OpsBug

Ops•Bug | ä-ps-‘bəg|; noun [Definition]: A bug found in the operations of a process. 1. The smallest unit of operational defect. 2. A class of conditions that accumulate and FUBAR your idea. 3. Millions of these might exist, but you need to fix the high priority ones.

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Inflating confidence and deflating ego

2 min read What are some thoughts that help in inflating confidence and deflating ego?

This lovely post is by one of my great inspirations Mr. Leonard Kim

Earlier today, I was asked “Why is ego bad?”

I responded with “It takes all you have and leaves you with what you were born with, nothing.” I paused, then thought about it, and then decided to tell him, “I mean, go try it. See where it gets you.”

He then asked me, “How do you define ego, Leonard?”

I responded, “Cockiness and arrogance.”

Confidence is saying “I believe in myself.”

Ego is saying “I am the best.”

Confidence is saying “I can do it.”

Ego is saying “I’m the best there is at this and no one can compete with me.”

To inflate confidence and to deflate ego, what I did was realized that I was human. I had my faults. I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t an almighty being that had all the answers to the world. Hell, earlier today I spilled some water on my shirt.

Would an almighty being be able to do something so stupid?

Of course not.

So, in order for me to maintain my confidence, yet not let my ego get in the way, I have to stay humble. I have to stay humble, hungry and honest. I can’t let my selfish desires get in the way. I can’t think I am superior to anyone else. I have to remember that we are all just terminals surrounded by data. At the end of the day, we’re all equals here in this earth.

We all have different experiences. We all have different skills. We all have different faults. That does not make any of us better or worse than anyone else. However, it just makes us different.

What works best for me is to wake up each morning and to think of three things I’m grateful for. By being grateful, I am able to realize that I can not make it in the world on my own. I need the help of others.

Then I follow it up with an attitude of abundance. I help everyone I can. Why? Because the more abundance I have, the more I will be blessed with true abundance of my own. My successes in life are not cultivated by myself. They are the universe’s way of providing what I put out into the world. I receive back what I give.

So, in order to be blessed with great things, I must perform acts of great kindness.

Otherwise, I will be consumed into the depths of hell, where my ego runs wild and takes all that I have worked so hard to build, and burns it all away into a fiery pit, never to be seen again.

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AWS for developers

AWS for developers: Ports

3 min read Setting up an AWS instance and opening ports in an AWS instance

I really enjoy using AWS as a platform for development. It saves me the hassle of installing everything on to my own computer which has windows. I mostly need windows for Office and also some drivers on my laptop that don't work well on linux. The final work can simply be pushed out to github or a code-repo and that makes it easy and functional to share code. Often times on AWS you need to run a server like Node.js and you have to open ports up. I wanted to do a walk through on opening ports because the process might be a little confusing.

So to create an AWS instance, follow this video which does an amazing job at showing how to create an instance, and then the rest of this tutorial will show you how to open up ports required for development.

After you're done creating an instance, you want to open up a few ports for some development services that you are going to use. First log-in to your AWS Console and click on Security Groups. When you created an instance, along with it you create a security group:

Photo credit: AWS

This takes you to the security group preview page which looks like the following. Select your security group and then the screen underneath pops up to show you what's in that group:

From here, select the Inbound. For my case, you can see a list of ports that I have opened up. Originally, you will only see the ports 80 and 22 opened up for the HTTP traffic and SSH. To run most servers, you will need to open up other ports like 3000 or 8080 as I have here to run node.js instances:

Click on edit to bring up the Ports modal to add a new port. For most purposes in the case of running a server, you would want to add a custom TCP rule to open up a new port that can take any incoming HTTP traffic for testing. This traffic will be outgoing from your browser on your laptop or computer and incoming for the server running on your AWS instance. The edit ports modal looks like:

Finally click add rule to add another Custom TCP rule, you can pick a custom TCP protocol, add any ports that you need and specify the source. For our purposes Anywhere would do, or you can add your own IP if you want:

Hit save and you're done! The new port should be active soon and your server instance running node.js or jekyll (for instance) needs to be restarted.

