http://blog.dougpetkanics.com Unnecessary insight provided by Doug Petkanics posterous.com Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:07:00 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/one-day-with-android http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/one-day-with-android <p> <p class="p1">The Android vs iPhone battles have raged for a few years now, and it's likely that they won't subside anytime soon. While both sides seem to battle back and forth claiming that they have a larger percentage of the mobile market, the general consensus is that at the current moment Apple offers developers a larger opportunity to monetize through the app store and their integrated payments platform (though <a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/09/21/ioss-lead-over-android-in-app-monetization-is-shrinking/">their lead may be shrinking</a>), but the Android install base <a href="http://www.intomobile.com/2012/11/06/mary-meeker-android-adoption-rate-increasing-six-times-faster-than-iphone/">seems to be growing at a faster clip</a>. It's hard to ignore the Android trend.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Though it may be hard to decide which platform to bet on for the long term, it is clear that right now, if you want to conceptualize and develop products that reach the majority of the mobile market, you need to understand both environments well. There are inherent differences in the interactions, design constraints, and underlying behaviors of the OS. Android can't be this great unknown that you read about occasionally and pretend to understand. &nbsp;For me it was an unknown, so I decided that it was time to pick up an Android device and live within it for awhile.</p> <p class="p2"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2013-01-22/DlEHjzgqnHBHajeAznhjnvqGEehFmbAsiEIJHzzeCEhhCiFrzIJHalmzDxFJ/21_hero_media_1.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="21_hero_media_1" height="380" src="http://getfile8.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2013-01-22/DlEHjzgqnHBHajeAznhjnvqGEehFmbAsiEIJHzzeCEhhCiFrzIJHalmzDxFJ/21_hero_media_1.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://getfile2.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2013-01-22/zGijHoxualFhFtAArHmHCuJqyJrdtnminhrtqlcJmriIlIGylaEGuuhGDoHk/21_hero_media_1.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="21_hero_media_1" height="380" src="http://getfile8.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2013-01-22/zGijHoxualFhFtAArHmHCuJqyJrdtnminhrtqlcJmriIlIGylaEGuuhGDoHk/21_hero_media_1.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <div class='p_see_full_gallery'><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/one-day-with-android">See the full gallery on Posterous</a></div> </div> </p> <p class="p1">Yesterday I went to AT&amp;T and purchased an <a href="http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-one-x-plus-att/?PS=1&amp;cid=sem157p7656&amp;adid=14266990210&amp;gclid=CLGNk868_LQCFWlxQgodEGIAaQ">HTC One X+</a> and added it to my existing plan on a second number. I shared the number with a few people who I interact with frequently and asked them to use it as my primary number for the time being so that I can get the experience of using it naturally as a first resort. Twenty four hours later, I want to share some of my initial impressions around being an Android user for the first time after years of using an iPhone.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Immediately I was humbled by being uncomfortable in a new experience. I took for granted the fact that over the last four years I've used an iPhone every day as an intricate part of my daily interaction with the world around me. I knew every setting on that thing, every customization, and had followed the announcements of every new feature the week that they were announced and made available. That level of time commitment and use created a high level of comfort. In a new Android environment, it was very clearly apparent, that 4+ years of innovation, new features, customization options, had rolled on without the slightest bit of attention paid, and as such, jumping in at this point left me with quite a bit of uncertainty about what to do.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">That being said, initial discomfort or uncertainty does not mean that my experience has been negative. On the contrary, I'm enjoying many things about the device, and am getting used to things very quickly. The large screen, the informational widgets, the nice Google service integrations, and the Play store have all been major positives. I'll share some of my initial thoughts in bulleted form, with the disclaimer that I'll likely discover solutions to some of the negative issues (if they are not in fact real weaknesses of Android) as I get more familiar with the ecosystem - in the meantime this only serves to notify people of some things they'll notice early on transitioning from iOS to Android.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li1">No visual voicemail - back to dialing your voicemail number and listening to terrible prompts.</li> <li class="li1">Informational widgets (weather, sports, stocks, foursquare, etc) give you zero click access to valuable information that you'd otherwise have to launch an app for in iOS.</li> <li class="li1">Google Now has done a nice job of anticipating what information I'm interested in. For example I learned that The OKC Thunder are playing in town tomorrow against the Warriors and I'd consider buying tickets.</li> <li class="li1">Notification overload - I am the guy who can't have a single outstanding badged icon on iOS indicating an unread message, must be at inbox-zero at all times, and hates thinking that there's information out there that he has missed. Well, Android seems to bombard you with notifications in the header that you need to swipe to clear, and for me that's just another chore that I don't need. I should probably figure out how to tune these via settings.</li> <li class="li1">The back button is a completely different nav paradigm than exists in iOS. It frees up in-app real estate for the developer, but creates a more clunky hardware interface for the user than iOS' one home button. I'll have to weigh in later on whether I appreciate the tradeoff.&nbsp;</li> <li class="li1">Users have the option to choose which service/app they'd like to use to accomplish a specific function. This was very annoying to me when I was just trying to listen to an audio note and had to select whether I wanted to use "Music" or "Google Play Music" to play the sound. I don't know - just play the darned 20 second sound clip. I assume this may come in handy in other circumstances though.</li> <li class="li1">It feels like I don't have to type in my password nearly as often as I do in iOS. The Play store seems to trust you that you actually want to install what you say you want to install.</li> <li class="li1">Push notifications temporarily turning on the screen in iOS is nice so you can quickly glance at your phone to see if you're interested. On the Android you hear a buzz, but don't know what's up unless you unlock the phone. This may be a setting, but if so I haven't found how to override it.</li> <li class="li1">No badges on icons mean you have to dig into your notifications screen to find out what's up.</li> <li class="li1">Web and email don't seem to quite snap to your screen size the same way they do on iOS. I'm constantly scrolling around horizontally to read all the content, and there doesn't seem to be a pinch gesture to resize what you're looking at. Or am I just missing it?</li> <li class="li1">Nice job of setting up your contacts from Google + Facebook + other services when you first set up your phone.</li> <li class="li1">It's completely unclear to me how I go about putting music or media onto the massive 64GB of storage that come with the phone by default. It's probably not hard, but there's no seamless iTunes integration like with iOS.</li> <li class="li1">Phone didn't even come with headphones, and at first impression it doesn't seem like the iPhone headphones+microphone work incredibly well with the device.</li> <li class="li1">In just playing with and testing the phone, it didn't ring when I called it half the time, going to voicemail after a couple rings when it displayed full service on AT&amp;T 4G LTE. One call was garbled and the recipient couldn't hear me. This may be an AT&amp;T issue and not an Android or phone specific issue, but it's not a good sign when you're only about 50% success rate on a limited sample.</li> <li class="li1">Tethering is huge! In fact, it was not that much more expensive to add an Android to my plan than it would be to get a MiFi or another mobile hotspot. Instead of shelling out $40+ a month for said base station, just add an Android and tether. A base station with functionality!</li> </ul> <p class="p1">That's all for now. I'm looking forward to begin hacking on Android development a bit, and learning what it's like to really build for one of these things.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/one-day-with-android">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/one-day-with-android#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/JP7v1gTGz30" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:00:00 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-technical-lead http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-technical-lead <p> <p> <p class="p1">I've spent the better part of the past three years learning on the fly and thinking about how to be an effective technical lead at an early stage startup. Whether the role is called a VP Engineering, a CTO, an Engineering Lead, or something else, its aim remains the same: to build both product and team. Responsibilities can include defining and executing on product, recruiting a talented engineering team, building a strong technical brand, evangelizing the company's platform, creating a fun and intelligent engineering culture and environment, forecasting for the company's technical needs in the future, and establishing metrics and criteria for ensuring the the company's technology is delivering and progressing according to business needs.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">While all of these things, and many more, are very important, I believe that there are really three overarching themes that the technical lead of a business needs to be thinking about all the time above all else:</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <ol class="ol1"> <li class="li1">The technical vision of the company</li> <li class="li1">Enabling the engineering team</li> <li class="li1">The engineering culture</li> </ol> <p class="p1"><strong>The technical vision of the company</strong></p> <p class="p1">It is the technical lead's job to set, communicate, and lead the technical vision of the company by example. This includes but is not limited to:</p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li1">clearly defining what is going to be built and when it will be delivered</li> <li class="li1">justifying and communicating why this is important to the business</li> <li class="li1">determining what technologies will be used and why</li> <li class="li1">determining workflows for development including iterations, release cycles, testing practices, deployment practices, code reviews, etc</li> </ul> <p class="p1">Is the team going to rush to the quickest possible minimum viable product and then iterate, or is it going to build quietly for months until it emerges with a hardened solution that's ready to go to market? What tech stack will it use? It's always recommended to use the best tool for the job at hand, but a company that is building using .NET and Oracle from day one is likely going to follow different technical dogma than one using Python and MongoDB. A company doing waterfall development will feel a lot different to an engineering hire than one continuously integrating and deploying.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">The technical lead will make these decisions early on in the company's path, and the practices that they lay down by example amongst the early employees will dictate the future technical direction of the company. And with quite a bit of momentum it may be hard to change course later.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p class="p1"><strong>Enabling the engineering team</strong></p> <p class="p1">After the initial team is established, and all of the roles are filled that are required to get the product to market, I believe that enabling the engineering team is the most important role of the technical lead. They must identify any blockers to progress for the team, and remove said blockers as quickly as possible.