse. Absolutely love it.

http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/

martharotter··on R.I.P. Microsoft Zune, 2006-2011
Agreed, I bought two Zunes, a 120gb one and the Zune HD. The devices were fantastic but more than that I love the Zune software.

iTunes drives me crazy, but the Zune software looks like nothing else Microsoft ever created. It's cool, intuitive and works great.

If they had gotten in to that ecosystem a bit sooner it could have been different, but the timing was all wrong.

martharotter··on How can you inspire programmers to work longer work weeks voluntarily?
The best manager I ever had was amazing at this and the reason was simple: he understood downtime and he negotiated.

So when we were trying to ship something and everyone was working late nights and weekends, he'd give us several days off afterwards. Additionally we had flexibility such that I could offer to work a few weekends in a row in exchange for a long weekend a few weeks later.

It was a great system and his employees always respected him for it.

martharotter··on Chile to give 300 startups $40,000
Someone on the program now came to our Dublin OpenCoffee meetup last week to talk about it.

He said that due to the cost of living, he was able to employ some very smart individuals who he wouldn't be able to afford to pay if he lived, say, here in Ireland. And mentioned that other startups were doing the same.

So even if it's not a requirement it happily happens anyway due to economics/cost-of-living/etc which sounds great.

martharotter··on Zune hardware apparently dead, software and services live on
Kind of a bummer - the Zune HD was one of the slickest and loveliest devices I've ever owned. I can't help but think if they had tried to sell them outside of the US they might have gotten a bit more coverage/visibility.
martharotter··on Ask HN: "Please don't use Internet Explorer" message
Implying that the individual's browser is not modern might sound offensive. Lots of people aren't allowed to control which browser or which version they use at work.

I would rephrase it as a feature thing to make it more objective. "You appear to be running IE6 which doesn't support X, so you'll miss out on feature Y of this site. To experience Y, please either upgrade your browser or try Chrome/Firefox or Safari" might be a bit more useful to the user.

martharotter··on Ask HN: How to identify promising entry-level coders?
Agree. It's hard to imagine someone is going to be a great programmer if they've never given any hobbyist or intro coding a shot.
martharotter··on O'Reilly "Geek Culture" ebooks 50 percent off
+1 for "Being Geek" - great read.

Anyone read either "Mind Hacks" or "Performance Mind Hacks?" Wondering if they're interesting/useful.

martharotter··on Kill Blackboard
I thought so too. Actually that might have been more entertaining.

Instead I was left with a "Okay so whadiya gonna do about it?" feeling.

martharotter··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (March 2011 Edition)
Nomad Editions - New York city area (sorry remote not an option for this role) http://readnomad.com

Web Developer for Digital Magazine Startup

Nomad Editions, a startup creating digital weeklies for mobile devices, is looking for an awesome web-standards focused HTML/CSS/JS developer to help build our content on top of Treesaver (treesaver.net), one of the most exciting new open source frameworks for digital news and magazine publishing. The developer will be responsible for taking wireframes and translating them into standards-compliant web pages in Treesaver.

We're seeking: - Expertise in standards-based web development with HTML/CSS/JS - Ideal candidate would also have design skills - Interest in working with a very exciting company doing something no one else in the digital publishing industry is doing: making digital content look amazing everywhere

If you're interested or have questions, please e-mail Martha Rotter at mrotter@readnomad.com

martharotter··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring (March 2011)
Nomad Editions - New York (sorry remote not an option for this role) http://readnomad.com

Developer for Digital Magazine Startup

Nomad Editions, a startup creating digital weeklies for mobile devices, is looking for an awesome web-standards focused HTML/CSS/JS developer to help build our content on top of Treesaver (treesaver.net), one of the most exciting new open source frameworks for digital news and magazine publishing. The developer will be responsible for taking wireframes and translating them into standards-compliant web pages in Treesaver.

We're seeking: - Expertise in standards-based web development with HTML/CSS/JS - Experience with source control (Git or SVN) - Ideal candidate would also have design skills - Interest in working with a very exciting company doing something no one else in the digital publishing industry is doing: making digital content look amazing everywhere

If you're interested or have questions, please e-mail Martha Rotter at mrotter@readnomad.com

martharotter··on Show HN: Instasaver- My latest weekend project
This looks really cool, Craig! Signing up now, fantastic idea!
martharotter··on Tell HN: My local startup hub just launched an online magazine
Well keep up the great work. I'd like to do something similar here in Ireland, definitely, just not sure what kind of frequency makes sense, bi-monthly or so perhaps.
martharotter··on Tell HN: My local startup hub just launched an online magazine
Really love the content, some fantastic and well-written articles in there. It looks great but yes Treesaver would be a bit easier/nicer to read. Would love to see more like this from other startup hubs around Europe, well done.
martharotter··on Ask HN: Any good new podcasts lately?
Build and Analyze (iOS): http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze and The Big Web Show (Zeldman & guests): http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow
martharotter··on Treesaver.js - JavaScript library for creating magazine style layouts
For anyone who is excited about Treesaver and wants to start working with it full-time, Nomad Editions (Treesaver client) are looking for a developer proficient in JS/CSS/HTML.

More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168659 or feel free to contact me

martharotter··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (February 2011 Edition)
Nomad Editions - New York (sorry remote not an option for this role)

http://readnomad.com

Developer for Digital Magazine Startup

Nomad Editions, a startup creating digital weeklies for mobile devices, is looking for an awesome web-standards focused HTML/CSS/JS developer to help build our content on top of Treesaver (treesaver.net), one of the most exciting new open source frameworks for digital news and magazine publishing.

The developer will be responsible for taking wireframes and translating them into standards-compliant web pages in Treesaver.

We're seeking: - Expertise in standards-based web development with HTML/CSS/JS - Experience with source control (Git or SVN) - Ideal candidate would also have design skills - Interest in working with a very exciting company doing something no one else in the digital publishing industry is doing: making digital content look amazing everywhere

If you're interested or have questions, please e-mail Martha Rotter at mrotter@readnomad.com