Posts about Startups
37 post37 found
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever
Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vul...
The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste
I have a lot of respect for Geoffrey Huntley. So when I read his blog posts about AI over the past couple of months: “Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you’re screwed unless you take action…” and “The...
Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two
“You can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two” is how the saying goes, referring to the inherent trade-offs in software development priorities. It makes intuitive sense but utterly fails in re...
Lessons Learned Over 10 Years of Bootstrapping Petabridge
As of Monday this week, my company Petabridge turns 10 years old. I’ve been my own boss for longer, but my tenure at Petabridge is nearly 5x my tenure at every other company I’ve founded and at eve...
Frameworkism: Senior Software Developers' Pit of Doom
If you follow me on Twitter / X, you have likely seen several increasingly exasperated tweets from me about a legacy software project from hell. This project deserves its own series of blog posts a...
Has Ruby-on-Rails-Style 'Gem Glue-Gunning' Come to .NET?
In this post we’re going to travel back in time to 2010 - a happier, simpler time for early-stage startup software developers. When Heroku was free and front-end developers hadn’t had a chance to r...
Hate Your Own Work and Ship It Anyway
When talking to members of our team about their projects and taking on more responsibility for their outcomes I will regularly recommend the following:
How to Distribute Roslyn Analyzers via NuGet
Towards the end of 2023 I had some rare downtime and decided to use it to develop a new skill I’ve wanted to learn: leveraging .NET’s impressive Roslyn Compiler Platform to help Akka.NET users be m...
Internal vs. External Accountabilities
One of the concepts that’s commonplace on software development Twitter / Reddit et al is the notion that management is ultimately responsible for everything that’s done by their employees - i.e. th...
DRY Gone Bad: Bespoke Company Frameworks
There are some software development best practices out there that are universally and unambiguously true outside of any specific business context - “use source control” is a great example. These ar...
Beware the Long 'YAGNI'
One of my favorite regularly occurring Twitter arguments is over what should be a simple and uncontroversial question: have you ever had to migrate to a different database in a production applicati...
Reflections on a Decade of Self-Employment
Ten years ago on August 10th, 2012 I wrote “Today I am Leaving Microsoft and Starting my Own Company” and cap-stoned my final day of working for someone else. Since then, I founded two companies:
You Have to Have Skin in the Game
Periodically I receive inquiries from people in the startup community who are exploring an idea or want an estimate on how expensive this particular idea may be to implement - as is common in the e...
The Beginner's Reference Guide to Startups
I was asked by a close friend earlier this week about whether or not I have any references, books, or recommended reading for anyone wanting to get into startups. I don’t have a single source that ...
Akka.NET - One Year Later
My Next Thing: Petabridge - the Future of Distributed Software in .NET
After wrapping up MarkedUp, I took some time off to consider my future. Travel. See old friends. Catch up on rest. During the entire time I was gone I received a steady stream of questions and inq...
The Next Fork in the Road
I had several friends and advisors review this post prior to publishing it; most encouraged me to go forward with publishing it but others cautioned that future investors / business partners may ch...
How to Learn a New Programming Skill
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 p...
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 se...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ab...
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 brus...
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 i...
How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup
The LA startup scene is fascinating, having lived and worked in it for a year now - it's a scene teeming with brillaint people with big ideas, and it's starting to attract some major capital from t...
Announcing XAPFest – A Massive Windows Phone 7 Hackathon in Santa Monica, CA on June 4th 2011
I am pleased to announce something very exciting that Microsoft is doing in my neighborhood of Santa Monica, California: we’re putting together XAPFest, a massive Windows Phone 7 hackathon ai...
8 Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend
I wanted to post this the morning after Startup Weekend Los Angeles concluded in late February, but due to the fact that I along with half my team (Minboxed) came down with the flu the following mo...
What Drives a Startup Founder?
I’ve been working on numerous projects since the year began, and on Sunday night I finally got around to watching The Social Network. My expectation was that the movie was going to be a ...
Getting Started with AppHarbor – Heroku for .NET
I’ve a lot of friends who are proficient Rails developers, many of whom who have left .NET for Rails.
The one piece of consistent feedback that I hear back from them is that it’s the fr...
Quick Interview about BizSpark at DEMO 2010
I'm attending DEMO 2010 this week up in (somewhat) sunny Santa Clara, and during the early parts of last night's social media lounge event some members of DEMO's social media team shot a quick inte...
Powered by Microsoft
I alluded to a change in my employment circumstances in my previous blog entry, and now that I'm an official Microsoft employee as of Monday I feel extremely comfortable making this information pub...
How to Attract Ambitious Employees to Your Company
Today was my last official day at SmartDraw – I’ve worked for this great company for two years and saying all of my goodbyes was bittersweet.
Were it not for the fact that my new employ...
.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
One of the other things I took away from Code Camp was a bit of .NET culture shock. As you can tell by glimpsing around on this blog, I am somewhat enamored with the idea of starting my own busines...
Learning When It's Time to Walk Away from a Project
I wanted to take the time to follow up on some of the additional lessons I learned from my May startup project, some of which I already shared in The Myth of the Single-Person Startup.
This week&nb...
The Myth of the Single-Person Startup
During the month of May, 2010 I took an unpaid leave of absence from work for the entire month and set off to launch my own web-based startup company.
My objective was to take a month off work, s...