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Blockers are tricky because they can come in many forms - an unnecessary midday meeting which interrupts the flow every Tuesday and Thursday, ill-defined requirements from the product side of the house, inefficient processes and lack of automation for requesting and setting up servers, unavailability of healthy snacks around the office, lack of data to validate whether the feature in question is effective or not, etc.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">Team is everything, and when the right bunch is fully enabled with the right equipment, environment, vision, and resources to do their best work, the results are magical. When they are blocked by any of the above, productivity can grind to a halt. As technical lead of the company, you have more power than anybody else to empower your team to be the best and happiest that they can be. Make it your highest priority to do so.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p class="p1"><strong>The engineering culture</strong></p> <p class="p1">I believe that a clearly apparent culture within a company is critical. From observing and living within the culture you can tell who the company is, what's important to it, who will fit in and enjoy working there, and what it might look like when it grows. If a company is devoid of culture, it has no clear identity to those looking to join or work with it, and this obviously can have negative consequences.&nbsp;</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">From an engineering perspective, the culture begins with the technical lead. Is this an engineering team that diligently works together from 9-5 and then checks out? Is it one that grinds through the night and wanders back in to work in the afternoon hours? Is techno blasting from the office speakers or do people quietly work with headphones? Does the team sit together on an open floor or sequestered within their own offices? Do you hold weekly tech talks, brown bags, hack days? Is there 20% time for personal projects? &nbsp;Is it an academic environment that encourages research and publishing? Do you eat lunch together and go to happy hour? Do you break for high intensity table tennis matches or do you reward engineering milestones with prizes and bonuses?</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">You can build a successful engineering team by answering any of the above questions in any way, as long as the culture is consistent amongst the majority (or preferably all) of your team members. When you're working as one team, the culture that you define, prioritize, and maintain will go farther than anything else in attracting a strong team that works together efficiently, productively, and most importantly has fun doing what they do.</p> <p class="p2">&nbsp;</p> <p class="p1">At Hyperpublic I was very lucky to work with <a href="http://hyperpublic.com/about">a team of some of the finest engineers I've ever known</a>, within a culture that was a ton of fun to be a part of and help create. I have no doubt that as a company grows beyond ten people, and branches into multiple teams, the challenges for an engineering lead grow and become more complex. I look forward to learning and adapting to them on the next go round.</p> </p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-technical-lead">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-technical-lead#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/XvCrWs-KmGY" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Sun, 27 May 2012 16:45:17 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/prologue-profiles http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/prologue-profiles <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Screen_shot_2012-05-27_at_4" height="143" src="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/kJcZnRxzwBU37TpCHpKJ0JgvSfahcy4bg8EpvYM7pSe1ohT219YGKGUGZHHt/Screen_Shot_2012-05-27_at_4.42.png" width="499" /> </div> <p><span>My friend Dan Feld, who I&#39;ve known since I was about 6 years old, is working on a really interesting project called </span><a href="http://prologueprofiles.com/" target="_blank" style="">Prologue Profiles</a><span>. It&#39;s tagline is &quot;Twenty-somethings onto something&quot; and its current form is a weekly podcast in which he interviews someone who has given up the normal route through life in favor of trying to create something meaningful of their own. He&#39;s interviewed writers, musicians, designers, entrepreneurs, and this week he </span><a href="http://prologueprofiles.com/2012/05/27/full-episode-005-doug-petkanics/" target="_blank" style="">released an episode in which he interviewed me</a><span>.</span></p><p /><div>In the 14 minute interview I talk about the path through the world of entrepreneurship over the last four years, and address such topics as finding the right business, and the thin line between struggle and success.</div> <p /><div><a href="http://prologueprofiles.com/2012/05/27/full-episode-005-doug-petkanics/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17,85,204);">Give it a listen</a>, and be sure to send Dan any followup questions or feedback.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/prologue-profiles">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/prologue-profiles#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/bbAXWPklP9s" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:24:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-happened-to-jumppost http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-happened-to-jumppost <p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Logo_large" height="378" src="http://getfile8.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/u8T8KxOiyejaYm5hmrAuN8f1QE69kfcgcgGZMgs6RARyohCj7pteLirBaV2C/logo_large.jpg" width="400" /> </div> </p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">&nbsp;</span></p> <div><em>I frequently get emails from people looking to use the JumpPost product that we launched a year ago to help find a new apartment. This post explains what happened to JumpPost and why we aren't running it anymore. In case you weren't familiar with JP, the model was that we would pay vacating tenants $500 to list their apartment with us, if we found someone to sign a new lease on the apartment. Apartment hunters could search in advance, not compete with the craigslist crowd, and not pay a full broker's fee, and vacating tenants could make $500 for doing very little work.</em></div> <p /> <div>When Jordan and I were starting a company we wanted to build a large "local" product. At that time our ideas weren't fully formed yet, but the vague way to describe it would be a Craigslist 2.0. We had studied marketplaces and attempts at better craigslist-type products, and we knew that you needed a unique model to create liquidity within one channel before you could just launch a craigslist with a better UI. So we looked at real estate as the most valuable vertical within craigslist, and came up with the <a href="http://jumppost.com">JumpPost</a> model as our "in". We also knew that we would need a significant amount of capital to go after a huge marketplace, and to attract the capital we'd have to prove our team, product, and revenue generation abilities before we could raise financing.</div> <p /> <div>JumpPost was quite successful for an early stage company in that it was generating revenue right away. And the whole time we were working on it, we were constantly trying to figure out how to expand it beyond just the unique real estate value prop that we were offering. Unfortunately its blessing was its curse in that the model was so specific, that if you added any more categories or even other types of real estate, people would be really confused about what to do when they landed on your site. They wouldn't know why they could earn $500 for listing and showing an apartment, but nothing for listing and selling an old ipod or furniture.</div> <p /> <div>So if we just continued on with JumpPost under the $500 incentive model, it would have likely been very successful if you measure success as owning a real estate brokerage which generates $1000+ profit on almost every apartment that you transact through the site. You have to also be excited about being "on the ground", handholding every deal from start to finish, dealing with multiple parties on every deal, and losing out on a lot of deals you put work into. This can scale into an NYC only multi-million dollar business if you work long and hard at it.</div> <p /> <div>But as Justin Timberlake let us all know: A million dollars isn't cool...You know what's cool....?</div> <p /> <div>We're internet entrepreneurs, developers, hackers, product designers. We want to change the world. We're not real-estate agents. After we proved that we could execute on a local marketplace, build product, etc, we were able to pitch the big vision which was now much more fully formed. Outside investment was raised, and the seeds for <a href="http://hyperpublic.com">Hyperpublic</a>, a local data platform, were planted. The decision wasn't made overnight to just shut JumpPost down. We certainly debated about modifying it, letting someone else run it, rolling the new product under the JumpPost brand, but in the end with the help of our advisors and network, we decided it best to focus on the enormous long-term opportunity.</div> <p /> <div>At JumpPost we were focussed on making money in the first month, and at Hyperpublic we won't be focused on it within the first year. But if we succeed, we'll change the world, and that's what gets us really fired up to work the long hard hours that it takes to run a startup.</div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-happened-to-jumppost">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-happened-to-jumppost#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/2tvJvuHxMC4" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:34:00 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/hyperpublic-developer-challenge-stats-and-rec http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/hyperpublic-developer-challenge-stats-and-rec <p> <p>Last Thursday over at <a href="http://hyperpublic.com">Hyperpublic</a> we launched <a href="http://hyperpublic.com/challenge">The Hyperpublic Developer Challenge</a>. It consisted of two programming problems, one of easy/medium difficulty, and one which was slightly harder. We built it for fun, because we're developers, and we love when there's a fun problem around to work on if we get bored or need a distraction. The response to the challenge was phenomenal. We had thousands of developers from around the world working on the problems, and hundreds submit correct solutions. Here's a summary of the response, the problems, the winners, and some observations.</p> <p /> <div><strong>The Response<br /><span style="font-weight: normal;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/wkJo9iGm0ruaMu2eEeIpl5gWcHwlbplbxeRxC8cQBbcitB3VoILr9mKhZ45E/Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9.32.png"><img alt="Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9" height="292" src="http://getfile2.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/opJGJNR9TSfFEEt5eH0JMWREkTgYwP6JZD2ZDavfk71Vkb69AZgqkUXQ1Fgd/Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9.32.png.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </span></strong></div> <div>To our amazement, 5,759 people landed on our <a href="http://hyperpublic.com/challenge">challenge start page</a>. From there 2/3rds of them, or 3,856, were feeling brave enough to at least look at the first problem. I'm sure it didn't hurt that we were giving away free Dropbox and Github accounts, so even the non-programmers who landed on the page at least wanted to take a look at the first problem. The response peaked out with 400+ people viewing/working on the challenge concurrently.</div> <p /> <div>The first problem, summarized below, proved to be a strong filter. Only 446 people, or 11.57% of people who looked at the problem, submitted a correct response. 4,860 incorrect answers were submitted, meaning that the successful submission rate was under 10%.</div> <p /> <div>Problem 2, the more challenging problem, received 231 correct submissions. This means that of the 446 people who made it through question 1, only 51.79% of people made it through problem 2. There were 753 incorrect submission attempts.</div> <p /> <div>All in all, 4.01% of people who viewed the challenge made it through to completing both problems.