Thank you for the great article. One of the best in while.
Diary of a Failed Startup
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: Diary of a Failed Startup
#32"Solve a problem, not a class of problems." I, for one, think this is good advice for code in general. At least "at first, solve a problem, not a class of problems". I have noticed that if I write my code too general at first, it ends up solving one class of problems kinda poorly, and ends up being re-written. If I write it for the specific problem I need to solve, and then generalize it to include another similar pr…
I've always liked the rule of three; the first time, solve just your immediate the problem. The second time, notice that you solved the same problem twice. If the same situation occurs a third time, write a general solution.
I couldn't agree more. I call this ORYO: Only Repeat Yourself Once. Actually, I often put comments in my code marking places I've already repeated myself (saying 'ORYO' plus a reference, if needed).
Re: Diary of a Failed Startup
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are, but nearly everything else is more abysmal. What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created? The nice thing about svn commits is that if you're doing atomic commits (and both organizations were, though I got a little sloppy about it with GameClay), 1 commit ~= 1 feature. There're still issues about what you consider a feature - if you do a feature right the fi…
I don't think there is one specific metric. It seems like SVN commits would be more accurate than LOC, but when I hear numbers like that, I begin to seriously doubt it. You have to take a lot of things into consideration when trying to measure "forward progress". In theory all of our commits are approximately one feature, and I can't, for the life of me, imagine finishing 100 features in 2 days (even split between al…
Good measure of how on-page the team is though.
It bothers me when developers aren't working on hard problems and fail to make frequent commits. They are used to working in isolation and without scrutiny. Unless people are actively breaking things they should be updating.
Re: Diary of a Failed Startup
#34Interesting, though I sure hope he is wrong about "If your idea starts with "We're building a platform to..." and you don't have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now.", since I work at a startup doing just that (buglabs.net). We are selling though, so hopefully we are gaining some traction.
Of course, the latest "platform" example is facebook. Now, they're a platform for web apps, and I'm sure that was in their original vision. But they couldn't have started out saying "hey, we're a platform for apps". So they solved a problem (namely, the "I need to know more about my friends' lives & activities" problem) first. And THEN they became a platform.
Re: Diary of a Failed Startup
#35FYI - Your blog made the SD Times News weekly email newsletter last week.