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11 October 2005
Tue, 11 Oct 2005 08:06:00 GMT What I Did this Summervia Kjell Olsen2416 days agoI think in some cases it’s not so much that they [23 year olds] lack the appetite for work, but that the work they’re offered is unappetizing.
I couldn’t agree more. I dropped my physics class, not because it was hard, nor disinteresting, but because for two hours a week we copied numbers off the board into xcel (the prof called it a lab!). I wrote two midterm papers last night. Bang bang. They were actually fun to write – I just wish I had the onus to write one every week.
I think the problem here is much the same as with the apparent laziness of people this age. They seem lazy because the work they’re given is pointless, and they act irresponsible because they’re not given any power.
I applied to the WFP, and hope to god I can get in. I’m probably screwed because I applied alone, I just don’t know anyone I’d want to live and work with for three months. But college is really getting to me – the only real way I’m passing the time are the two jobs I managed to get: one in php and one with rails, I won’t say the extracurricular is bad, but I’m the kind of kid who needs to be doing something interesting and challenging on top of teenage schmoozing.
Indeed, one quality all the founders shared this summer was a spirit of independence. I’ve been wondering about that. Are some people just a lot more independent than others, or would everyone be this way if they were allowed to?
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09 October 2005
Sun, 09 Oct 2005 09:42:08 GMT Knuth: Computer Programming as an ArtKjell Olsen2418 days agoProgramming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules. Andrei Ershov
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30 September 2005
Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:34:01 GMT 2006 Winter Founders Programvia Kjell Olsen2427 days agoEven if your startup ultimately fails, we think the WFP is a better alternative to a job for ambitious young hackers. You’ll learn way more than you would in most jobs, and you’ll probably meet more interesting people. You’ll be able to work where you want, when you want, instead of having to show up every morning at some office building full of cubicles. You’ll get to work on your own projects, using the tools you like, instead of dealing with legacy code. And because it’s difficult to get into this program, being able to say on your resume that you were a Winter Founder should carry more weight than an ordinary job.
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02 September 2005
Fri, 02 Sep 2005 12:52:00 GMT Slide 1 of 12 (3 Steps, at reboot7)via Kjell Olsen2455 days agoInteresting presentation by Matt Webb on the future of computer programming in relation to the evolution of physics.
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23 August 2005
Tue, 23 Aug 2005 08:15:40 GMT Why Railsvia Kjell Olsen2465 days agoWhat is a huge deal? Having an extremely
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31 July 2005
Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:55:00 GMTThe Pragmatic Programmer
Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
A great look at how to program well.
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22 July 2005
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 16:30:00 GMT Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools | Sketchupvia Kjell Olsen2497 days agoI’ve had my eye on this software for a year or two, but at $500 it blatantly out of my price range, and will be for a long to to come (but I’m not knocking on wood).
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19 July 2005
Tue, 19 Jul 2005 12:34:00 GMTAgile Web Development With Rails
Dave Thomas, et al.
I’m a little late catching the bandwagon, but I didn’t buy the (beta)book for a few weeks after it’s release. This is a spectacularly detailed book on the rails framework, capturing the simplicity of setting up a rails application in it’s tutorial followed by quite a dense summary of the different aspects of rails quite in depth.
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17 July 2005
Sun, 17 Jul 2005 07:58:40 GMT WTH: Lectures and workshopsvia Kjell Olsen2502 days agoA few of the programs here look fascinating, particularly these:
And lots of others.
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05 July 2005
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 19:07:00 GMT Pragmatic Programming Articles from The Pragmatic Programmer and the Pragmatic Bookshelf.via Kjell Olsen2514 days agoI’m working through agile … with rails at the moment, and these guys write delightful technical manuals. Their essays and articles aren’t half bad either.
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Tue, 05 Jul 2005 18:50:23 GMT
Caching images in Railsvia Kjell Olsen2514 days ago
Cute way to generate cached image files from your db with rails.
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28 May 2005
Sat, 28 May 2005 18:55:27 GMT Rails Day 2005 - June 4thKjell Olsen2552 days agoI want to do railsday, but don’t know if I’ll be able to make the time on saturday. Hm…. I’ve got some killer ideas, but not too much rails-fu. But I could probably work out something in a day, rails is pretty easy.
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13 May 2005
Fri, 13 May 2005 21:18:52 GMT MisterHousevia Kjell Olsen2567 days agoA nice looking X10 interface in perl, which kind of sucks, but it’s cooler then a GUI based client.
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29 April 2005
Fri, 29 Apr 2005 17:49:00 GMT Flickr.rbvia Kjell Olsen2581 days agoNice flickr library for ruby, the love of my life (well…). Brought to you by the wonderful Scott Raymond.
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28 April 2005
Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:41:00 GMT PythonForSeries60 - Matt Croydon::Postwikivia Kjell Olsen2582 days agoWhat you get when you let python hackers loose on a mobile paltform: some cool shit. I just wish I had a sweet series 60 phone.
Also: series60 snippets
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12 April 2005
Tue, 12 Apr 2005 06:25:00 GMT The blend of mind, talent, and passion (Loud Thinking)via Kjell Olsen2598 days agoWhy we like rails:
Ruby on Rails is turning out to be that place in the middle capable of igniting excitement from both ends of the spectrum.
So what we’re basically trying to achieve is the meeting of quick’n’dirty with slow-but-clean into quick’n’clean.
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16 March 2005
Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:47:00 GMT Ruby On Rails Quotes in RailsKjell Olsen2625 days agowhen rails works she is like a sports car covered in hot babes. mrpotatohead (irc)
Could you say it any better?
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10 March 2005
Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:34:38 GMT How to Start a Startupvia Kjell Olsen2631 days agoAnother neat essay by Paul Grahm, and I heard that there were only five mentions of lisp this time ;) I only saw one, but who knows?
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that’s implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.
Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.
In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.
Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I’m amazed how much worry it caused me. “Business plan” has that word “business” in it, so I figured it had to be something I’d have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn’t. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you’re going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you’ve been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours, and you’ll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.
...Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys “newscasters,” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn’t know much more than they read on the teleprompter.
Unless you’re in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they’re ripe for the picking.
More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. [...] We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.
When you’re looking for space for a startup, don’t feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?
he key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them.
More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That’s the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.
So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.
Why I shouldn’t start a company right now:
The other reason it’s hard to start a company before 23 is that people won’t take you seriously. VCs won’t trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you’re going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you’re very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you’ll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you’re 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.
And why I should…
ome people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you’re thinking, I don’t care what he says, I’m going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.
My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing—though in that case it probably won’t take four years.
So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That’s the way to think about it if you’re trying to decide whether to start one. If you’re the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.
Sorry for all the dumps, but there was a lot of stuff here and I found it quite interesting.
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09 March 2005
Wed, 09 Mar 2005 20:17:36 GMT Greg Duffy [dot] com - Google's Cookie and Hacking Google Printvia Kjell Olsen2632 days agoHow a college student hacked past google prints page limit for viewing scanned books, and wrote a program to spit out pdf’s of them! Unfortunately he didn’t release the source code (just a few hints), and apparently google now discriminates against his name. Wheee…
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03 February 2005
Thu, 03 Feb 2005 13:38:00 GMT Guide to Rsyncvia Kjell Olsen2666 days agoA nice little command line utility to sync files – and it works good even if it does feel like voodoo. Also getting started with ssh is a nice read.
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Also somewhat recently