</div> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/e7EMC20aCE39CkXMCJ4r6pvGiZ2XidyV5nYYiAackPGQ5Y1YejFFN84zjtNY/Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9.45.png"><img alt="Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9" height="253" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/2DFCKlItkSyz6PqpEy1Aey8FvMkWURQahki5ZRChimNdkNNDMpMfKxCeBBzo/Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_9.45.png.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><strong>The Problems</strong></span></span></div> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><em>Problem 1</em> asked developers to calculate the influence of fictitious users in Hyperpublic based upon the influence of the users which they have added to the system. The data was given as a text file, but it could easily be converted into a 2-D array representing which users added which other users to the system.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">The most common approach was to use the input as a matrix representation of a directed graph. For each user in the input, traverse the graph recursively to sum up the number of users that the initial user was responsible for. Then find the three users with the highest scores, and use them to compute your answer to problem 1.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">While we won't be posting code examples here because we'll leave the contest up for others to try, there are various solutions available around the internet and github, which can be found quite easily be googling/searching github.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><em>Problem 2 </em>assigned point values to various tasks around Hyperpublic and gave 4 users point totals. It asked the developer to compute the minimum number of tasks required in order to reach their exact point totals. This proved a bit trickier, in that many people's first instinct was the use a greedy algorithm in which they always executed the task with the largest point total before moving on to tasks with smaller point totals. This would lead to an incorrect submission and developers to rethink their solutions.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">The best way to write this program for inputs and point values of any size is using dynamic programming. This is analogous to the </span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=coin+changing+problem">optimal solution coin changing problem</a></span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"> which asks what the optimal way to make change for a given amount of money is using coins of various values. It uses a technique called memoization, where you compute the optimal ways to make change for values 1, 2, 3...up to your highest amount, and you use the previously computed values to compute the next unknown values in </span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><em>k</em></span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">&nbsp;attempts, where </span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><em>k </em></span><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">is the number of distinct values of coins.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">The other way common way in which people solved this problem efficiently was by solving 4 different linear equations. There were some one line solutions using Mathematica and Matlab linear solvers.&nbsp;</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">Fortunately, the problem size was limited enough in that a brute force solution would run quite quickly if people really got stuck as well.</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><strong>The Winners</strong></span></span></div> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">From the 231 correct submissions, we randomly selected winners of the following prizes:</span></span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;"><em>Github "Medium" account free for one year -&nbsp;</em></span></span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Norbert Fekete. Norbert hails from&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Mosonmagyarovar, Hungary, and submitted his solutions in C++. He's new to github, <a href="http://github.com/grumpos">so follow him over there</a> and suggest some repos for him to fork.</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;"><em>Dropbox "Pro 100" account free for one year </em>&nbsp;- Brian Barthel. Brian is from Memphis, Tennessee, submitted a C# solution, and runs an independent software company called <a href="http://zoasoft.com">Zoasoft</a>.&nbsp;</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;"><em>Free desk for a month for two hackers to work on their own project at Hyperpublic HQ -</em>&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Martin Czygan. Martin is from&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Leipzig, Germany, submitted a python solution, and since he can't take advantage of a free desk in NYC anytime soon he has graciously <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273331">donated the prize to an NYC based hacker who can use it</a>. You can find him on <a href="https://github.com/miku">github</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/pingmrtn">twitter</a>.</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;"><strong>Other Observations</strong></span></div> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">The most common language that we saw in submissions was Python. We haven't run exact numbers, but eyeballing it, Ruby, PHP, Java, and C++ were the next most common. There were submissions in a wide range of languages though including Groovy, Scala, Clojure, L, Ocaml, C, Javascript, Haskell, Matlab, Mathematica, and others. Haskell in particular was popular among people who self identified as students or researchers.</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Many people who submitted commented that the problems were too easy, and they would have preferred a harder challenge. We think that judging by the number of people who made it through, the number of people who emailed for help, and the number of people who submitted incorrectly, that the difficulty was about right. The majority of responses were very positive in that they said "this was a fun way to kill an hour or two." We wanted the problems to take only an hour or two, and as such I think we got the difficulty right. People got to brush up on their dynamic programming or linear solving, they got to construct a graph, or they got to get their hands dirty with a new language. We think people had fun.</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">The last thought, is that we did this for fun, and we're glad people enjoyed it. We also wanted to meet more developers and make them aware of Hyperpublic. We're working on structuring data around every "local object" in the world, which is a big technical problem. If you're interested in working on this with us, or hearing more about it. Don't hesitate to <a href="mailto:doug@hyperpublic.com">contact me</a>.</span></div> <p /> <div><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">Looking forward to the next programming challenge.</span></div> <p /> <p /> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/hyperpublic-developer-challenge-stats-and-rec">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/hyperpublic-developer-challenge-stats-and-rec#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/KwoFCX92hUA" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:15:37 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-hyperpublic-developer-challenge http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-hyperpublic-developer-challenge <p> <a href="/"></a>Over the past couple of days the team at Hyperpublic has been working on the <a href="http://hyperpublic.com/challenge">Hyperpublic Developer Challenge</a>. It&#39;s a simple programming contest consisting of two problems: an easy problem, and a slightly harder one. It should take a programmer with a CS background 1-2 hours to complete.<p /><div>We love hacking, we love building, and we love puzzles, so we made this for fun. But we&#39;re also hoping that it will spark developer interest in our product and our platform. Anyone who completes the challenge successfully will be entered into a raffle to win a free year&#39;s account at Dropbox or Github. We also have open desks in our new office and we&#39;ll be giving some of them away to developers looking for a home for a month or two.</div> <p /><div>Have fun, and let us know if you have any questions or feedback. </div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-hyperpublic-developer-challenge">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-hyperpublic-developer-challenge#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/e_baoFKq3KY" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 17 Feb 2011 07:30:15 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-is-hyperpublic http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-is-hyperpublic <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/qDNtTKfuTyCRMFy8FtLg2zrSGppVqb01MtdtCTv3cQLmidke2uX6YWq4d63X/Screen_shot_2011-02-17_at_10.2.png.scaled.1000.jpg"><img alt="Screen_shot_2011-02-17_at_10" height="420" src="http://getfile2.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/VYlrGWoyOb9GEw86WsiudR9zC1pw6ucVKzSj8UP9iah5ZXGaDU377tFz9gfv/Screen_shot_2011-02-17_at_10.2.png.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> <p></p><div>As an entrepreneur you frequently get asked what you do, what you&#39;re working on, and what your big idea is. Even your closest friends don&#39;t always know, since over the years they&#39;ve observed all of the &quot;pivots&quot;, &quot;iterations&quot;, and &quot;experiments&quot; that you&#39;ve conducted in the name of finding that elusive product market fit. I&#39;d like to explain what Hyperpublic, the product we launched two weeks ago, is all about, since there is more to the company than appears on the newly minted <a href="http://Hyperpublic.com">Hyperpublic.com</a>. </div> <p /><b>Hyperpublic is a company focused on capturing and structuring local data.</b><p /><div>What does that mean? Well, we look at local data as being any object in the world with a location attached to it. These objects can be people, they can be places (like restaurants, shops, and parks), or they can be things (like the West Elm bookcase in your apartment you&#39;re trying to sell). After we know what the object is and where it is, we&#39;d like to structure and attach as much data to it as we can. This data may be photos, it may be tags that describe it, it may be pricing data if the item is for sale, it may be contact information. The list goes on.</div> <p /><div>After you collect and structure all of this data, there are a lot of things you can do with it. You can browse photos of local restaurants, you can find and hire a babysitter in your neighborhood, you can list all of the great comic books for sale in your city. We&#39;d like to make it available to developers in order to find uses that we haven&#39;t even dreamed about. As such, the Hyperpublic platform will have an open API where developers can not only pull our data to create and enhance local applications, but they can also push objects, tags, and photos back into the system to distribute through the Hyperpublic ecosystem.</div> <p /><div>Hyperpublic.com is the first application built on top of the Hyperpublic platform. It exposes some of the data in the system as a local search, discovery, and curation tool for several big cities in the United States. Add yourself to the site if you&#39;d like to be discovered. Tag yourself with &quot;web designer&quot;, &quot;freelance&quot;, &quot;writer&quot;, or &quot;looking for love&quot;. Browse your local neighborhood and save your favorite places and items into lists to organize your local world. Share your favorite spots with your friends. Post items you want to sell to the things category. You can join by simply emailing a picture of yourself, a thing, or a place to <a href="mailto:add@hyperpublic.com">add@hyperpublic.com</a> from your camera phone. No signup required.</div> <p /><div>Structuring data and location around every single person, place, and thing in the world and becoming a data provider is certainly a large goal, but it&#39;s a goal that our team is incredibly excited about pursuing. We&#39;ll have to solve hard problems involving big data, search, mobile product design, API and platform design, and more. If you&#39;re interested in working with us on these challenges, <a href="http://hyperpublic.com/jobs">I&#39;m hiring</a>. Email me at <a href="mailto:doug@hyperpublic.com">doug@hyperpublic.com</a>, or hit me up <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics">@petkanics</a>.