If you need help with any other ports issues, comment below or hit me up on twitter!

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Introduction to Gust: The startup portfolio

4 min read Using Gust to showcase your startup

Gust is an amazing platform for startups. Basically Gust allows you to create a portfolio-page for your startup that contains a profile of your venture and an overview into your business model (or anything you are comfortable showing to investors). Today I want to do a walk-through on Gust, the features it offers and how to use Gust as an entrepreneur tutorial o make the best of this resource as a progress-tracker (even if you're not looking for investments).

Photo credit: Gust

After picking an individual entrepreneur, you will be taken to the signup page that asks for your name, and other relevant information. Completing the signup takes maybe 5 mins and after that you enter your portfolio area. You can start filling up the popup box with the elevator pitch and some basic information about your startup. Realize that all of this information can be and most likely will be changed as you learn more about your idea and receive more validation on it. This is how the portfolio page would look like in the beginning:

You can start by editing the Company Overview and Gust already tells you what should go in there, "Tell the world what makes your company special." The idea with the Overview is that the customer pain that you are trying to solve should be fairly obvious to you and this part should be the easiest to fill up. Writing is an exercise and while writing about your company overview, you will come to a more coherent understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and the story behind why this company needs to exist. Filling up the profile, you can also scroll down to add any previous investors or more importantly advisers as you gather some around you. When people are not given proper direction to work in, they often get confused and when they get confused they look at their business card 1 for direction. When you as a founder get stuck and need advise, your advisors are there for you and that's the purpose behind putting them on Gust:

Recently, Gust added a new feature to upload a pitch deck. Using this, you can upload a pdf of your powerpoint and if you get a chance to meet with investors, you can give them access to your Gust portfolio and they can see it in action:

So far, we saw the first parts of Gust: The profile page and the pitch deck. What comes next is by far one of the most powerful parts of using Gust to develop your ideas: The Executive Summary which lists parts from the business model 2 in a question-answer format and asks more. These questions not only help you fill up the executive summary, but also the word limits force you to write in a clear, concise and coherent manner. The boxes underneath the question give some hints on what should be expected for each question:

The next section is financials, by far this is one of the most important sections as you start to get into your revenue plan and financial projections. Gust allows you to add previous investments or any other valuations that you might have incurred. The only thing to keep in mind is not to share more than you are comfortable with: Gust is not a platform to make your business on, but only to showcase it. That's why Gust keeps financials to minimal to what was your revenue and what your strategy is to make more of it:

Lastly, Gust has a feature to add any additional documents that you need to. This can include your NDA if needed, or any legal terms that you have created in terms of sharing agreements, or sales. Keeping those in Gust gives easy access to anything if needed:

Overall, an amazing platform to create and collaborate on startups. Please let me know if this tutorial was useful and any improvements on it in the comments or tweet to me!

Eric Reis mentioned this in one of his talks, I paraphrased the quote. ↩︎

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder . ↩︎

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Single point of failure

Photo credit: catchpoint.com

Living in one world, you develop an identity based on what you do, this can also be very dangerous because if the idea (the single node) that you are betting your identity on fails or more likely gets surpassed then you can imagine what happens to you. Diversity keeps life fresh, it keeps you motivated and also gives you bragging rights and all you need to do is to live a little more and get out of your comfort zone. Descartes realized the importance of our understanding being fragmented and it is really not much different from information silos that develop in a startup. It takes a person not ingrained into that system of working, a person who doesn't have a single point of failure to come by and disrupt the industry.

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Windows phone revolution

3 min read Predicting the future or defining the future? Windows phones.

