Minor Technical Difficulties

Speaking At BigDataCamp DC During Fose Tomorrow

C. Scyphers — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:04:50 +0000

Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a lightening talk at the BigDataCamp unconference during Fose. My talk will be an overview of NoSQL technologies, their respective pluses and minuses, as well as where they fit in the enterprise. Hope to see you there.

MapR, HDFS and Forking Code

C. Scyphers — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:51:21 +0000

I was in the exhibition hall of StrataConf talking with the good folks at MapR. During our conversation, the MapR rep said “we’ve rewritten HDFS to optimize it and make it better”. The rest of our conversation is (roughly) below: Me: Okay, you forked the code. That’s going to raise some support issues, as you [...]

Been Away For A While

C. Scyphers — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:30:34 +0000

Things over at RE are heating up. In fact, we’re probably going to be doing a soft launch (read here: an early alpha to select people) in the next week or so. If you’re interested in joining the list, send me an email and I’ll see what I can do for you. Until then, here’s [...]

Idea Factory — Secure Garbage Collection

C. Scyphers — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:30:04 +0000

It’s a fact of law that when you put your garbage on the street, anyone can paw through it to their heart’s content. This can be a problem for two groups of people — celebrities and criminals. General Concepts: Offer a refuse collection service where the trash is not “thrown out,” but rather has its [...]

Day 0 At #GlueCon

C. Scyphers — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:39:44 +0000

Tuesday was sort of a pre-day for GlueCon. I flew out a day early both to try beating jet lag and to learn a bit more from the conference than I otherwise might. Travel Fun I flew on Southwest because, well, it’s cheaper. And I got what I paid for. The flight into Midway was [...]

Business Cards Aren’t Dead Yet

C. Scyphers — Wed, 25 May 2011 02:53:45 +0000

Paper business cards still beat technological alternatives.

Tutorial Day At #RailsConf

C. Scyphers — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:32:25 +0000

Yesterday, Scott and I went up to Charm City to sit in on tutorial day of RailsConf 2011. It was a good enough day. As I don’t know Rails — at all — I went to the Rails for Idiots track. Otherwise known as Rails For Zombies and a live review of the Ruby on [...]

Why Trying To Find A Technical Co-Founder Will Almost Always Fail

C. Scyphers — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:30:42 +0000

Last night, I went to a local “find a co-founder” meetup for RE. A while back, one of the original people helping get RE off the ground left to pursue other options (an amicable split, which is always nice). I went to last night’s festivities to see if there was anyone else suitable who could [...]

A Quandry With LinkedIn

C. Scyphers — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:00:10 +0000

So, I generally believe the people with which you connect on LinkedIn should be limited to people you know, work with and (usually) respect. LI is becoming more and more established as a means of social proof for both potential startup investors and potential employers. There are those who consider the people on LI who [...]

Reason #1453 Why I Don’t Like Apple’s Mobile Platform

C. Scyphers — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:36:19 +0000

I’ve said this many times before (and it looks like I’ll be saying it again) — Apple’s iOS platform is a walled garden. Just like Facebook now and AOL before it, you can only play in the garden if you follow all of Mr. Jobs’ rules. And if they change the rules? Well, you can [...]

Returning To My First Love

C. Scyphers — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:30:30 +0000

Not literally — I’m still quite happily married. I started playing drums when I was six years old. My older brother begged and begged and begged our parents for a drum set and he finally got one that Christmas. Granted, at six I wasn’t Buddy Rich or anything; it took me probably a year or [...]

Idea Factory — Smartphone Cloud Recording

C. Scyphers — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:30:04 +0000

The other day, I saw a news release from the US Department of State about their panic button app intended for pro-democracy protesters in foreign governments to be able to wipe the contacts from their smartphone and prevent the government agents detaining the protester from gaining more intelligence about the protester’s social network. A good [...]

Six Priorities Of Traditional Software Development

C. Scyphers — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:30:20 +0000

When designing and developing a traditional software system (i.e. one that will be installed on an end user’s system, rather than running in the cloud), there are several design goals for a successful project. These goals are: Availability of the system (Availability) The ability to backup and recover the system (Backup/Recovery) The ease of use [...]

How Resumes Are Stored

C. Scyphers — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:30:32 +0000

If you are a job seeker and you go to most job boards these days, you will be asked to do one of three things: Enter your resume information section by section Upload a file containing your resume Open your resume in some other program (Word, vi, Pages, et al), then cut and paste the [...]

It’s Been 7 Startups

C. Scyphers — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:30:35 +0000

When people ask me if Resume Everywhere is my first startup, they are surprised at the answer. Not the fact that I’ve done startups before; rather, that RE is my seventh. Yes, really — 7. Here’s the breakdown: Company Product/Service Dates Result Best! Software Shrinkwrapped Fixed Asset Depreciation Software 1995-1996 Acquired by Sage Software in [...]

RE’s 2nd Pivot

C. Scyphers — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:40:30 +0000

Since Mike has moved on and Scott and I have been looking for a replacement, we have also been closely evaluating our current business and technical model. At this time, we no longer believe it to be feasible within our current level of resources to pursue resume synchronization; we will be changing our focus and [...]

Passing On Founder’s Institute

C. Scyphers — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:30:13 +0000

As mentioned previously, I have been considering joining Founder’s Institute. I was accepted, but I will not be attending. Below the fold are the two primary reasons why, one old and one new. Payment Required Up Front As I commented before, someone requiring you to give them money before they will help your business — [...]

Been Quoted In CIO Update On Xoom Tablets

C. Scyphers — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:47:00 +0000

In the article 10 Reasons To Buy Xoom (And 2 Not To) as compared to an iPad, I talk about the walled garden aspect of the iPad. Xoom is built to be hacked to serve enterprises’ specific needs. Within days of release, message boards were filled with gloating reports of just how easy it is [...]

Considering The Founder’s Institute

C. Scyphers — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:30:09 +0000

Almost everyone has heard of the startup accelerators these days; the most famous of them are Y Combinator and TechStars. If you’re lucky enough to get into one of those programs, you’ll meet with some amazing mentors, learn from some of the best in the business and almost certainly get funded. Good things, you might [...]

#TechCocktailDC It’s Usual Thing

C. Scyphers — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:40:35 +0000

Last night, I went to the DC TechCocktail for the second time. It was fun, much more so than the last meetup I attended. The DC TechCocktail showcases about a dozen local startups, both for exposure’s sake and (ostensibly) for possible fundraising. My experience, however, has been that the events are long on equal parts [...]