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-is-hyperpublic">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-is-hyperpublic#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/q9w28xJz16s" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:47:14 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/heroku-support-saved-my-launch-day http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/heroku-support-saved-my-launch-day <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="052406_computer_smash" height="195" src="http://getfile6.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/fMQVcgFcM4fbIL6anK441HIlbslJtTOHqYkT5RsCyOjX7VslnbtNHrdoz4R0/052406_computer_smash.gif" width="250" /> </div> <p>The last 72 hours have been a wild ride leading up to the launch of my new site, <a href="http://Hyperpublic.com">Hyperpublic.com</a>. I&#39;d say that I got about 3 hours of sleep last night, 0 hours on Sunday, and maybe I was lucky to get 4 hours on Saturday. Pushing the site live this morning gave me all the adrenaline I needed to carry through the day however, as watching the users, tweets, and data pour into our hyperlocal object database kept me from falling asleep on my keyboard. A great writeup from <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/hyperpublic/">Techcrunch</a> and <a href="http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/hyperpublic-wants-tag-world-around-you">The Observer</a> provided an extra boost of momentum.</p><p /><div>We got quite a bit of traffic, and thanks to <a href="http://heroku.com">Heroku</a>, the instant deployment and scalability Ruby application hosting service, we were able to handle all of the activity without a problem. The last thing you want to worry about on launch day is keeping the site up, and instead you want to be supporting your users and getting their feedback. After a few months of building and a momentous sprint at the end to get launched, I was very excited as we were nearing COB here on the east coast and traffic was starting to level off indicating that I would be okay to finally get some rest.</div> <p /><div>But that was not to be, as anyone who&#39;s ever launched a web product before knows, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (ATCGWWGW). The site went down around 5pm with a few hundred active users on it.</div> <p /><div>There was no evidence, no error, no log message to indicate what the problem was. I tried everything I could think of to get it back up with no success. That&#39;s when we reached out to the aforementioned Heroku to see if they could help diagnose the issue. </div> <p /><div>I filed a ticket with support hoping to hear back. Sure enough a few minutes later I got an email response. After a quick exchange we were on IM. A few minutes later my contact had the database team looking into the issue while he worked with me to help diagnose it at the application level. After about half an hour we found out that the database drive failed and needed to be switched out. They made the change, and within minutes Hyperpublic was back online.</div> <p /><div>Anyone reading this may first react that this was Heroku&#39;s fault in the first place. Sure it was horrible that my app was down for an hour on launch day, and I would have preferred that there was no problem with our database. But as mentioned before, ATCGWWGW, and I&#39;m damn glad that I had Heroku at my back helping to diagnose and fix the issue, as opposed to having to go it alone with my own server or unsupported hosting. </div> <p /><div>Instant, personal, realtime, friendly, and free support more than makes up for the occasional glitch in service, even if it occurs on a launch day. Once again, thank you Heroku.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/heroku-support-saved-my-launch-day">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/heroku-support-saved-my-launch-day#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/SNDdhJYddJw" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Sun, 05 Dec 2010 07:08:00 -0800 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/advice-for-college-computer-science-students http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/advice-for-college-computer-science-students <p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2010-12-05/GzGqxgpAdevxsjcaDJGErwuFBwwwFxBxJvsIvthawsCjsHeyjccogegBpxml/Screen_shot_2010-12-05_at_10.10.10_AM.png.scaled1000.png"><img alt="Screen_shot_2010-12-05_at_10" height="372" src="http://getfile4.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2010-12-05/GzGqxgpAdevxsjcaDJGErwuFBwwwFxBxJvsIvthawsCjsHeyjccogegBpxml/Screen_shot_2010-12-05_at_10.10.10_AM.png.scaled500.png" width="500" /></a> </div> This past Friday I took part in a panel at Penn's computer science department designed to help students figure out what options are available to them career-wise post graduation. The panel was excellent and included representatives from big tech companies, big finance companies, graduate research programs, startups who had already grown and had a successful exit, and early stage founders such as myself. A lot of great advice was handed down through the Q&amp;A session in particular, and I figured it would be good to summarize some of the best advice for college computer science students who are interested in entrepreneurship.</p> <p /> <div><strong>Build a web presence</strong></div> <div>This was echoed over and over again. One of the best parts about college is that you aren't burdened by a nine to five job, and you actually have time to work on projects. In many cases, you can actually receive credit for such projects. Use your senior design project, your independent research projects, and even project based homework assignments to enhance your web presence. Spend a little extra time putting up a simple web site to collect and show off your work. If appropriate, open source your work on github and contribute to active open source projects. Start a blog to document your entrepreneurial endeavors and instincts.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Whether you're looking for a job at a startup, or elsewhere, simply pointing to your web-based project repo or your github account will be 10x more effective than emailing over another one-page resume.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Learn systems - take the hard, project based classes</strong></div> <div>Operating Systems, Databases, and Networking should all be required for anyone looking to build applications. Why they are sometimes electives are beyond me. Take these classes, work through the projects, and what you gain in experience will pay off for your entire career.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Get comfortable with a scripting language</strong></div> <div>Many good CS programs eschew practicality in favor of teaching the fundamentals and core concepts. This is a good thing as the current popular languages will go out of style at some point, but the core concepts never will. But just because the CS departments may teach you Java or C++ doesn't mean that you are stuck programming in them forever.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Many startups use scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP, as well as the accompanying popular web frameworks that go with them. These languages, although not the most performant, contain great high level standard libraries allowing you to accomplish many useful tasks in just one or two lines of code that would otherwise take 30 in C++. You can easily and quickly write scripts to solve many of your problems, and you won't have to worry about complicated compilation or deployment setups. Spend time learning and using one of these languages for your senior design or independent research projects if your program doesn't use them in any of your classes.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Graduate</strong></div> <div>If you start a company during college, it might fail. Most startups do. What you learn at college, in and out of the classroom, will benefit you your entire life. Most people don't look back on college and regret staying the full four years.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Sub-matriculation can save years off of the immigration process for international students, which can be especially helpful in working towards entrepreneurship</strong></div> <div>This was a great practical piece of advice that apparently many undergrads aren't aware of until after the fact. I'm not familiar with all of the immigration laws and processes, but the gist of the advice was as follows:</div> <p /> <div>With a bachelor's degree you need to be sponsored by an employee to remain in the US, and you likely have to stay with that employee or find another big company sponsor for a period of 7+ years while you work to earn your green card. It's hard to make an entrepreneurial move in the US during this process. However if you sub-matriculate into a 1 year master's program, then you cut the process from 7+ years to about 1.5 years. If you have the flexibility to spend one more year on campus, it can be worth it just in the immigration benefits alone.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Getting funding for your college startup can be difficult if you go the traditional VC route, but there are options</strong></div> <div>Programs like YCombinator, Techstars, and Dreamit are perfect for recent college grads. You have a smart and scrappy team, no overbearing life commitments or costs, and the ability to relocate to the best possible environment to launch your company. Big-time investors will look for proven leadership teams, past experience, and market intelligence and connections when making million dollar investment decisions, and this likely doesn't describe the team comprised of your dormmates. But the accelerators mentioned above are looking for smart teams working on hard problems. This is right up your alley, and they'll lead you to the connections you need later.</div> <p /> <div>The above is just some of the great advice that was given. If you are a college student and you have questions about working at a startup or entrepreneurship, email me anytime at <a href="mailto:petkanics@gmail.com">petkanics@gmail.com</a>, or hit me up on twitter <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics">@petkanics</a>.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/advice-for-college-computer-science-students">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/advice-for-college-computer-science-students#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/Wd9tYftO-io" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:55:35 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/making-a-post-request-to-a-rails-api-endpoint http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/making-a-post-request-to-a-rails-api-endpoint <p> Here&#39;s a rare super-technical blog post. I spent enough time struggling with this seemingly simple problem today, that I felt I should share the answer.<p /><div><b>The problem: </b>You&#39;re designing a REST API for your Rails app. You want to let people insert records in your application via a POST request. However they submit their POST request via their 3rd party application, and your app throws an InvalidAuthenticityToken exception. Why is this happening?</div> <p /><div><b>The background:</b> Ruby on Rails stores an authenticity token for each session, and submits this token as a hidden form field in any POST request upon a form submission. It does this to authenticate that the request is actually coming as a form submission through the web site, as opposed to a random POST request generated from CURL or another tool. A 3rd party application developer certainly doesn&#39;t have a token assigned and therefore can&#39;t submit this via their API request.</div> <p /><div><b>The solution: </b>Rails only checks for the authenticity token in the case of a form submission. If you submit your data as content-type application/xml or application/json, then the token is not required. As a result you can set the content type appropriately and encode your input parameters as either xml or json. See the below gist for a ruby example.