05 Oct 2012 5 minutes to read

What It Takes to Actually Ship a Piece of Commercial Software

Last week our startup, MarkedUp, hit the first important milestone for an early stage technology: we shipped the first version of our analytics product and put it into the hands of actual end-users.

For those of you who don’t...

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23 Sep 2012 9 minutes to read

Thoughts on Recruiting Developers at Early Stage Startups: Understanding the Job Market

Shortly after leaving Microsoft to work on MarkedUp full time, my founding team and I joined an early stage accelerator here in Santa Monica. We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of value from it so far, and the directors of the accelerator have done a great job helping me prioritize...

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06 Sep 2012 3 minutes to read

Software Engineering Priorities for Early Stage Companies: Put the Team First

Team first.

Earlier this week I made a pilgrimage up to the Bay Area to visit some mentors – I came seeking advice from entrepreneurs who’ve done work relevant to our interests at MarkedUp, mostly to learn how to address some “known unknowns” that have been keeping...

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05 Sep 2012 1 minute to read

ASP.NET MVC4 Gotcha: Embedded Views and Razor Pre-Compilation

In the course of some of our work on MarkedUp, we discovered an interesting gotcha with MVC4, embedded views, and ASP.NET pre-compilation.

A little back-story:

One of the things we did as part of a major refactoring recently was to pull all of our email templates out of the...

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24 Aug 2012 11 minutes to read

Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders

Now that I’m running my own company and no longer speak on behalf of Microsoft or anyone else, I feel like I can speak a little bit more freely about some of the things I’ve observed about people at startup companies over the past couple of years.

I worked with...

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17 Aug 2012 6 minutes to read

How to Setup a Proper Python Environment on Windows

python-logo.pngOne of the things we have to do at MarkedUp on a routine basis is test the live HTTP endpoints for our data collection APIs, and some of the data structures we upload are multipart-form POSTs that contain...

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14 Aug 2012 1 minute to read

New Change in the Windows Store TOS: Any App with the Word “Metro” in the Title is Insta-Failed

I thought this was an interesting side-effect of Microsoft’s decision to surrender on the trademark dispute around “Metro,” so I figured I would reblog this from the official MarkedUp blog.

original link: The MarkedUp Blog - New Change in the Windows Store TOS: Any App with the Word...

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10 Aug 2012 4 minutes to read

Today I am Leaving Microsoft and Starting my Own Company

I’ve spent my last two weeks at Microsoft wondering how I was going to write this blog post.

Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News two years ago. In the Summer of 2010 I was still brushing off the ashes of my first failed startup when I wrote...

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18 Jul 2012 2 minutes to read

Why Front-End Web Development Makes Me Sad, Issue #1092145

I have an internal reporting interface for one of my Windows Phone 7 applications that shows me more or less how much of the app is getting used every day, and I developed the reports using the eternally awesome jqPlot charting plugin for jQuery.

I generate three line plots...

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16 Jul 2012 5 minutes to read

Taking Risks Requires Practice

And patience. This is intended for people who recognize that a need to change themselves, their environment, or whatever and are having trouble getting started.

Until last month, all of the books in my Kindle collection were exclusively technical.

Whenever I travel for work and spend two hours uncomfortably seated...

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