06 Feb 2013

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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03 Dec 2012

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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21 Nov 2012

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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30 Oct 2012

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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16 Oct 2012

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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05 Oct 2012

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

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

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

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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