Viewing profile — crcarlson

I have worked ~ 10yrs in each. Larger companies can have better structure and mentoring available. They can also have more resources and work on more impactful problems. Public com…

This is a super neat idea. I have made wedding bands for friends over the years, I usually provided a stainless steel band the right size to wear for a week or two and found that o…

Congrats guys!

This may have been an unfortunate tactic used in the feud between Westinghouse and Edison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me personally I referenced the secti…

The site looks great guys, can't wait until I can order my cards and wrapping paper from chirply.

I recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality. When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice …

Congratulations guys! I like the redesign. I check the site for deals every weekend before doing the weekly shopping and always find at least one good deal. (I am still looking for…

Apple's design is well known and impressive, but even more impressive IMO is their ability deliver it with such incredible operational efficiency. My favorite insight from this art…

That is a nice machine. I have been trying to convince myself that if I want to build a custom set of cabinets that should build a 4x8 router to make the whole job easier :) Yes my…

I built two CNC machines. The first one essentially from scratch components: bearings, plates and beams. And a second higher performance machine by converting a manual machine to s…

We are working on an alternative http://gantto.com It is still Beta and we are very actively working the kinks out. If you find it is close to serving your needs and send us your r…

One traditional way of dealing with this issue is to have a mandatory retirement age. Pre-tenure and usually pre-full professors usually do a good job of hustling for money and gro…

The best way to start marketing is to start listening to anyone who will talk to you. Start with a list of needs or gaps that you feel you understand or are very interested in and …

I think this is great advice. Part of perseverance is not letting anyone else tell you what you can not do but even more important is not telling yourself what you cannot do.

Sorry, I am not really a surf guru. I do know some people who used to surf off of the Sunset, but I think they were beginners so I have no idea of the quality. I do hear that the S…

There are a few people I know living in Santa Cruz and commuting into Mountain View or Palo Alto. The traffic is pretty rough, especially coming over the hill from SC, and generall…

In addition to essentially input-output test driven development at the unit, subsystem and system levels, I am a huge fan of "design by contract" for identifying both design and im…

A lot of people ask me why I applied to Y-Combinator in my 30's with cash in the bank. For me it was because YC offers big picture perspective on internet companies I could not get…

I had a stack of books that I felt were relevant on the new developer's desk the first day they showed up. The exact stack depends on what you are doing specifically, I started fro…