mwbiz

Agreed, as a shareholder I'd also prefer to have a well rested CEO dedicated to just one company

I have a CS degree and an MBA and overall I feel that the CS degree provides more value. The MBA is helpful for some positions but only combined with my CS background. An MBA or business degree on it's own is not that helpful because the only set of skills you have is business, and nothing really tangible.

I wrote about this some time ago. It's a great way to build web applications after you sort out the little kinks and intricacies. Some tips can be found in this post: http://www.w2lessons.com/2011/05/why-and-how-you-should-writ...

So the $25B number is entirely made up then? There seems to be nothing in the article to justify this number.

Just taking a wild guess that PG is Paul Graham, so any negative comments to the post are irrelevant at this point.

If you have a high monthly revenue the 3.9% is pretty steep. The $60/month for paypal get's wiped out above $6k per month. It may be good for a small, low dollar value businesses, but as one commenter mentioned, net 60 days is BS.

There is no free lunch, payment processors get you one way or another.

If you're writing in JavaScript it's a nice candidate for self memoizing functions. Obviously this is only helpful if you're making numerous requests to the method, a single request still produces a series of recursive calls.

Totally agree. I would also add that the long-term effect of doing more could have been really detrimental here. If they let users share tons of folders this would have made it much more difficult to work with a variety of platforms and devices. If you don't have to put in a feature, don't!

Absolutely agree with you. I'm not sure why this post got 200+ points. Enforced Association is perfect description and it's something that every company must be aware of. I try to get our team together once a month to go out for lunch but that's where it stops. Everyone likes each other and they spend time together at lunch when they want to, not when they're forced to.

For me lunch is a time to stop thinking about work and get out of the office.

If people don't like sitting together at lunch, all you do is force them to think about creative things to say rather than letting them rest their mind and come back to work more productive after lunch.

It's another one of those time where I don't agree with Joel.

We had a similar experience with failure every 3 months or so. We had a small portion of our services on Amazon and it was the main reason we moved it back to our own Servers. I really don't know how they can continue to offer a service with a failure rate as high as EBS. Amazon should be ashamed of themselves for having such a glaring gap in their otherwise strong collection of products.

Thanks Ragan, I completely agree with you and this is one of the first things that I do in an interview.

It is an anti-pattern but it's one that every framework takes advantage of. jQuery and Dojo use it heavily and it can be dangerous if you plan on incorporating it in strict mode. I will note strict mode in the article, thanks for pointing it out.

Also, to teach all this stuff I'd have to write a whole book, this is why I've suggested two good ones that will do just that.

Alex, I'm actually a back-end developer, there is no inferiority complex.

Yes I do, if you're using strict this won't work.

Is that Rob Mauceri speaking in the Video? I saw him at a round table at the Web 2.0 Expo last month and Douglas Crockford and Alex Russell tore him a new ass about Ecma Script 5 strict mode. Looks like he got out of the building alive and actually listened. Cool

You can always setup a new account and start from zero. It's kinda like going bankrupt, that's the American way.

Yeah, too bad didn't tell Google about that one a few years ago.

The calculations are quite tricky given the granularity of data the author is working with. I agree that a marginal cost calulation is a bit more useful as the cost of development staff is not really relevant here as this is an R&D cost. The exception being those employees that work on technologies to sustain the growth of pages and searches and the IT staff to maintain the infrastructure. Without management accounting data the figures will be rough estimates at best.

Perfect, the feedback is much appreciated.

Yep geekfactor is correct. The Scala-Java relationship is not analogous to Dojo-JS and this was not my intention.

gibsonf1 I agree that a functional approach is equally powerful as an OO approach. I focused on an OO aproach as this is what I have the most experience with and this is what Dojo is geared towards.

The intent of the post is to entice server side programmers to learn JS and to take a rigoruous approach to writing JS code. Whether it is functional or OO is irrelevant as long as you write great code, so your point is certainly worth mentioning.

Thanks for the feedback

Thanks for the feedback. I have adjusted the colors to make it more readable, please let me know you still have trouble reading it.

The fact is that you are testing for viability with an MVP. It is not a product but rather an experiment. You are falling into the trap that most people fall into in thinking it is a product when it isn't. The goal is to validate if there is a demand for your solution, not to create "the product". If you create a whole product then you've defeated the purpose of the lean startup. Look at About.me, they had nothing more than a landing page and got thousands of Beta registrations. The fact is that this approach does work. If the value proposition of the product is attractive to your visitor and solves a large problem of theirs. By creating this basic demonstration to test your assumption you are in fact checking if you would be wasting yours and everyone elses time by building it, that is the underlying premise behind the lean startup.

Also, the post does actually suggest a static prototype as one of the options.

Bloggergirl did a fantastic job on these slides. It is amazing that she took the time to go through the site in so much detail. Thanks for sharing the slides as this is good advice for anyone.