</div> <p /><div><p><a href="https://gist.github.com/548731">https://gist.github.com/548731</a></p></div><p /><div>It was hard to find this solution via google. Anyone know a smoother solution? Does the API designer generally disable forgery protection in this scenario on POST endpoints for inserting data via an API? Let me know in the comments or on twitter <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics">@petkanics</a></div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/making-a-post-request-to-a-rails-api-endpoint">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/making-a-post-request-to-a-rails-api-endpoint#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/5OKTvxlFSNM" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:48:15 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/quora-as-a-blog-subsidy http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/quora-as-a-blog-subsidy <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Screen_shot_2010-08-19_at_2" height="104" src="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/dsAnKdYP6k7NU8tbhMdWKle7gDJ6oG1J2XfEf5zbxrZyWFFGXh3vKrOHCqHQ/Screen_shot_2010-08-19_at_2.46.png" width="238" /> </div> <p>There&#39;s been a lot of buzz lately about <a href="http://quora.com">Quora</a>, the question and answer startup from ex-facebook employees Charlie Cheever and Adam D&#39;Angelo. The site has done an amazing job of quickly building up a strong community of users including many experienced startup founders, investors, and respected members of the tech ecosystem. I read <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchmark-invests-at-86-million-valuation/">an interview with the founders</a> where they explained that they didn&#39;t exactly see it as a question and answer site that they were building, but instead it was more of a blogging platform where you are writing to an audience who&#39;s already opted in to read about what you&#39;re writing.</p><p /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex;"> When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say “there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it’s going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this.&quot;</blockquote> <p /><div>This struck a chord. If you&#39;re looking for an audience for your writing, previously you would post to your blog. A few people might be subscribed. If you share a link to your post across your social graph, maybe 100 people will read your post. If it gets picked up by an aggregator or social news site, then maybe a few thousand people will read it. And if all of the above happens and you really hit the SEO jackpot on a previously unfulfilled popular search query, then you may get thousands of readers from search over time. But of course that all begins with an original creative idea.</div> <p /><div>Now consider the case of writing on Quora. The site has a large audience, with many followers on particular topics such as &quot;startups&quot; or &quot;venture capital.&quot; There are plenty of unanswered questions, and if you happen to have some valuable information to contribute in answer to someone&#39;s question, you are almost guaranteed that what you write will be of interest to at least that person. And as you&#39;re taught very early on in school, if you have a question you should ask it, since someone else probably has the same question. Chances are many people are interested in what you have to say. Your writing is immediately distributed to a list of topic followers, and if what you said is really insightful, it will get voted up and bubble to the top of the answer listing.</div> <p /><div>There are many reasons to write a blog - writing helps formulate your ideas, you create a personal voice within the greater community, and active discussion follows from intelligent posts. In Quora, all of these advantages are maintained, with the added benefit of a built in audience. So this prompts the question: is your time better spent writing a personal blog, or answering questions on Quora?</div> <p /><div>I suppose there are two main advantages to a personal blog: If you want to write about a topic where there is no existing question on Quora then you have a place to do so, and on you blog you can include personal branding around your writing. On a blog you can add pictures, video, and other media to your post. However it would be nice to subsidize your blog content with your own Quora answers as well. When the Quora API is available I&#39;d like to write an importer which optionally autoposts Quora answers as blog articles with the question as the title of the post and the answer as the body. This would create a nice steady stream of blog content with the addition of distribution of your voice to the Quora audience. Two birds with one stone. </div> <p /><div>Now to figure out how to reduce the SEO hit on duplicate content...</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/quora-as-a-blog-subsidy">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/quora-as-a-blog-subsidy#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/dgoHhx7Sk4o" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:33:21 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-internet-never-sleeps http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-internet-never-sleeps <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="The_city_that_never_sleeps" height="318" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/D6JwJjG37dPKuZyJBusCRZ2RgOgi7olWwRtdw7Ha999ZTmVEFSoM3HH1nMyd/the_city_that_never_sleeps.jpg" width="400" /> </div> <p>When people ask me to describe my regular workday, I usually start off by mentioning that I spend from about 7:15-7:45am &quot;catching up with the internet.&quot;</p><p /><div>You see, it seems as if this post-web-2.0 internet consisting of realtime, social, and mobile is an organism that never stops moving. It&#39;s constantly spewing off news stories, tweets, startup launches, blog comment discussions, and <a href="http://youtube.com/user/oldspice">genius viral campaigns</a>. Not only is there a 24-hour news cycle, but there&#39;s a 24-hour discussion cycle amongst my friends, my colleagues, and people whom I aspire to one day become my colleagues. And there&#39;s something to learn from all of it.</div> <p /><div>So during my waking hours, even though I don&#39;t spend every minute working, I still try to spend as much time as possible absorbing. It&#39;s not that hard to stay current on the pulse of the internet because I&#39;ll either catch an update on twitter, hear someone in our workspace talking about the latest controversy, or get an email asking me what I think about the hot new datastore. But when I sleep, the internet keeps moving forward. The debates of the day ramble on late into the west coast hours, and intelligent people contribute valuable information to the general collective knowledge base. And it really burns me up inside to feel like I&#39;m missing out.</div> <p /><div>Am I missing out? In the grand scheme of things probably not. If I don&#39;t hear about news that broke 6 hours ago while I was sleeping, then it probably wasn&#39;t important enough to be worth knowing anyway. But still, it&#39;s hard to tell what&#39;s worth spending time on and reading in the morning, and what&#39;s not worth the 10 minutes that could be better spent elsewhere.</div> <p /><div>There are a number of services out there which try and recommend worthwhile content to you based on your past habits, topics of interest which you&#39;ve tagged, and the influence of other people like you in the system. The smart folks at <a href="http://Parse.ly">Parse.ly</a> are working on content recommendation system like this, as are the bright minds at <a href="http://pinyadda.com">Pinyadda</a>, among countless other startups. If these services can truly recommend useful content, and more importantly do it in realtime, then it will be interesting to see how they turn out. I think it may be overly optimistic to expect that the realtime aspect will be effective, so instead I would like to recommend another approach: curated personal daily briefings.</div> <p /><div>When President Obama gets up in the morning, he doesn&#39;t even have to ask, &quot;What&#39;s going on?&quot; There&#39;s already a large team of people who&#39;s sole task it is is to provide him with a briefing on every area of governance that he&#39;s concerned with, and they&#39;re all waiting and ready to give him a report. I&#39;d like an analogous team ready to give me a briefing on what&#39;s going on, as well as to tell me what is worthwhile to follow up on on my own. </div> <p /><div>Sounds like it&#39;s pretty far fetched, eh? Maybe not. Consider that I&#39;d be satisfied with one person very similar to myself, a good friend and fellow NYC startup hacker-founder perhaps, who happens to be paying attention to the internet during the 12 hours that I&#39;m not, giving me a 10 minute briefing first thing in the morning. I&#39;d be happy to return the favor for him during the time he wasn&#39;t paying attention. We&#39;d read similar news, be interested in similar topics, and follow similar sources on twitter. Now, with just two people playing this role there&#39;d definitely be gaps when we&#39;d both miss something, but what if there were 4 people and we only had to report once every other day? What if there were 10 people? 60 people? Each person would be responsible for creating a curated update of the past 12 hours once a month to contribute to the group. Seems reasonable to assume there may be 60 like minded people in the same ecosystem looking to benefit from these updates.</div> <p /><div>Now what if there was no need to organize a group like this at all, and instead there was a service that you could pay for these on-demand updates. Maybe I wouldn&#39;t subscribe individually to pay out of pocket (I probably would actually), but it would certainly be beneficial for a startup to pay for this for each of their employees. The productivity gains would be tremendous by eliminating the need for every individual to filter through all the content on their own. A service could deliver updates to subscribers via podcast, via email, via personal phone call, and it could be customized to each person based on their interests and sources of preference.</div> <p /><div>I haven&#39;t taken much more time than it took to write this to think through everything, so with more thought it could obviously be tuned. But it seems like a curated wire news service for niche groups based on their ecosystem and preferences would at least be useful, if not profitable.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-internet-never-sleeps">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-internet-never-sleeps#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/BuXjZPXrqDM" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:23:40 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/key-takeaways-from-the-facebook-effect http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/key-takeaways-from-the-facebook-effect <p> <div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/yRuJ1Ab53ZBKfJxvMAdMlhDScRHX6MDssMPk4imJFfh43TXDYPTqMCWTKUpY/Screen_shot_2010-07-01_at_11.2.png"><img alt="Screen_shot_2010-07-01_at_11" height="156" src="http://getfile4.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dob/UMBguVuowejOc5RknQlZsk9FBpXtQnaCGzV6Awt5MsbEz0CXF5yXLgmtVL8T/Screen_shot_2010-07-01_at_11.2.png.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> <p><span></span><span></span><a href="/"></a>I recently read David Kirkpatrick&#39;s new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112">The Facebook Effect</a>, which chronicles the history of Facebook from the pre-creation days in a Harvard Dorm Room to the 400 million user platform and advertising behemoth that it exists as today. It was a very pro-facebook, pro-Zuckerberg account as compared to much of the media coverage that has been given to Facebook over the years, and while it points out the mistakes they&#39;ve made along the way, it generally gives the young founders the benefit of the doubt. Overall, I found the book interesting and worth the read simply for the Facebook story, but from an entrepreneur&#39;s perspective, there were three key takeaways for me that will shape the way I think about building <a href="http://jumppost.com">our current company</a>.</p><p /><div><b>1. Ride a big theme</b></div><div>Shortly after the founders experienced the early success of Facebook on their campus, they realized that they were onto something big. But their goal was never to build a business that had one product which was an intercampus social network. Their goal was to increase sharing in the world. They felt that by making the world a more open place, they would make it more transparent, bring people and cultures closer together in the global ecosystem, and as a result it would be a better place. Their business wasn&#39;t based around selling one product or even one feature within a product as some businesses are. Their goal was the change the world.</div> <p /><div>By riding this enormous theme of sharing and openness, Facebook was able to address a market of almost every person on the planet. Sure they needed a product which would facilitate their themes, and they had a great one, but they were really starting from a point of almost limitless growth potential.