Lately different platforms have adopted the windows mobile OS and the Nokia models in particular have dropped in prices1. In time, as this adoption continues 2 we can expect a few things to happen all of which will drive the ecosystem forward. Predicting how this will happen is a very exciting and incredibly important challenge in the mobile markets but it is also very easy to get wrong. I will attempt to speculate on a set of predictions that I hope come true, but only time will tell.

Photo credit: Tabtec

We are noticing more windows phones are coming in consumer's hands, slowly but surely. The sales and adoption trends will continue to rise steadily but at a slightly slow pace. More manufacturers will start offering windows phones, and updates that are released will make the interface cleaner, minimal, simplistic and a complete pleasure to use. After the interface has reached a stable state, the updated will start to focus on the core architecture.

The next stage will also be somewhat stealth. In this stage, developers, power-users and hobbyists will start to talk amongst each other about the growing windows platform and this will begin the hacking-phase. Power-users and developers will push the windows OS to it's limits trying to tweak every setting, app and so on. They will post their results in their blogs or other forums and that will result in a very clear cut expectations of the windows platform and what can be improved on. Microsoft will begin to take notice.

This next stage is critical and it is fueled by a viral app. With more power-users and developers talking about the windows phones and coming up with cool neat little tricks using the platform, some developers will take notice. Windows Store doesn't have a lot of the major apps, but it is definitely starting to have more users. This is not a bad thing - on the contrary, this is an opportunity for any good developer to make it big and have their app get far. One of those new apps being submitted is going to go on the windows platform and become absolutely viral. Because we don't have a lot of the trendy apps on the windows platform, if a developer can take advantage of their UI and design to make something unique, the app also doesn't need to have a ton of features, a few would be great just to start off. The viral factor will come in from the downloads and then the major news media will also start to take notice. This will draw out more attention to the platform which the app leveraged and showcased to get the viral effect.

With the viral stage going through the boom-cycle, Microsoft will also take notice. This is one of the times they will see the potential of what their platform is bringing to it's users. Based on that, they will dedicate more developers to the project and fixing up some fundamental features like being able to clean app cache and making an app to for that themselves. Once the basic issues are fixed up, it will only attract more indie developers who complain about their apps not making it big. After having seen previous success in the early-viral stage, they will want to jump on this boom-cycle too.

Major app developers will notice this build-up and it's time for the major changes. We just need one or two of the big apps to start developing for the windows phone and their competition can't ignore this and they have to start developing too. This will complete the cycle and we will definitely being to see more and more windows apps. People will realize just how easy it is to develop those too since windows OS's are native to most of us anyways.

I will try to make more revisions to this in the near future and now it's time to sit back and watch how this really folds out: Will windows OS platforms be as successful as I predict here? Time will tell!

Lumia 521 has been one of the most popular selling phones ↩︎

For instance lately by HTC One. ↩︎

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What is an MVP? Part I

What is an MVP?: I

4 min read MVP is not a smaller, hacked up version of the final product.

Most concepts from Lean methodologies have become buzzwords over the past few years and the hype cycle generally goes from not knowing the term to the term being overused without ever passing through the phase of actually understanding what the term does. The concept of MVP is no different, however some lack of understanding behind this term is understanding since the whole concept of an MVP is a bit abstract. So let's agree on the following definition for an MVP: The MVP is a prototype that you've made putting in the least amount of money and time to get initial validation for your idea.

This is arguably one of the prominent lines of thought behind an MVP but a lot of people generally interpret this as a smaller and cheaper version of the final goal, the two become intertwined. Let me present a case from Steve Blank's blog 1 that illustrates this problem very well:

I ran into a small startup at Stanford who wants to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a Hyper-spectral camera over farm fields to collect hyper-spectral images. These images would be able to tell farmers how healthy their plants were, whether there were diseases or bugs, whether there was enough fertilizer, and enough water. They would go out to a farmer fields on a weekly basis, fly the drones, collect and process the data and act as a data provider to give it to the farmers in an easy understandable form.

