26 Mar 2013 8 minutes to read

Live by “Fuck you, pay me;” Die by “Fuck you, pay me”

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...

Read More

20 Feb 2013 3 minutes to read

Migrating from RavenDB to Cassandra

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...

Read More

06 Feb 2013 17 minutes to read

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer

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...

Read More

03 Dec 2012 5 minutes to read

Be Your Own Measuring Stick

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...

Read More

21 Nov 2012 4 minutes to read

Get a Grip

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...

Read More

30 Oct 2012 1 minute to read

5 Key Themes from Microsoft on the Future of Windows and WinRT from the //BUILD Keynote

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...

Read More

16 Oct 2012 6 minutes to read

Thoughts on Recruiting Developers at Early Stage Startups: Determining Who’s Right for Your Company

I posted a little while ago about the job market for technical talent at early stage companies, and I promised a follow-up post on what you should look for in a developer when your company is at a critical, early stage. This is that follow-up ;)

Our company,...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More