</div> <p /><div><b>2. Timing is critical</b></div><div>You often hear people say that they had the idea for Facebook before the launch of Facebook. And sometimes in tech circles you even hear people say that they built a Facebook style service before Facebook but it never caught on. Well here&#39;s some news: lots of smart people spent lots of time and money building Facebook style social networks long before Facebook even launched. And some were actually moderately successful. However many just didn&#39;t have the timing that Facebook had and the world wasn&#39;t ready to embrace a global social network yet.</div> <p /><div>What made their timing so accurate? There were a couple of contributing factors including people&#39;s willingness to accept transparency online, proliferation of broadband internet, and the rise in popularity and availability of cheap digital cameras. </div> <p /><div>Companies that created social networks before broadband internet had a hard time convincing their users to wait around for endless page loads and no photos. Facebook users spend a tremendous amount of time on the site because they can keep clicking from link to link, from photo to photo, and get instant satisfaction. Try that before broadband. </div> <p /><div>Social networks that launched before people were comfortable enough with the internet to put their information online had a hard time getting people to use their real names and information. Facebook only let users use their service with their real name and identity, and therefore there was an enforcement on the site that you couldn&#39;t misbehave or your reputation would suffer. In 2001 people were scared to enter any information online, but in 2004 people were ready and the timing was right.</div> <p /><div>The Facebook photos feature was really the first application built on top of the Facebook social graph, and it was a gamechanger for the company due to the amount of time that users spent on the site after the launch. But photos on other networks just weren&#39;t popular until everyone had a digital camera with which to take the pictures. 2004 was probably one of the earliest years that you could expect your average college student to possibly own a digital camera. And if they didn&#39;t own one, they could buy one for a couple hundred bucks in order to join in the facebook photo frenzy.</div> <p /><div>When thinking about your own business, you need to look around and leverage the emerging trends (or even better yet the trends that are just about to emerge), and use them against existing, slow moving competition. Look at recent changes in the world and technology and take advantage of the latest ways that people are spending their time and money.</div> <p /><div><b>3. Product vision is key and needs to be protected</b></div><div>Mark Zuckerberg really was a product visionary. He somehow knew what users would want, before they even did, and he was almost always correct in his predictions. The protection which he gave his vision was paramount. He was endlessly harassed by investors, officers of his company, and even the public at times to consider major changes, but he fought them off hard and committed to building the product that he wanted to build. </div> <p /><div>Ben Horrowitz wrote yesterday in his <a href="http://bhorowitz.com/2010/06/29/why-andreessen-horowitz-invested-in-foursquare/">discussion on why they funded Foursquare</a> that &quot;<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">The only thing better than the CEO being the <em style="background-color: transparent; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-color: initial; font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">keeper </em>of the vision is the CEO being the <em style="background-color: transparent; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-color: initial; font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">creator </em>of the vision.&quot; Facebook had this CEO with the right vision, and he knew never to compromise the vision or the product for short term wins. If he had, Facebook would likely be chock full of banner ads and part of the Rupert Murdoch empire.</span></div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/key-takeaways-from-the-facebook-effect">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/key-takeaways-from-the-facebook-effect#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/hF3K05nz5hY" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:27:49 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/why-hacker-angels-is-a-great-idea http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/why-hacker-angels-is-a-great-idea <p> I was really excited to hear recently about a new collective of investors known as <a href="http://hackerangels.com">hacker angels</a>. Their simple web site describes the group as:<p /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex;"> <span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">an informal association and not a fund. <br />If inclined, we may provide feedback, advice, <br />mentorship, hacking, investment and/or serve <br /> as advisors or independent board members, <br />on an individual basis.</span></blockquote><p /><div>While their web site may be understated, their accomplishments are not. They&#39;ve been the developers and entrepreneurs behind some very successful web products, and they&#39;re the exact type of mentors that young hacker entrepreneurs need in the early stages of their business. This group of guys will not only be able to provide investment to the companies that they work with, but also invaluable advice about how to go from product to business.</div> <p /><div>I predict that they will have success in backing very smart hackers, very early on in their careers. While your average recent MIT graduate may be intimidated by traditional finance focused investors, they&#39;ll be able to relate easily, and therefore trust the hacker angels. Fred Wilson has written about <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/vcs-who-code.html">VC&#39;s Who Code</a>, and the great perspective that they provide in later stage VC deals. I imagine that the hacker angels will provide a similar barometer on early stage financings.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/why-hacker-angels-is-a-great-idea">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/why-hacker-angels-is-a-great-idea#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/UYlpCROL5oE" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:12:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/who-i-want-to-work-with http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/who-i-want-to-work-with <p> <p>Things over at <a href="http://jumppost.com">JumpPost</a> have been moving very quickly, and we're excited to be making our first full time hire. We're looking for a lead product designer, and the full job post can be found over at <a href="http://jumppost.theresumator.com/apply/">TheResumator</a>.</p> <p>We're a product focused company, and as such our product designer will play a key role in the success of what we're building. Since I'll be working closely with this hire every day, I figured now would be a good time to declare who I want to work with in an ideal world outside the guise of a formal job post.</p> <p>It goes without saying that our product designer should have a great sense of design. Show me what you've designed before, show me that you've created great user experiences, and show me that you go the extra mile to really take ownership of the full product experience from beginning to end.</p> <p>You should not only be able to think in terms of product experience, but you should be able to implement your designs as well. I can do all the back end coding and get you the data that you need, but you should use your HTML, CSS, and javascript skills to make the design a reality. Implementation and execution are everything.</p> <p>You should be fearless. Designing for the web is one thing, but you should also jump at the opportunity to switch gears and work with UIKit to design for the iPad, work with FBML to distribute our listings into Facebook, and design widgets to be embedded across the web. We're thinking a lot about distribution at JumpPost, so all environments are fair game. These skills aren't required in advance, but you should have the guts and confidence to work with us to learn them as required.</p> <p>One of our greatest strengths as a young company is that we have big ideas and we build quickly. I'm far from a brilliant programmer, but I have confidence in my ability to build whatever it is that we dream up. If you feel the same way about yourself as a product designer, I'd love to talk to you. <a href="http://jumppost.theresumator.com/apply/">Check out the job post</a>, and get in touch.</p> <p> </p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/who-i-want-to-work-with">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/who-i-want-to-work-with#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/XD3VMJ0-hRU" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:46:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-long-until-my-prototype-is-ready http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-long-until-my-prototype-is-ready <p> <p><span style="color: #424037; font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><em style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">This post is part of the <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series" style="color: #bc7134; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Nontechnical Founders Series</a> - a set of posts aimed at helping would be nontechnical startup founders get answers to their questions around the technology side of starting a company.</em></span></p> <p>In previous posts I've written about collecting the right resources in order to launch an internet product. I covered <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder">skills your technical co-founder or contractor need to possess</a> and <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod">what technologies they should be comfortable with</a> in order to move quickly and create a solid foundation from which to grow your company. The next logical question is, "How long will it take the team to build the product?"</p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Underconstruction" height="300" src="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2010-06-02/jbuoCDjJAdvhBktdqxmzCzrwuIDFkGrzxGAbuFvttvHlFAAbcAmIBkkdjBjA/underconstruction.gif.scaled500.gif" width="300" /> </div> </p> <p>As with everything, the answer is that it depends on what type of product you're creating. Let's assume that you're building the usual data driven web application, and that there's not any core deep technical IP requiring unending research. Let's also assume that the product is being built by one core developer (either your technical co-founder or your hired contractor) with rough competency in all areas of the development stack, and a contract designer. </p> <p>The short answer is that you should push for your product development to move quickly. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of releasing early and often, and as such, it's not necessarily important that the "release" version of your product contain every single feature which you've been dreaming about for months. As soon as the developers have a product that does <em>anything, </em>they should push it live so that early users can begin poking at it. How long should this take in the case of the basic web app? Probably about a week for an undesigned version, and probably about 2-3 weeks for a designed version. To give you an idea of the scope of what you can expect in this timeframe, let's take the following example:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>You're building a facebook clone. In just a couple of weeks users should be able to sign up, create a simple profile with a profile photo, and add and remove friends. On one hand that doesn't sound like a facebook clone at all (no photo albums, tagging, chat, applications, etc), but on the other hand think about the basic functionality and what's been accomplished in just a couple weeks. After this base is in, it's easy to add features one by one every couple of days. But if you never released this basic functionality after week one, you wouldn't have any early users (even if it's just your team, friends, and family), and you wouldn't be getting any feedback about how to best move forward. </em></p> <p>Okay, so a couple of weeks to launch a simple prototype that does <em>something</em> but nothing <em>interesting</em>. In the case of the facebook clone, maybe you'd like to get to the point where people can write on one another's walls, create albums, and tag their friends? At that point you'd feel comfortable "launching" to the world.  