And from their ideas, they decided to make an MVP in the following form:

They concluded that the only way to get a delighted early customer was to build a minimum viable product (MVP). They believed that the MVP needed to, 1) demonstrate a drone flight, 2) make sure their software could stitch together all the images of a field, and then 3) present the data to the farmer in a way he could use it.

And they logically concluded that the way to do this was to buy a drone, buy a hyper-spectral camera, buy the software for image processing, spend months of engineering time integrating the camera, platform and software together, etc.

This approach is the pitfall that Steve is trying to illustrate:

The team confused the goal of the MVP, (seeing if they could find a delighted farmer who would pay for the data) with the process of getting to the goal. They had the right goal but the wrong MVP to test it. The team's hypothesis was that they could deliver actionable data that farmers would pay for. Since the startup defined itself as a data services company, at the end of the day, the farmer couldn’t care less whether the data came from satellites, airplanes, drones, or magic as long as they had timely information.

They had defined the wrong MVP to test first. What they needed to spend their time is first testing is whether farmers cared about the data. So I asked, “Would it be cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for? Couldn’t you do that in a day or two, for a tenth of the money you’re looking for?” Oh…

Photo credit

This issue is not isolated in that a lot of people fail to understand the idea of a MVP because it's very abstract. Situational analysis makes it very easy to fall into a local minima and (Conveniently you have no clue of your relative location in the landscape either) you confuse this local minima as the global minima and stay there 2. So I think part of the problem lies in how we define an MVP. If our definition can be updated, then I think we can apply it better and avoid the pitfall is that an MVP is not a smaller, hacked up version of the final product. Here's my first attempt to try and redefine a MVP:

A MVP is not smaller hacked up version of the final product but

MVP is testing your core-hypothesis (for instance, will customers care for farm data?)

The testing of your MVP is like steering the car while pressing the accelerator, the right kind of testing will steer you forward to learning whether this product can be made into a viable business. The wrong kind will lead you somewhere because you're still accelerating but you'll get off the road due to the fact that you're not steering properly.

From the points above, every single test of your MVP will give you steering and acceleration, not changing transmission to get the car started.

Blog post ↩︎

A landscape has high and low points, the highest point is the global maxima or inima, but it can also have other slightly lower points called the local minima or maxima. ↩︎

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A Beautiful Mind

Photo credit: Economist

Software eats the world and data structures the world. Social media enabling the deeper cultural change is just a straight-forward effect of data structuring the world. The data we obtain from a lower-stack layer of the underlying tech allows us to go a step beyond and add on a full stack 1 of non-tech components to our tech startup to offer a full experience. That's what will redefine human life. That's what will create a cultural change. That's what will solve the tough problems within our minds.

We often talk about concepts like user-experience in design, but social media is still growing up and social media has the power to create a better life-experience for us users.

Full stack startups are just becoming more well known. The idea is that first you build a core-service or use an existing idea as a core-service and then you start to build more and more components (sometimes even non-tech components) around it to offer a complete experience. ↩︎

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Sharpen the contradictions

3 min read Conflict management done right

Taking an idea from just an idea stage to application requires time and an incredible effort. Startup founders with their amazing vision to change the world draw to them a team of equally amazing domain experts who can help make that dream come true. When it's just a founder and a co-founder, the process of communication is easy, there's no formal process and no need for anything like that either. But as the team grows, there exists a greater chance to screw things up. Also because we have more people, communication becomes more challenging. Maintaining a clear line of communication and command are absolutely necessary so that your startup's operations can be as streamlined as possible.

The revolutionary thinker Karl Marx said in relation to labor and means of production: > We must sharpen the contradictions. (An excerpt from Ben Horowitz's interview)

I think the last three words: Sharpen the contradictions is probably the most useful three-word advice I can give to anyone, ever. The idea behind this is not in the same context as labor and capital but instead in terms of conflict management. As any team approaches a problem, it is natural to think about different possible solutions. Some of these might conflict with each other. Picking a solution, it doesn't matter if it's the right one or not, must be a careful choice because of the message it sends the individual who came up with the alternative. They might act in a defensive manner and that's natural. Conflicts over just about an issue can come up in a startup but what's critical is how you as a founder handles them.

