Number four is booked for Wednesday Jan 23rd, once again at the Albion. Please sign up here to attend. Please come and check it out. If you’re interested in demo’ing, contact me asap.

Lists, lists and more lists. Instead of going to the effort of creating yet another list for you, I’ll take the even lazier route and paste someone elses…

“Software Engineering tips
Tip 0: You must have code
Tip 1: You must have a technical co-founder
Tip 2: Hire A+ engineers who love coding
Tip 3: Keep the engineering team small and do not outsource
Tip 4: Ask tough questions during the interview
Tip 5: Avoid hiring non-technical managers
Tip 6: Cultivate an agile culture
Tip 7: Do not re-invent the wheel”

This whole audibles category barely exists. What can’t I stop listening to today? Matt Mays is a maritimer from the same area as that loser sid the kid. I’m kidding, I just like giving sid a hard time, he’s great.

Tunes: In session in Vancouver, Matt Mays and El Torpedo.

Links:His allmusic page, his wikipedia page, his site, apparently he’s involved in a movie as well with Sam Roberts and Buck 65.

We’re still looking for designers, see description here. We’re hoping to hold a group gathering late next week with people who are interested. If you’re interested, and haven’t contacted me yet, please do so asap.

I’ve never owned an Apple, and have never had the urge to, so I can’t comment but Dave Winer‘s story sounds insane to me. Apple’s clearly making some mistakes in my limited opinion.

$160 for a possibly used 80GB drive and then you ‘trick’ the owner into signing away their old drive? That’s just ballsy….

I’m on the hunt for designers. I’m actually really interested in finding some people with traditional design experience who are looking to make the jump to software design. Check out the description here and if it interests you in the least please contact me!

We’ll likely host some sort of group evening early Jan to meet all the people interested but we’re still working out those details.

Yes, I’m rereading a lot of Paul Graham today. Paul makes a great point about interesting projects.

“Before ITA (who wrote the software inside Orbitz), the people working on airline fare searches probably thought it was one of the most boring applications imaginable. But ITA made it interesting by redefining the problem in a more ambitious way.”

Some may think that our BrainPark project is boring old knowledge management for the workplace. Well technically it is, however, we’re spending these early days exploring the problem space to find the right problem to solve. I think we’ve managed to find it and part of the requirements was that it’s one we’re all excited about.

Is it just me or is Paul describing coworking?

“If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don’t work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There’s no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. And when you look at what they’re doing on that computer, you’ll find it reinforces what I said earlier about tools. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you’re more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.”

Success is all about the measuring stick. Let’s peek at the success rates YCombinator has experienced with a few different measuring sticks.

1. Success as a business, got stupid rich: 50% although Paul indicates 25% is likely more reasonable over the long term
2. Everyone got paid, no one lost their shirts: 100%. Even the initial projects that didn’t continue as a business were able to somehow make enough money to pay back investors and then some.
3. Enjoyment and growth: 100%, “Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people who wish they’d gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.”

It’s easy to peek in from the outside and read about a business failing and think ‘wow, they screwed that up, poor losers’. As always there’s more to it then you read in the papers.

Quote from Why to Not Not Start a Startup.

Just an interesting quote…full Paul Graham post here..

“When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you’re not just making a technical decision. You’re also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two…when you choose a language, you’re also choosing a community. The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.”