schmidtc

To follow up, I started reading Steve Blank's book and it clears up most of the confusion. Specifically that the founders start with a product specification derived from their vision (not focus groups). The Customer Discovery phase is designed to test the assumption that customers exist that want the product. Indeed the business model changes through the process.

We've been trying to start without a product or vision, instead we've been trying to search for the product itself.

Thanks for the feedback. You can checkout the existing homes (below the fold) without signing up, but you have the sign up to access the editor. What would you want to do before signing up?

Thank you! I've been trying to get my head around responsive grids for a while and after using this for 2 minutes I finally "get it".

If this guy works for a firm it would be worth notifying them. A good firm will want to protect it's brand.

Block interest in VIM gets you most of that functionality

I don't think this is in the wild yet, but interesting all the same...

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/151506-self-healing-sel...

Ok, after a day of using it, it gets pretty annoying. Perhaps it's just mental, but it seems to make the new tab slower. I have to wait for animation to load before I can use the tab.

So that works "On Startup" only, not when I open a new tab. Works great in Safari though.

I think this is great. I think I would still follow this up with a quick standup, but it forces everyone to show up prepared. Can you put up some pricing info or define "small teams"? Is this working? or is this an experiment?

Nice. Is there an easy way to set the new tab url in Chrome? Without extensions?

As a developer looking for work I found a ton of startup job opportunities in the NYC area. But I found the companies hiring for a very specific set of skills (frameworks, insert random buzz words) instead hiring for general ability and knowledge. It's an interesting dynamic as the startup has limited funds and limited time. They want someone who can jump in on day one without any learning curve. The smaller startups are willing to wait for the perfect candidate because hiring the wrong person could be a disaster.

In my own startups I've found the developers I know love the idea of working for a startup. But when it comes down to it, they are risk averse and value job security and cash compensation over the freedom and equity that a startup offers.

As a web developer I think its worth spending some time to learn about the various protocols in use. Writing your own HTTP server can be a useful learning exercise and is pretty easy a rudimentary server running.

Also I think a deep understanding of JavaScript and concurrent design patterns will be invaluable over the next 5+ years.

Your search feature doesn't handle "St. Louis" type searches.

Searching for "St." anything returns nil, but searching for "Paul" returns "St. Paul" and others.

Otherwise it's an interesting exercise.

Good write up, especially the concurrency stuff. SQLite is great, I've used it in read heavy production environments for years.

I didn't get it until I watched the kickstarter video, and even then not until the scene of actually building the mosaic out of logos.

At first I thought it was just a cheesy low quality image filter. I also didn't notice the image was 3d movable.

A simple way to convey the idea might be to show the count of each logo color used in the image on the side. Or maybe animate the building of the mosaic?

Neat idea though, I think kids would have a lot of fun with this.

Looks interesting, but it would be nice if they had some kind of documentation on their site. I can't figure out exactly what they do.

interactive web maps...

http://geoscore.com/

Github pages maybe?

https://pages.github.com

You certainly can just write your html/CSS/js and upload it to your favorite static hosting provider. The command line and IT stuff are just tools in the toolbox. Some tools will help you write more sustainable code by managing your dependancies, or running your unit tests, etc. I usually don't bother to invest the time in learn a new tool until it's clear that it will solve a real problem for me.

8 years :-|

ZeroMQ is really good. I think the best introduction to it is this video, http://vimeo.com/20605470 (ZeroMQ is the answer). Just ignore the it was recorded at a PHP conference, the examples are pretty language agnostic.

I think one of the best things about ZeroMQ is there are not external brokers or services that you have to keep running. The entire architecture is captured in your own long running processes.

How much of the Redis API do you rely on? You could write a client library for say any of a dozen data stores that mimics the redis API. Disclaimer: I've only used redis for small side projects, and I'm sure some of the in-memory data structures would be difficult to replicated on disk while maintaining performance.

I use redis mostly for stream processing, keeping the latest few gigs of data in memory while streaming the old data to mongo for archiving.

Thanks, I think you are right about us thinking of the "business plan" to different ways. I'm very much thinking of the business model canvas, and my partner probably thinks I'm talking about a formal plan.

I still think we need to have some kind of model as a foundation on which to build our experiments. Even if that foundation turns to be completely wrong.

Thanks, Those links were helpful!

I'm on the same page when it comes to starting without knowing the end. The part I'm having trouble with is starting without having any clear model of how we "think" it will end. In other words, I feel like we need to establish a clear set of hypotheses (assumptions) before we start designing our experiments to test them.

Right now we are testing assumptions without any sort of business model or picture of how they fit together, and I'm not sure the assumptions we are testing will be relevant once we do start thinking about our business model.

I will read the Steve Blank book which will hopefully clear up some of our misconceptions.

I found the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera to be incredibly helpful

https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

The course was very challenging and I learned a lot in a very short period of time. Highly recommend it.