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...
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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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