softbuilder

The employees almost never knew anything technical, and were often suspicious of nerdy kids like me lingering in the parts section. I remember one time I was building a circuit and needed a .22uF cap. I asked if a .22pF was the same (I was like 10 or 11). Instead of saying "I don't know" the sales guy just kind of stared at the package and then shrugged and said "Yep". My circuit did not work.

I hear people floating the idea of RS reinventing itself as more of a hacker-friendly place, but from an investor's perspective you'd be switching from a giant consumer market to a much smaller niche market. Personally, I think that's a great idea, but I'm not sure you could ever convince investors of that.

For those not already familiar with it, Underscore is a wonderful functional programming library that lets you code in a functional style while insulating you from many of Javascript's quirks.

You make money by charging companies for access to the platform. Charge for access, charge for users, charge per tweet. There are options. This is not a new idea. (See EDI etc.)

For clarity, I see Twitter as having this amazing potential as a message bus for both people, apps, and services. And I feel that potential has been squandered.

I'm unsure if this particular idea is going to pay off. But the general notion of an ecosystem of services hanging off of Twitter seems like the right one to me.

(This is usually where someone says app.net, and I say 'critical mass'.)

I really, truly do not understand Twitter's thinking. I'm sure on someone's spreadsheet of imaginary numbers it looks more attractive to be a billboard, but Twitter had the opportunity to be a true platform. A platform gives you control. It's a longer-term play, but my goodness the opportunities missed. Including this one, which could have been in play years ago.

Whether people will actually use this feature is a whole other question.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sell-simply

Edit: Clarify first P.

I wish more non-technical leaders understood this. It's not that engineers have all of the answers, it's just that we specialize in thinking critically and solving problems. That's useful everywhere, not just with technical matters.

There is a core aspect of hacking/making/doing that Woz demonstrated well and aren't represented by many modern thought leaders in the industry.

1. Any time you're in business for yourself and you don't have a buffer, you're basically out of business. (I keep re-learning this one.)

2. Using a site like this turns you into a commodity. It's structured to be a race to the bottom. There is no substitute for finding your own clients and building relationships with them. That's hard to do and takes time and energy. See #1.

Nowadays I take it as a given that I'm probably wrong, but I start rewriting anyway. Worst case (and most common case) I have to toss the code. But I learn. Plus there's a different place your brain goes when you feel like you control the code vs. looking at it behind glass.

I'm sometimes asked about tech hiring and I keep telling people that technical teams need to be responsible for technical recruiting. No one wants to hear that though.

    account.status = ["paid", "unpaid"][amount_due > 0]

Personally, I found this handy and liked it a lot. Others didn't and now there is this, which isn't bad:

   account.status = "unpaid" if amount_due > 0 else "paid"

  [(not x % 3) * 'Fizz' + (not x % 5) * 'Buzz' or x for x in range(1, 101)]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...