This post is about stress.

It's been nearly a year since I started MarkedUp Analytics, and we've come a long way - I've raised money, won the business of some amazing customers, built the nucleus of a really talented team, and developed a product that people rave about. At the previous //BUILD conference, no one had ever heard of us - this time our logo was shown onstage during a keynote. Feels like progress; none of it was easy.

I took my first vacation in two years last week and had a chance to put some distance between myself and MarkedUp for the first time since inception, and I thought a lot about some of the assumptions I had about starting a company when I was just getting started, in particular this section from "The Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders:"

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MarkedUp Analytics’s customers are developers and so are most of the people who work at the company, so I spend a lot of time thinking about and refining my answers to the following two questions:

• What are the lowest common denominator skills and programming knowledge that my...

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I was really surprised with the positive reception 10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer received after it got picked up on Hacker News and a few other places. One theme that became immediately clear to me in some of the feedback in...

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I came across a blog post by Michael Halligan on Hacker News last week entitled “Benefits matter, or why I won’t work for your YCombinator start-up.” As a fledging entrepreneur trying to attract senior engineering talent to my startup, his post bothered me immensely. I spent about a...

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Today on the MarkedUp Analytics Blog I authored a post entitled “Cassandra, Hive, and Hadoop: How We Picked Our Analytics Stack.”

In it I explain MarkedUp’s evaluation process for choosing a new database, how we selected Cassandra, and some benchmarks from our test. If you want to learn...

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Since going full-time on my own startup 6 months ago, I’ve spent a lot of my time recruiting, evaluating, and working with a lot of different developers. My startup, MarkedUp, is an analytics provider for Windows 8 apps (and eventually, other platforms.)

Our technology is sophisticated and difficult even...

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Today was one of those days when it was nearly 1pm before I was free to sit down and make my daily to-do list. There was water damage in my apartment, one of our awesome engineering candidates took an amazing job offer with a top video game studio instead of...

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My regular source of entrepreneurial catharsis is watching Deadliest Catch.

If you've never seen it, it's a Discovery Channel show that follows four-six actual fishing vessels during two different Alaskan Crab fishing seasons a year (King and Snow.) “Bering Sea fisherman” is considered to be the most dangerous occupation...

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I posted this originally on The MarkedUp Analytics Blog, going to put an excerpt here and then link you to the original post.

1. “Microsoft can only win by training consumers to expect consistent behavior, availability, and synchronized data across all of their different devices”

WinRT isn’t just...

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