Employee #1: Dropbox • Hacker News Board

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#51

Post by idlewords » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

pensive_returns wrote: post #49

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…

What is the connection between AutoAdmit and Church? I don't understand how he's relevant here.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#52

Post by pensive_returns » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #51

pensive_returns wrote: post #49

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…

What is the connection between AutoAdmit and Church? I don't understand how he's relevant here.

Church is from autoadmit and probably well known to Aston (since they were both part of the PR community).

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#53

Post by psawaya » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

What a great interview. There's so much under-appreciated advice here, particularly around founder/idea fit.

I've been lucky enough to know Aston over the past two years, and have always been super impressed by his insight.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#54

Post by gregmac » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

dude_abides wrote: post #7

> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?

I have only a very tiny amount of experience with Hg, and it was my first experience with DVCS. I found the learning curve on it much smaller (which is mainly why I choose it over git at the time).

The reason I switched to git was mostly inertia. Many open source projects were going to git, Github was starting to really take off, and just generally there was a bigger community around git. This mean git got more (and likely better) choices for tooling, more help, and personally I would have to deal with fewer SCM's when working on open source/etc stuff.

I suspect the author was talking on those lines, and the other thing already pointed out in this thread: ability to find experienced people.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#55

Post by city41 » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #24

typetypetype wrote: post #2

> We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.

In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens frequently. The UX never evolves. I have NEVER worked on a product that got worse when it was dogfooded and I have NEVER worked on a product that consistently got better without dogfooding (sometimes it'll get better but it's always in spurts before going back dow…

Dogfooding only helps here if the dev team's use cases match the users's. Just about every company I've worked at has "dogfooded" its products, but almost always a small subset or even a completely different configuration from a typical customer.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#56

Post by Siecje » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #40

dude_abides wrote: post #7

> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?

Mercurial supports only a subset of the use cases of git, while adding no exclusive functionality. It is true that it is the subset that 90+% of the people need. But there are network effects on VCS, making git a clearly superior choice.

What doesn't Mercurial support?

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#57

Post by yeukhon » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:19 PM UTC

barkingcat wrote: post #8

yeukhon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogfooding is quite important, yeah. Some products, hmm, maybe not. For example, if I work for a dating app, I may not feel comfortable actually using the app myself especially when I am committed to a relationship. I.e. I can't dogfood it because I have no use of the product. In the case of say Facebook, I believe employees use the site internally so dogfooding is possible, even if privately some employees don't act…

For low barrier to entry products like facebook, dating sites, etc, I think companies are smart enough to build internal facing development only environments - so as a developer you won't be "using" the dating site, just using/testing/dogfooding the internal "dev" dating site that has maybe a million robots and all the employees, contractors, partners of the company. If you haven't set down ground rules with a partne…

Right, building a stage site internally or asking a pilot to test are basically user acceptance testing. Xeros builds a new printer model, replaces all the printing machines on the first floor that's dogfooding. But I get what you are trying to say.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#58

Post by ones_and_zeros » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:19 PM UTC

pensive_returns wrote: post #49

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…

Michael O. Church a troll? Please.

The guy had an odd view of himself but I always found he provided excellent well thought out analysis and arguments. I'm not saying he is always right, but he wasn't a troll.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#59

Post by doktrin » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

Aston is a class act. He volunteered to act as a mentor to students in a coding bootcamp I attended several years ago, and it was my privilege to meet him. He's the sort of person who is unequivocally a net positive in this world, and I wish him all manner of continued success.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#60

Post by saintzozo » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:31 PM UTC

pensive_returns wrote: post #49

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…

sup pensive