Why Founders Shouldn’t Be The Developers
"If you plan to be doing the coding in a year or two, you're doing it wrong," one of the advisers told me when I was starting my first startup a few years ago.
Swizec
A geek with a hat. I write blogs people read, launch things people share, fix startup prototypes.
Downloading the internet with a single machine
The core of Zemanta is a recommendation engine. With a single call to the API it can recommend everything from related articles and relevant images to interesting links for your text. Okay, it only does those three things … Still, doing that requires data. Lots of data. Regularly following over 600,000 RSS feeds has already [...]
World Wide Wasteland
Nobody links to other websites anymore! Bloggers didn’t die, and neither did blogging. But somehow, it just stopped being a vast, interconnected blogosphere … When did the blogroll die anyway? Didn’t bloggers used to have links to all the blogs they read? Didn’t they talk about each other’s posts? Didn’t they quote and even reblog [...]
So you want to offer a public API …
You are awesome. Your startup just came up with a cool new piece of tech. Others might want to use it as well. The best way to do that is offering it up as a service – a RESTful API even. Hey, it made Twitter famous. Surely it will help you gain some traction as [...]
I bet you over-engineered your startup
Quick! How do you design distributed scalable software that does many small things to achieve a common goal? Most of you shouted “discrete services!” at the screen, others kind of shook your heads at the buzzword soup in that line. And that’s okay too. Perfect world Everyone can tell you that building a big web project, [...]
Your startup needs a dashboard
Your startup is logging hundreds of metrics. If it isn’t, you should fix that right now. Your users are awesome – most of the metrics update a few times a second, the slowest only a few times a minute. So how often do you parse those logs and look for what they’re trying to say? [...]
I want to reply!
An old saying goes: Make it easy for people to say yes. I say: Make it easy for people to tell you, your startup is awesome. Email used to be a joy. Every email meant somebody wanted to talk to me. Just me. Me alone. It was private, it was personal, it was glorious. [...]
RSS will never die
This was supposed to be a post about translating a URL into a [good] RSS feed. After reading The War on RSS and some of the passionate debate it kicked off on HackerNews I decided to write something else. In short: RSS will never die. The War on RSS part un In May 2009 Steve [...]