Photo credit: Rick Schupp

The absolute worst thing you can do is try to soften the blow, or sugar-coat the issues that have come up or accumulated in a team as a result of problems such as picking one solution vs another. Similarly, the next worst response is to promise one of the parties that you will favor them the next time. This will only lead to more politics emerging in the long-run as your startup scales. Trying to go for a short-term resolution of the problem will only cause more trouble in the long-term.

When a conflict arises, sharpen the contradictions. Sharpen the underlying causes of it and bring them to surface to resolve them. Don't sugar-coat them. Don't hide behind the, "Oh they will naturally resolve themselves over the time" because they won't and what you will be left with a unmotivated and dysfunctional team looking for silver bullets.

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben mentions that startups should stop looking for a silver bullet. So what's a silver bullet? From a team-member standpoint, a silver-bullet is a personal opinion that would fix all their problems. Often silver bullets are external solutions to internal problems. Let me explain, Ben talks about his time at Netscape when they were making money selling server products and Microsoft had just announced that they would launch their server product for free with the windows operating system. The employees came up with all sorts of solutions like let's acquire a company that has X features which will save us. The solution here was not to acquire another company but just buckle down and build a better product.

The team starts to look for silver bullets and fantasy solutions when they are not working towards a clear vision. Eric Reis said in one of this talks that when people get confused about what to do, they look at their business card. Oh my business card says Senior Architect, so let me go write some code. Without really understand why they are doing that. These are results of not sharpening the contradictions, each one of them absolutely lethal, so get to sharpening them.

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Data structures the world

Data structures the world

5 min read Software is eating the world and data is structuring it.

Marc Andreesen coined the phrase software is eating the world to signify how software is seeping into our connected world and our lives. Technology has been playing a critical role in just about every industry and we will only see more of it as software is eating up the new industries. Often, new paradigms occur when someone bringing software to an industry that was not using it and almost instantly they see growth because prices drop and they can increase their market share.

The Internet is a vast place right now. We have almost too many websites, blogs, social medias. The rate at which information is flowing out of these sources is absolutely unprecedented. Companies concerned with capturing as much data as they can to make better decisions are now becoming interested in creating Big Data infrastructures that can make it possible. So what is Big Data? It's a commonly used buzz-word signifying data that is characterized by the following four attributes (Also called the 4 V's):

Volume: This represents the scale of data or just how much of it is under consideration. Big Data is at the scale of 100 Terabytes or more and this data is coming from every imaginable source, from traffic lights and music downloads to medical records.

Velocity: This represents the speed at which the data is coming through to your organization. The speed matters here because the collected data has value during a critical-window of time. The amount of time it would take to capture incoming data, convert it into something more meaningful and store it in your warehouse is far longer than the critical window. By the time the data is in the warehouse, it has lost the incredible value it has during the critical window and that's why now we have tools like Storm that can do real-time analysis as the data is coming in.

Variety: This represents the different forms of data that are collected. Some data is nice and gets collected in a form that meaningful operations can be done on it right away. Other data from a different source is all over the place and we need to pre-process it. This should seem completely natural simply because how many sources we have for all the data that we are collecting.

Veracity: This represents the accuracy of the collected data. This is a more abstract concern where the organization collecting the data is not sure how accurately they have collected the data that they will be using to make informed decisions

Photo credit PTI

In cases of blogs, new and interesting content coming out on the Internet is like a shower that shoots jets of water from the ground. We only ever come across a small portion of all the jets of water that come up and our search queries only reveal so much that is in our attention span. But there is a lot of interesting data out there, and now we are seeing a hierarchy emerge out of this. The first level is the content itself spread everywhere on the internet. The level above this is the emergence of organic repositories which favor good content places like HN, Reddit, Quora and so on. These services gather some of the most interesting content submitted by the users and with the voting systems, we see a portion of submissions reaches the top.