How long does it usually take to iterate to an <em>interesting</em> point? </p> <p>It shouldn't take longer than 3 months. I arrive at this rather rough estimate by looking at the startup accelerators as good examples. Programs like <a href="http://ycombinator.com/">YCombinator</a>, <a href="http://www.techstars.org/">TechStars</a>, and <a href="http://www.dreamitventures.com/">DreamIt</a> generally run for about 10-12 weeks, and at the end of the program most teams have an <em>interesting </em>product to pitch to the media and investors. If these programs have learned through years of experience that most consumer web applications can be built and demoed in under 3 months when the founders buckle down and get to work, then this is what you should shoot for yourself if you're launching a similar product. If you are using an agency instead of an in-house team, expect development time to be 2-3 times longer. This is due to the overhead of communication, going back and forth with changes over the span of weeks instead of hours, and the inevitable second guessing that occurs when you have one party thinking and the other party blindly responding.</p> <p>If you want to move fast, then I would like to emphasize one key lesson I've learned: release your product as soon as possible. Immediately. Don't even wait for it to work fully. When you keep your product behind closed doors, it tends to fester. You spend days or weeks debating key feature decisions with your team, and you use unfinished features as an excuse to delay launch. Compare this to a simple product that is out in the open being used by actual customers. If you feel embarassed that they're not experiencing the complete product in all it's glory, then you'll race to enhance the product every single day. You'll know what the most pressing need is, and you'll get it implemented quickly to create a better experience for your users. Your product will grown organically instead of in a contrived way, and you'll know very quickly what's important and what's unimportant.</p> <p>Good luck, and get to work.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-long-until-my-prototype-is-ready">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-long-until-my-prototype-is-ready#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/VZKPGTX70WY" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Mon, 03 May 2010 19:43:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod <p> <p><span style="color: #424037; font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><em style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">This post is part of the <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series" style="color: #bc7134; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Nontechnical Founders Series</a> - a set of posts aimed at helping would be nontechnical startup founders get answers to their questions around the technology side of starting a company.</em></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;">I often get asked by nontechnical startup founders what language they should use to build their product? Since they won't be writing code themselves, what they really are looking for are the buzzwords to use when writing a job ad for a developer or potential co-founder. This is of course important, because if you write a job ad asking for mainframe experience and strong knowledge of qbasic, you aren't very likely to attract the talent you're looking for to help build your company. </span></span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #000000; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">I'll start by saying that if you have a strong technical co-founder on board, then you should trust their judgement to build in whatever language and platform they are comfortable with. But for the purposes of this article, let's assume that you aren't so fortunate. Let's also assume that your product is a consumer facing web application. If you're working on something deeply technical, mobile, or embedded, then either your language choice is already made up for you, or you'll probably need the know-how in advance. When building your standard web application however, you have no shortage of choices. </span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #000000; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Some choices will lead to rapid development, the ability to attract A+ talent, and a large community that you'll be able to leverage for years to come. Other choices will lead to a development team of one, unable to expand. </span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #424037; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #000000; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal;"><strong>Background - Languages, Frameworks, Platforms</strong></span></span></span></span></p> <p>You've probably heard these terms thrown around a bunch, without really having any idea what they truly mean. Here's the quick overview.</p> <p>A <em>programming language</em> is the basic tool that a programmer will use to write your application. Each language has different strengths and weaknesses. Some are harder to program in and require more code, but run faster and use less memory. Others require less code and are easier to program in, but may run slower. Examples of languages are C, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Erlang, and on-and-on.</p> <p>A <em>web framework</em> is a tool that simplifies many of the tasks that programmers would otherwise need to reproduce over and over again when creating a web application. Each language has a number of different frameworks to choose from, and the choosing a good framework is much more important that choosing a particular language.</p> <p>A <em>platform</em> is an environment which your application will run on. It can be a server that you buy and stick under your desk (not recommend). It can be a cloud based system which will help with scaling, backups, and deployments such as Amazon EC2. Or it can even be a special purpose destination environment like Facebook the iPhone. The right platform will simplify maintaining your site and keeping it up and running.</p> <p>Okay, so finally, what languages and frameworks should you choose?</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>The Big Boys</strong></p> <p>These languages and frameworks all are pretty trendy in the startup world, have no shortage of adept and fast moving developers, and are proven on popular real world applications. You'll be safe with any of the below.</p> <p>Ruby - The ruby language paired with the <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Rails framework</a> is a popular choice these days. It favors convention over configuration which means that any Rails programmer can drop immediately into any Rails application and have a very good idea of where to get started. It's built to support rapid development and prototyping, it has a great community working on updates and plugins, and it's not going away any time soon. Ruby/Rails developers tend to be expensive but worth it. There are also other Ruby frameworks such as Sinatra which are suitable.</p> <p>Python - Much like the Ruby community has Rails, the Python community has the <a href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django framework</a>. Everything mentioned about Rails applies equally as well here. Python and Ruby are both high level languages that are easy for developers to program in. Expect good things from the Django crowd.</p> <p>PHP - This language runs some of the biggest sites on the web including Facebook, Wordpress, and Flickr. It has the lowest barrier to entry among the three languages mentioned here, which means that programmers tend to be a little cheaper. (It also means you generally have to be more on the lookout for bad PHP coders). It has a number of good frameworks such as <a href="http://cakephp.org">CakePHP</a> and <a href="http://zend.com">Zend</a>. </p> <p>Javascript - A developer won't necessarily build your entire site in javascript, however it's a skill that's very useful to have on your team. Developers use javascript to make your web pages dynamic, and provide nice visual effects. You'll want someone familiar with javascript working on your web app.</p> <p><strong>Safe Options But Be Careful</strong></p> <p>These languages and frameworks are fine if you have the right technical lead who knows what they're doing and have plenty of experience. They tend to be a little more old school than the frameworks above, but they're proven, and will get the job done. The pace of development might be a little slower, and the younger talent may not be as eager to join up to work on these projects. </p> <p>Java - The <a href="http://java.sun.com/">java language</a> is an old favorite in the enterprise. As such, there's no shortage of ex-big-co employees who will have experience building large applications in java. Unfortunately java applications, and their frameworks such as Spring, have relied a lot more on configuration than the current frameworks, and haven't quite evolved very quickly over the last 10 years. There'll be plenty of cheap employees around to work on Java projects, but you may not be the most attractive shop in town.</p> <p>.NET - Microsoft's current platform is called .<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/net/">NET</a>, and it has a number of languages to choose from, but usually pair ASP.NET with C#. Like Java, .NET is a favorite in the enterprise, and there's no shortage of developers around who will have experience here. Developing in .NET generally takes place on a windows machine (unlike many of the above options where developers prefer Macs or Linux), and it's accomplished inside a really nice program called Visual Studio. Unfortunately, the licenses for this suite, and the servers to run them on, are very expensive. So if you choose .NET, be prepared to pay.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Stay Away</strong></p> <p>If a developer tries to convince you that he's going to build your web app in any other language, advise strongly against it. There is no doubt it's possible, and the developer could even do an incredible job. However it's not likely that you'll attract a strong team, and be able to grow it as necessary to support an unconventional choice.</p> <p>Another thing to watch out for is a developer who tells you that he'd like to use his own homemade language or framework. Again, they may be very capable, but it will be hard to find others jumping at the opportunity to join on.</p> <p> </p> <p>Developers are generally very strong-minded about their programming languages of choice. I didn't write this article to incite a holy war or to offend anyone. I would just like to give nontechnical founders and idea of the current landscape of frameworks commonly in use in the startup world. If you have any other suggestions or think that I've missed anything, feel free to let me know in the comments.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/vAJpxsnmgf0" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:24:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder <p> <p><span style="color: #424037; font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"><em style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">This post is part of the <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series" style="color: #bc7134; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Nontechnical Founders Series</a> - a set of posts aimed at helping would be nontechnical startup founders get answers to their questions around the technology side of starting a company.</em></span></p> <p>So you're committed to founding a tech startup, and you know that you need the right technical co-founder to come on board to build and launch your product, right? Good. Now where do you find this mythical co-founder, and how do you know what to look for?</p> <p>I'm not gonna sugar coat this. Finding a technical co-founder to partner up with you and build your product from scratch will be a long, time consuming process. Unless you have plenty of money to offer up front in salary in addition to large amounts of equity to give away, expect to spend about 2-6 months on the hunt for the right co-founder. Since you won't be working on your product in the meantime, the best things you can do are to get smart on your business, and to contribute intelligence to the community.