How to evaluate startup ideas

by Adam Loving on June 9, 2013

It was obvious a month into TechStars that the business I had started would not be big enough. I will share the full story another time. While striving to find a better idea, my co-founder Lewis and I created a scorecard to help evaluate ideas. It’s easy when you’re in love with an idea to [...]

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Working together with Git

by Adam Loving on June 1, 2013

Here are the basics of how a team of two or more people can collaborate on a project using Git. I wrote this to help a co-worker learn Git. Please comment here on the original Git Gist for git collaboration if you’ve got any suggestions. Create the change $ git checkout -b my-feature … modify code [...]

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How to warm a cold email list

March 22, 2013

I had a quick chat session last week with my friend Darren. He was looking to promote his band’s latest album. He had an old email list, and he wanted to send them an announcement. Warming up a a cold email list (one you haven’t mailed in a while) is tricky. You need to blast [...]

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Ruby and Javascript contractor rate survey

March 7, 2013

I sent an informal survey to friends and Hacker News readers yesterday. The survey was to determine the current hourly rates for Ruby and JavaScript contractors. Below is the pivot table summarizing the results. You can take the survey here and see the raw results here. My conclusion: there is a lot of variance among experienced [...]

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Quantified self and lifestreaming

March 7, 2013

It seems inevitable that someone will create a lifestreaming hub for your personal activity data that allows you to capture and own your data (either before or after it is published). Here’s a collection of thoughts that have been bubbling in my brain for a while.  Assertions Tracking numerical stats about yourself (weight, steps) can create [...]

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Creating the WordPress of quantified self

March 7, 2013

I’ve been logging keystrokes and footsteps to a web page I call my Featbeat. My plan with Featbeat is to create the WordPress of quantified self – an open source logging platform. Why? It’s not just because “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It’s also because measuring things tends to change behavior. Right now, [...]

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Ruby interview questions

March 7, 2013

I think there are two types, “phone screen” questions which gauge someone’s depth in a particular language. Then, white board questions where the language and syntax doesn’t matter (as much), just the candidate’s grasp of computer science.  Phone screen questions What are ruby code blocks? (or what is the difference between functional and object oriented programming) What is [...]

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Over-simplifying customer driven development

March 6, 2013

I was looking through my colleague’s notes on Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual. A couple thoughts came to mind. 1. It’s hard for me not to over-simplify all the Steve Blank stuff into simply “are customers dying for your product?” It seems like that is 80% of the ball game. 2. I realize that it’s [...]

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Stack of the month club

February 20, 2013

One of the problems with Open Source technology is knowing which of the plethora of tools and technologies to choose. Is it stable? Does it have staying power (or is it just a fad)? In July 2010 I created a “Stack of the Month Club” spreadsheet to compare technologies with some of my developer friends. [...]

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Building tent apps with rails

February 20, 2013

I’ve been experimenting with the Tent protocol. Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking. It’s sort of like the WordPress of social networks. It provides a way to share status updates, photos, and blog entries without going through Facebook or Twitter. You can host your own server, or use someone else’s. Here is my [...]

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