The user-base for these services keeps increasing and more and more content is being submitted every day that reaches the top. The amount of content that reaches top is so much that we are now seeing a third-level of services that pull data from central content-repositories like Twitter and make a small tailored subset of it available to the user in some form. A perfect example of this is TagAndSee which takes tweets from a specific user and converts them into a slideshow playlist so that a user can see any content from just one user. These third-level repositories can be thought of as extensions to SEO, often search is only limited to what we look for and hardly anyone goes to the second or third page on google to look for related content. To create a network-effect where we not only find what we want, but also related good content, these third-level can be incredibly useful. As the size of any of these levels increases, we see a higher level emerge tailored to just a specific subset of content from the level underneath.

Currently there is a push for building APIs, services or infrastructure to make more and more data searchable or actionable. The idea here is that we will soon have even more data than we do now, and the more we can act on it, the better we can predict the future. This push on making the data more searchable and available creates these hierarchies whereby good content is created, then submitted to a central repository which filters a portion of it to present to users. As their size grows, other services are being built on top to filter even more content and present even smaller subset to users.

In this sense, data is structuring the world. We are building services around data and data in-turn is presenting opportunities to structure our society around it and create those services. Data is parallel to software, as software eats the world, it craps out more and more data that we can act on. In a sense, we are trying to overcome the limitation of our own mind in terms of finding content that is helpful to us but don't necessarily occur to our brain and become searchable. The future of Big Data is very likely to be different from how we manage it today, but without a doubt:

"It is an exciting time to be alive" - Norman MacAfee

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Anatomy of a blog: Writing Component

Photo credit:thewritingfortress

Stacks: This is a feature in the CMS that will broaden it from just a blogging engine into a full writing platform. The idea here is that of post organization. Not all posts need to be put into the publish queue. Some posts can remain in the private queue, with that, why not organize the private queue as Private/Software Ideas, Private/ToDo List, Private/Grocery Items. This allows the writer to use their same lovely-platform to do more than one things and the blogging platform becomes more centralized. Subtle and Medium offer this as you enter an idea in the idea list. It gets stored, the right hand side contains a list of published posts. That's a stack containing posts that got published. How about adding multiple stacks? This can be used in a very interesting fashion. Stacks can contain multiple files. If the developer makes the stacks modular as in anyone can design a stack of posts and you can upload them as bare-bone templates into your own writing platform and use them, a marketplace selling the stacks can be created which adds business value to the CMS. This adds value to the content precisely because theming is limited and therefore what is being sold in the marketplace is high-value content-templates that will make the writers more attached to the platform itself and the stacks thus increase adoption of the CMS.

Writer: The Writer is the last sub-component, a distraction-free writing pad that contains the title from the idea-list and an empty page underneath to complete the idea. This is the most important part to the content-creator, making it distraction free allows them to experience the pleasure of sharing their writing with others. Being that we are developers, a nice to have feature would be to enable syntax highlighting using highlight.js and check-lists to create ToDos.

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Anatomy of a blog: Admin Panel

Anatomy of a blog: Admin Panel

3 min read What the admin panel for a blog should look like

The Admin panel is the management side of the blog, this component presents to the admin what settings are available for customization. The sub-components in the admin panel are critical to building the blog for the reader, the background mentioned here will be used extensively later on in this guide. Admin panel can be further divided into three main sub-components:

Modules and pages: Extremely lacking in some platforms. Modules extend the functionality of a blog There are two that are absolutely critical: Cateogories and Archive (for reasons we will discuss in the upcoming sections). A more pertinent issue that can be addressed here is page creation. To keep your readers coming back for more, you have to engage them in a more personal manner. One of my inspirations Leonard Kim does this on quora with just about every single one of his answers. He gives a really personal side to his answers and in a blog, the writer needs to do this not only with the content but also be adding an About Me page where the reader can learn more about the person they reach to for help with questions or concerns in their mind. That's how the reader approaches your blog, seeking for answers and a great writer doesn't give the answer but guides them to it. Simply having an About Me page is not enough, it needs to be clearly visible to the readers too. This is a huge jump in making that personal connection to your readers and creating a brand out of your writing.

