Viewing profile — whirlycott1

This is really useful!

Chief Architect at PagerDuty here. Sorry this has happened to you! I can accelerate this for you but I’ll need some info to get started. Can you please email me at pjacob@ [PD doma…

That "Overwhelmed" book is excellent. Halfway through it now and it's really altered my perspective on everyday life.

It's a venture funded business. There are only three outcomes: sell, go public or crash. What were you expecting? They also said their API will stay up: http://blog.echonest.com/po…

Congrats Brian, Tristan and Jim!

How do people feel about Springpad? I've only used both casually, but it seems like the power users probably have thoughts or advice.

Certainly, there's a whole ecosystem of add-on services for AWS that improve the whole experience.

On the monitoring side, we're shortly moving into private beta for Stackdriver. Ping me if you want early access. @whirlycott

Dan was a super guy and a good friend. Incredibly smart, incredibly experienced, well respected and wonderfully nice to be around. It's incredibly sad and a big loss for the techno…

One solution (which obviously won't for everybody): live in Massachusetts. We have excellent health insurance plans available here: https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ I'm using one…

I tested infinite scrolling on a large site about a year ago and the results were decidedly negative in almost every significant respect according to our A/B testing. Does anybody …

Note to self: try not to make announcements on April 1st lest they get mistaken as jokes.

The startup scene is not elitist at all. There are lots of easy places to plug in and I think people are generally receptive. Feel free to ping me when you arrive here or email me.…

I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently unavailable.

I finally had a better understanding of the context of the opportunity and started to think big. And I found people I liked who understood the vision and were willing to back the i…

If you're all presuming that EC2 is some magical pixie dust for reducing the costs of running a large site, that's not the case. We had ~10 EC2 boxes and 15 managed servers at Cont…

Those are short so I will just answer them here: * Basic social sharing of products, fancy bookmarklet, following other people and then we quickly moved into some high-end realtime…

Easy: without venture funding, I would have just been a guy sitting on the couch at home with nobody to work on this with. And the hosting costs alone to run a site that large are …

http://www.quora.com/How-much-was-StyleFeeder-acquired-for Sure, fashion search/bookmarking is a commodity - that's why those sites don't succeed. I think discovery services are mo…

Sorta... http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2005/10/17/stylefeeder-step-1... LMK if that's not what you are looking for.

Good luck to you with your new venture! I'm easy to find online and will be happy to answer any questions if you like.

I started StyleFeeder in January, 2005, built it into a profitable company of 8 people and sold it to Time Inc in January 2010. From January, 2005 through May, 2006, I worked on St…

Wow, I'd love to see an 8256 - that's what I learned to program on. Actually, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, but... man, bump the table even slightly and the 16K RAM pack w…

It's not a matter of forgoing unit tests. Example: rename a method to something more clear. It's used 1000x in your codebase. You can do that in probably 5 seconds and know that it…