October 2013
Oct. 20, 2013
Outside of hotels, what are some good SF venues to host small conferences?
There are plenty of tech companies in SF with good facilities who might host a small, relevant conference, often for free (as a venue sponsor).
[... 44 words]Why was the popular Silicon Valley incubator named Y Combinator?
From this interview with Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/frinte...
[... 95 words]Is it realistically possible to work for a startup like Medium with little to no coding and programming knowledge?
Yes, but not as a programmer. If you have other skills you might be able to land a job at a startup that makes use of those.
[... 84 words]Is it possible for anybody to be expert in all areas of software development, that includes database, backend, web frontend, mobile apps, and graphic design?
It isn’t possible for someone to be expert in “all” aspects of software development—that would include everything from writing safety critical control systems for nuclear power plants in Fortran to high frequency trading algorithms on Wall Street. The world of software development is simply too big for that now.
[... 167 words]Did you submit a proposal for a conference before you actually learned/understood the topic you’ve proposed to talk about?
I’ve submitted proposals for talks on subjects which I have familiarity with, but need to research more thoroughly before giving the actual presentation. Preparing to teach others is an excellent way of learning a topic yourself.
[... 99 words]How could we using couchbase with binary document as value?
There’s a system called cbfs that acts as a distributed blobstore on top of Couchbase server—https://github.com/couchbaselabs...—it looks like it is currently under active development.
[... 45 words]How many cups of coffee can a venture capitalist drink in one work day?
When we were raising our seed round we quickly realised that lining up four “coffee” meetings with potential investors in a single day wasn’t going to be sustainable... so we switched to tea and other lower-caffeine drinks. At one meeting I even had a hot chocolate.
[... 75 words]Oct. 21, 2013
What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic?
Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have a very impressive distributed team culture.
[... 30 words]Is GitHub a reliable tool if I want to upload all the non-proprietary scientific computing code I have from my hard drive?
Yes. I find GitHub is a particularly good place to host older code that you might not intend to actively maintain, as it makes it extremely easy for other people to pick up where you left off.
[... 65 words]Does GitHub hire developer advocates? If so, how do you go about applying to be one?
If you’re a good candidate for a developer advocate position, you already know how to get in touch with the right people at GitHub!
[... 81 words]For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?
S3 is really a no-brainer for this, it’s extremely inexpensive, very easy to integrate with and unbelievably reliable. It’s so cheap that it will be practically free for testing purposes (expect to spend pennies a month on it).
[... 88 words]What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub?
“fork” creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account. This is an exclusive Build software better, together. (links to: http://Github.com) feature and not a Git feature.
[... 98 words]Oct. 22, 2013
How can one become a masterful Rails developer (and still have a life)?
Don’t sacrifice your social life. Sacrifice TV.
[... 79 words]What should the CEO’s salary be in a startup seeking seed capital? Is there an average number?
If you haven’t yet raised any capital, how can you pay a CEO salary at all?
[... 133 words]Oct. 23, 2013
What email marketing tool does Goop, InsideHook and other popular newsletters use?
You might be able to tell by viewing the full email headers on one of the emails they have sent you.
[... 39 words]Why can’t Twitter Web Intent pages be loaded into an iframe?
I imagine this is to discourage clickjacking: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
[... 26 words]Who would like to help set up a Wordpress site that is event focused?
Eventbrite (my employer) recently worked with WordPress.com to provide an integration between the two services which you may find relevant—it makes it very easy to set up a WordPress.com hosted site which ties in to the Eventbrite API to promote and enable ticket sales: WordPress.com Integrations for Eventbrite
[... 73 words]What do you do when you passionately believe in what you’re doing and have been seeing strong customer validation, but people around you constantly diss it? How do you persevere without a support system?
This is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to build a circle if trust with other entrepreneurs—or potentially even move to a “startup hub” region where more people are doing startups.
[... 110 words]It is posible to send an RSS feed to Twitter geolocalized?
Yes, this is possible using the Twitter API. A competent web programmer should be ale to build this for you in a few hours.
[... 41 words]Oct. 24, 2013
What is way that android connect to Oracle database?
As a general rule it’s not a good idea to allow mobile devices to connect directly to a server-side database, as it’s an invitation to hackers to figure out what’s going on and then connect to the database themselves for nefarious reasons.
[... 105 words]If you’re starting a website as a product, what are the important things to consider for the domain and how important are they? Ex: effect of being .com, .net or .io etc., and is it okay to have a hyphen in the name?
Get the .com. If you don’t, you’ll find that a surprisingly large number of press mentions etc will link to the wrong place—and you may end up having to pay a fortune later to buy the .com from a domain squatter (the price goes way up once your site starts to gain traction).
[... 104 words]Why did Facebook remove their hamburger navigation and go back to docked tabs in their mobile app?
Probably because the swipe-to-see-menu gesture conflicts with the iOS 7 standard swipe-to-go-back gesture.
[... 36 words]Why is it important to expand/upgrade my professional network?
There are plenty of reasons, but the most obvious is for finding a better job. Next time you are job hunting having a high quality, wide ranging network can make a huge difference.
[... 148 words]Oct. 25, 2013
Y Combinator: I want to apply to YC and I have 5 people on my team. we have two founders one technical and one designer but on our application I want to only include our three programmers one being a founder. Is this frowned upon at YC and does it hu...
YC are fine with three founders—no need to limit it to two.
[... 143 words]What is the role of angel investors? Do they help people who find themselves in financial difficulty relating to a business failure?
I’m afraid you are misinterpreting the word “angel” in the term “angel investor”.
[... 139 words]How do I explain my patchy job history to a VC when pitching investment?
I wouldn’t worry about it. Entrepreneurs often have patchy job histories. A VC is much more likely to understand “I took a few months off to work on a startup idea” than a regular employer.
[... 55 words]What company or service sends the most beautifuly designed emails?
Litmus (who provide an excellent email testing tool) send out the most attractive newsletter in my inbox.
[... 36 words]Oct. 26, 2013
Does y combinator review applications in the order they were received? If you apply just right before the deadline should you not expect your app to be reviewed before next week?
Appslications are reviewed in random order.
[... 43 words]Would you test your web app against simulated infrastructure failure?
I think this is a pretty interesting idea—simulating these kind of conditions isn’t easy so I imagine many teams don’t bother. If it was good (really easy to get started with, great control and reporting tools, maybe helped set up the actual tests to replay) and I trusted the service I would definitely consider paying for it.
[... 125 words]Oct. 27, 2013
What kind of website can be run on AWS for 10, 100, 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million dollars per month?
“But is there a simple way to say that for 10$ per month you can run website on AWS, that has X unique users and Y data transfer...”
[... 166 words]