</p> <p>The worst thing that you can do is try and recruit a technical co-founder based solely on the idea that you came up with the previous day. If you're not really smart on the idea, and already well connected within your market, there won't be any incentive for a technologist to join up with you and build your product for you for only 50% or less of the business.</p> <p>Getting smart on your business should be a given. Do the market research, talk to as many people with knowledge on the subject as possible, come up with a set of assumptions around a strongly crafted model that will need to be proven, and then collect data on those assumptions. </p> <p>Contributing intelligence to the community is a little bit less intuitive. The easiest way to get your voice out there in the open is to start a blog. Write often about your business, your thoughts on technology, marketing, distribution, and existing business models. Comment on other well read blogs, and engage in the discussion. Aside from writing, actually participate in community events, attend meetups, speak on panels, and schedule frequent meetings with potential candidates for the co-founder position.</p> <p>You'll meet plenty of these candidates through the startup community in your city if you put the time and effort into immersing yourself into the experience. Contact people from the online communities like Hacker News, email people you're connected to on LinkedIn, set up followup meetings after you meet a potential candidate at a meetup. </p> <p> </p> <p><strong>When you actually talk with technical candidates, how will you know you've found the right one?</strong></p> <p>First of all, look at what they've already built. This will be the best evidence of what they'll be able to build again. If it looks like, sounds like, and acts like the product that you want to launch for your business, then that's a great sign.</p> <p>Secondly, ask them what their specialties are, and what they contributed to their previous projects. At the early stage of startup life, it's important that you hire generalists and not specialists. That means that you'd rather have someone who's built an entire application from beginning to end, instead of someone who was pigeon holed into just working on the design, or the front end, or the database, or the API. A key word to use here is <strong>the full stack</strong>. This means that they're comfortable working in almost every area from the database all the way up through the front end design. The right technical lead for your team will have worked on all of them a little bit. They needn't be an expert at any one area, and in fact they may be really weak at certain areas, but they need to be confident that they can at least find the right person to help them out when needed.</p> <p>So if the candidate seems to get along well with you, they've built something interesting before, they have the commitment and tenacity required in a co-founder, and they seem to have confidence in their own technical ability, do you sign them on the spot? No. There are still two more steps that I'd recommend. </p> <p>You'll want someone technical who you know and trust to interview them to vet their technical ability. Your trusted friend will be able to dig deep on technical ability to make sure that they really will be able to live up to what they told you they will. Even if they pass this test, I recommend you'll want to work with them at least on a trial project to see how the two of you work together. Pick a small project (it can be unrelated to your business), and you work on the business related strategy while they work on the technical side. After a few days if everything still feels right, it might be a match.</p> <p>I'll leave you with a high level checklist. All of these needn't be fulfilled, but the more that you can check off, but more likely the long term partnership will be successful.</p> <ul> <li>They're highly technical</li> <li>They have active projects online that they've built and can show you</li> <li>You get along personally (don't need to be best friends, but at least need to tolerate each other)</li> <li>They're a good communicator</li> <li>They're around your age</li> <li>They're located in your city</li> <li>You have similar financial needs over the coming years</li> <li>They come with strong references that you can check out</li> <li>You both have similar goals about what you want out of the company </li> </ul> <p>Good luck. As a highly technical developer who's joined up as a co-founder with a nontechnical partner, I can vouch for all of the above from the side of the person who's being recruited. Disagree or have any thoughts? Let me know in the comments or <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics">on twitter</a>.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/I9G6mohabeI" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:41:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/do-i-need-a-technical-co-founder http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/do-i-need-a-technical-co-founder <p> <p><em>This post is part of the <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series">Nontechnical Founders Series</a> - a set of posts aimed at helping would be nontechnical startup founders get answers to their questions around the technology side of starting a company.</em></p> <p>Do you need a technical co-founder? The short answer is yes.</p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Jobs-woz-garage" height="298" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2010-04-23/HcCvFsIqlAEFvorlsntxnfjeIthDqjhGnyBxrqvtwJseghDFAJGdwmFihwdj/jobs-woz-garage.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="400" /> </div> </p> <p>If I have one piece of advice for an aspiring nontechnical startup founder, it would be to find yourself a technical partner. Nothing will accelerate the process of getting your product built, shipped, iterated on, and improved than having core technical talent within the founding team. This is hardly an original idea, and it is often preached around the tech community these days.</p> <p>But why is this so important? Can't you just hire a technical employee or outsource development?</p> <p>You can, but it will be slower, more expensive, and far more unreliable than having a partner who has the knowledge, drive, and incentive (being a partner in the company) to put out the best product possible. </p> <p>As an early stage founder, presumably on a tight budget, your goal should be to get version one of your minimum viable product (to be discussed later), launched as quickly and cheaply as possible. Until your product is out in the open and you're getting feedback from your users, you don't even know whether you've build the right product. Sure you could get an agency to build your prototype within your budget, but after you get feedback and need to make changes, the bills will start to add up. It often takes many iterations to get the product on the right course, and iterating on a per-hour or per-project budget is not the way you want to preserve capital in the early stage. For this reason, I'd advise that outsourcing your product to an agency is the worst way to launch a business.</p> <p>Hiring a technical lead, who's not a partner/co-founder, is a slightly better alternative. If you have the funding to do so, and you find the right candidate who's willing to be incentivized by salary instead of equity, then this can work. There are at least three reasons I can think of why this is subpar to having a technical cofounder. It's going to be more expensive cash wise, the employee won't be as incentivized to work above and beyond their expectations of what they consider standard, and they'll be far more likely to leave when a better offer comes around.</p> <p>But having that right technical partner will pay dividends many times over in the early stage when your product gets prototyped, released, and iterated on a daily basis. When you want to test something out or try a different direction, your co-founder will say "can-do" and you won't have to worry about making the stressful decision about whether to put another 5-10K against an agency developed prototype feature. Imagine this scenario playing itself over time-and-time-again in the early days of your company, and trust me, you'll be glad that you have a technical partner to go to battle with.</p> <p>Of course it's important to find <strong>the right partner</strong>, and not just settle for the first one that comes your way. What should you look for in a partner and how will you know when you've found the right one? More on that in the next post.</p> <p><em><span style="color: #424037; line-height: 21px; font-size: small;">If you're interested in following along with the Nontechnical Founders Series, or know someone who might be, you should <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDob" style="color: #bc7134; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">subscribe</a> to stay up with future posts, or <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics" style="color: #bc7134; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">follow me on twitter</a>.</span></em></p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/do-i-need-a-technical-co-founder">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/do-i-need-a-technical-co-founder#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/vM61NdPtBW0" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:18:00 -0700 http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series <p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>Do I need a technical co-founder, and where can I find one?</p> <p>How long will it take to launch a product?</p> <p>How do I recruit and interview developers? </p> How do I know what programming language to build my startup's product in?</blockquote> <p> </p> <p>As a technical <a href="http://jumppost.com">startup founder</a> in New York City, I get asked these questions and many like them all the time. There are a lot of smart, young, ambitious, first-time entrepreneurs without any technical background, who seem dedicated to building a tech company. I admire their ambition and their willingness to learn, so I'm always glad to help. </p> <p>A large part of building a tech company is the technology. It's very important. There is of course, a large part completely unrelated to the technology - the strategy, marketing, fundraising, recruiting, and so-forth. These are all great roles that the nontechnical founder can excel at, but I truly believe that the core of an early stage tech startup is its product, and without some semblance of knowledge surrounding the technology piece, you'll put yourself at a severe disadvantage. </p> <p>I have a technical background. A computer science education, a passion for learning and playing with new technologies, and a history of launching products quickly. As such I'd like to write a series of posts dedicated to helping nontechnical founders get up to speed on the technical issues they may be faced with in starting a company these days. Note that I say "starting" a company and not "growing and selling a company." Unfortunately I won't pretend to yet have had that experience, and as such I won't get unsolicited advice about things that I've yet to test out myself.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p> <p>1. <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/do-i-need-a-technical-co-founder">Do I need a technical co-founder?</a></p> <p>2. <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-to-find-a-technical-co-founder">How do I find the right co-founder?</a></p> <p>3. <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/what-technology-should-i-use-to-build-my-prod">What technology should I use to build my product?</a></p> <p>4. <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/how-long-until-my-prototype-is-ready">How long until my prototype will be ready?</a></p> <p>Coming soon - What should I do while I'm waiting for the product to be ready?</p> <p> </p> <p>Every time I add a new post to this series I'll update this page with the link.</p> <p>If you're interested in following along, or know someone who might be, you should <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDob">subscribe</a> to stay up with future posts, or <a href="http://twitter.com/petkanics">follow me on twitter</a>.</p> <p> </p> </p> <p><a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/the-nontechnical-founders-series#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheDob/~4/pJ71nNNPTe4" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/390132/dougfacebooksquare.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3FrYNYvW Doug Petkanics the dob Doug Petkanics