Calling all procrastinators
Posted by Jon on Mar 31, 2008
Tomorrow (or today technically, but it’s not the next day till I wake up as far as I’m concerned) is the last day to submit an application for TechStars. Since I’m a big procrastinator I thought I’d write this post for all the other procrastinators that haven’t quite gotten around to submitting their application. I’ll start off with a short and sweet bit of advice: make sure you get your application into TechStars! Alright, so you’re not convinced. Well, hopefully I’ll be able to better explain why TechStars is so great in the rest of this post…
I’m not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that TechStars literally changed my life. It opened the door to a completely different direction in life that I’d always wanted to experience, but probably never would’ve (or not till I was quite a bit older) if it weren’t for this program. You see, I was that young kid that had all the ambition to take over the world. Entrepreneurship was something that always fascinated me. More specifically, tech entrepreneurship, but really the entire concept was something I was always passionate about. I’m that kid that read every biography for tech entrepreneurs: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, even some of the shorter lived, but deep impacting stories like the history of Napster. All these stories got me excited because they were about people that were able to make a huge impact with relatively simple ideas by pursuing them relentlessly and passionately. This constantly led me to spend my days dreaming about what my big idea was going to be. I even remember joking with my parents about how I was going to need to hurry up and find it so that I could pursue it and drop out of college before I graduated like many of the greats did. The truth was, however, that I grew up in a small town in Illinois where no one knew about this world, and I had no idea how to get into it.
Then, through a rather random set of events, I and the rest of my team got accepted into TechStars. This one event completely changed the course of my life. I was going to Grad School and had lined up a great internship with a large company. It no doubt would’ve led to a cushy job that I would’ve been happy at for the foreseeable future had I wanted to. I know, however, that I never would be fully satisfied by this type of job. I’d still spend all my free time dreaming about my big idea and how I was going to break into that world. Of course, none of this came into fruition as part of accepting the TechStars opportunity involved backing out of my internship and moving out to Boulder, CO.
This was a completely new experience for me. I knew no one out here when I first arrived (I hadn’t even met my other team mates in person when I arrived…). I was quickly won over though. The area is gorgeous and the people are amazing. Everyone just wants to help everyone else out, and it seems there is very little competition among the people in the area. The other TechStars were also very welcoming, friendly, and smart. The thing that impressed me most, however, was the mentors. These are crazy smart people that took time out of their obviously busy lives just to help us out. Many of them even began to take a personal interest in us and our company; even going so far as to seek us out at times! Where else can you get that kind of help from this caliber of people?
The end result is that I was able to finally find my way into the world of entrepreneurship I’d always dreamed of. It was even better than that though, because I didn’t have to claw and scratch my way in as most starting out do…instead I was all but carried in. It really is an amazing thing. I also was given phenomenal resources through the mentors in the program, many of which still help me out long after the program has ended. And this doesn’t even include the great resource that the other TechStars teams turned out to be. They’re all smart guys that are great for getting feedback, helping to prepare for our investor pitch, and even helping work through coding problems.
So basically, what I’m trying to tell you is that TechStars was completely amazing. It literally took my life in a new direction (and a good one at that!) So go ahead and submit that TechStars application you’ve been putting off and let TechStars change your life too.
Stats by email
Posted by Jon on Mar 30, 2008
As I’m sure most people do, I like to keep track of my Feedburner subscriber count. I don’t, however, want to display the subscriber count widget on my blog, and I definitely don’t want to have to log in to Feedburner just to check the current count. It’s just too much of a hassle and the truth is that I just end up forgetting and end up ignoring my blog. So instead, a little while back I setup a script to run once a week and go fetch the stats for my blog’s feed and email them to me. Getting the stats in my inbox allows me to stay current without having to remember to go check the site…if nothing else the email reminds me that I have subscribers and should probably get another post out (of course that doesn’t mean that I always do)…
All in all it’s the best method for me. I get the stats in my inbox and I don’t have to remember a thing, but I still get a constant, weekly reminder that I have a blog and that there are a few people that have (for whatever reason) subscribed to the feed.
I decided tonight to modify the script to email me my Twitter follower count once a week as well. It’s another stat I’d like to keep track of, but don’t want to go to the site to check. And of course another reminder to stay active. If you even remotely care about these stats I’d highly recommend doing something similar. It’s quick to setup (if you want the script I’d be happy to share it), and for me at least it makes all the difference in the world. I never used to keep track of these things, maybe check it once a month at most, and now I can get updates as frequently as I want without having to remember…freeing my mind to focus on other problems. Anytime I can do that it’s worth it for me.
Bug squashing…
Posted by Jon on Mar 18, 2008
Bugs are a fact of life as a developer…there’s no avoiding it. The really frustrating bugs, though, are the ones that drive you mad and then turn out to be the simplest little thing. This is where having another fresh mind on the problem can do wonders.
I faced such a bug today. I’d been looking over it off and on for a couple days and just sat there staring at the screen KNOWING that this code should work. I’d run over it 1,000 times (approximately) in my head and run it through a battery of test cases trying to isolate the problem…all to no avail. I then asked the always helpful Josh Fraser for a hand in hunting down the culprit. He sat down with me, looked over the code, and fully agreed that it should work exactly as I’d expected (though not how it actually was). He had asked me to run through some test cases, so I asked him for a couple minutes to allow me to hunt down all the samples I’d made the previous couple days. Just to try to avoid a bit of embarrassment, I decided to look over the test cases and test code I’d setup before I called him back over. During this process I realized that there was a slight difference between my test code and my code I was debugging that must’ve happened from an inadvertent file copy of an old version or something…in any case the problem became immediately evident after this realization. Sadly, I then had to swallow my pride and call Josh back over and explain my blunder…so much for avoiding embarrassment. Of course the embarrassment was a small price to pay to resolve the frustrating problem in my book.
So the moral of the story? Get someone else to talk through the problem with. Even if they don’t provide the solution, there’s a chance they’ll help you find it yourself by re-examining what you “knew” to be the case.
Whiteboards change everything
Posted by Jon on Mar 15, 2008
We’re still getting settled in to the new Intense Debate offices. Definitely an interesting time.
The other day we finally got our whiteboards put in (actually they’re psuedo-whiteboards, but that’s another topic for another day) and it’s completely changed how we work. Every meeting I’ve had since has in some way involved a whiteboard. Every new coding project (I think) has also leveraged the whiteboard to outline objects, work through a problem, etc.
It’s amazing what a difference such a simple addition can make.
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