Decisions, decisions
Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven
Posted by Olly on February 26, 2011 Comments (0) | Permalink | Comments feed
The Facebook Curve
6 years ago, Facebook was one server in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room running PHP, MySQL and Apache 1.3.
6 years later they have 500 million active users, tens of thousands of servers, and they still use PHP. Sort of.
This growth and infrastructure complexity, along with their engineering-led culture, utterly fascinates me. Where do they go from here? And what effect will the solutions they have to find to cope with this mind-boggling growth have on the web application development world? This tech talk offers fascinating insight into how they’re approaching problems no-one has had to face before on this scale.
Posted by Olly on January 29, 2011 Comments (0) | Permalink | Comments feed
Terminal boredom
I never did get on with Terminal.app. I can’t remember why exactly, but we were not best mates. Something not quite right about it. Anyway this friction led me to find iTerm early in my Mac career and we’ve been buddies for years, but the irrational geek in me gets bothered when apps get no loving. And iTerm has had no loving in years (0.10 forever). No self-respecting geek wants to be associated with abandonware, even if it’s a great product which never causes a problem. Geeks like problems, dammit!
So it gave me great pleasure to read about iTerm2 this week. It’s a fork of iTerm and it’s in alpha. Buggy as hell but that’s the point.
Download it and give it a bash (boom boom!).
Posted by Olly on January 14, 2011 Comments (0) | Permalink | Comments feed
Gasping, but somehow still alive
My ‘portfolio’ site, which was a nice idea six years ago, has bitten the dust. It’s digital remains live on in an SVN repo somewhere on the dusty old VM which hosts this site, but I’ve actually forgotten how to use SVN and I have no intention of relearning it so for all intents and purposes it’s history.
So the blog which promised so little and delivered precisely that has been promoted to the top level domain. No more is it squirrelled away on a silly subdomain, it’s now just raw, unadulterated, uninteresting, pointless content. Where will it go from here? Is this the last gasp or will I have nothing better to do with any free time I find myself with (which has strangely eluded me for the past few years) than write something vaguely geek-related here?
Perhaps I’ll set myself a deadline, with punishment by cron if I fail to deliver.
0 0 11 7 * rm -rf /var/www/lylo.co.uk/
Tick, tock, tick…
Posted by Olly on January 11, 2011 Comments (2) | Permalink | Comments feed
So long, Spolsky
Joel Spolsky is officially retiring from blogging. His penultimate parting thought is as pertinent as ever:
We need something that is more objective (based on measurable truth and falseness rather than just lists of anecdotes about successful projects and failed projects). We need something that reflects the best new ideas about what authorship means in 2010, not just electronic forms of 18th-century pamphlets. We need to stop rewriting the same things again and again (fail fast! NDAs are worthless! Execution matters, not ideas! Use the right tools for the job!). Instead we should start filling in the long tail of knowledge.
So that’s what I’m going to do with the next decade.
And his parting thought is as dry as ever:
Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
So long Joel, you’ll be missed.
Posted by Olly on March 15, 2010 Comments (0) | Permalink