When I imagine what my dream job would be, I picture something that doesn't yet exist. I honestly don't even know what to call it. I do know what qualities my dream job has: Qualities of my dream job Freedom to choose what I work on. I want to be able to work on anything at any time. Ownership proportial to my contribution (literally, I want shares). No managers. I don't want to manage anyone, nor do I want a manager. Consistent paycheck, like a normal job. Even at the best tech companies, there are no positions that have those qualities. Oh and I forgot one other thing: I want everyone I work with to have a job with the same qualities. So, is this dream job even possible? That's what my team is working on building. We're creating the ...
My start-up group is in the process of building our team for our latest project (working title: "Devshare"), so I'd like to take a few minutes to explain the software stack we're designing for future newcomers. Wait, why Node.js? Good question! There are a lot of ways to write a web-based software platform. Ruby on Rails seems like the most popular solution for most sites, and I think it is good for most things. It probably would've been a good choice for us, too. So here are the biggest reason's why I chose Node.js: It's just Javascript. I know it well, and chances are you do, too. There's no magic. Rails has too much magic (in my opinion). It's asynchronous by default, which encourages scalable design. If you're looking for a more thorough explanation of what's so cool ...
I'm not an expert at start-ups, but I do have a few failures under my belt, and there was one common issue that each of them had to address: how to divide equity. Guess what? It's not that easy. For some groups, disagreement on equity can even stop work or kill the project entirely-- which is insane given that the intent of start-up equity is to enable contributions, not prevent them. Trusting people is hard We've all been burnt in one way or another by trusting the wrong person at the wrong time, so it's understandable that we have a difficult time trusting eachother when working together to build something new that is potentially very valuable. It's interesting how different this atmosphere of subtle mistrust is from the atmosphere of the open source world, which on the whole manages to ...