Settings: This sub-component more than any other fulfill the traditional role of the admin panel. Besides the obvious features such as changing password and google analytics ID, deciding what to make available for change can be difficult. Theming options and customizations for themes should be kept limited, for instance the settings is a perfect place for custom colors for hyperlinks, post titles, background, title of the blog and so on. This goes back to the original focus of making the writing a brand, not their themes. Comments should be managed outside the CMS and disqus seems like the best option for that. Analytics should be handled outside the CMS as well, perfect example is just to offer the analytics ID and that's all. This prevents the developer from having to worry about spam, and complicated analytics. The settings side also should allow the admin to list the social networks that they want to make available to their users as channels to reach them. Font-awesome seems like the best way to do this, and the developers just need to provide the linking information to the respective profiles.

OpsBug: Too much complexity and grabbing too many features to get right. Follow UNIX philosophy: Make one tool do one thing right. For example: Why handle comments within the CMS when you have disqus?

Photo credit: yuiblog

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Anatomy of a blog: A guide

Photo credit: StudioBanks

This series will have four posts:

Part 1 discusses the admin panel

Part 2 discusses the writing component

Part 3 discusses the reading component

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Competitive advantage of design

2 min read The importance of design for a startup

I came across a great post Peter Omvlee's on Design as a differentiator and wanted to expand on that to address a more fundamental problem that startups face which is too much focus on design. I read a lot of startup blogs and very often the advice that I see floating around is along the lines of, "Design is really important, put a lot of focus into it, design trumps all

Peter's post points the exact problem with this approach. Basically Peter explained in his post that he had never tried Unread (an RSS-reader app) because he had been using Reeder which served his purpose just as well. His main problem with Unread was that it basically put a new theme on the same feature-set that was present in Reeder. The heart of the problem here is that design will not give you any competitive advantage if you don't have any persuasive features. There are millions of apps out there and to stand out as a good product, there is only one way to do it: Make good features and test those on a small early-adopter set of customers.

Trying to use design for competitive advantage is an abstract topic, anyone can take either sides of the topic and argue that design is important but what does this mean for startups? Let me try to explain the importance of design with a different example, one which I hope you all can agree on:

Focusing a lot of your time on design is like writing optimized C-code. Initially when you write code, it's not very optimized but an expert who cares about things like memory allocation and execution time can inspect the code and refactor parts of it to give it the best possible optimizations. Here's the problem: If you are writing hello-world in C, writing it optimized or non-optimized will give you the same results. For a hello-world program, no matter how optimized it might be, it is fundamentally useless and the same goes for creating a product with different design but similar fundamental features. Design is an optimized boost that will only kick in if your program is under heavy load. When you are doing initial testing for validation, you won't have heavy load, maybe 10-50 customers. In that time, focus on getting the product right, with the right amount of features and then you can spend all the time in the world on good design.

> OpsBug: Too much focus on design and too little on product features and customer development.

Photo credit: Hongikat

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Proletarian effect in programming

5 min read Emerging middle-class of programmers

Marxist theory redefined the term proletarian as the social class that doesn't own any means of production. In Marxism, means of production are incredibly important and can be roughly defined as the resources needed for producing goods (such as generating wealth, tools, machinery). The means of production are the assets that a society has in the form of infrastructure capital and natural resources.

The proletarian class includes all those who expend either mental or physical labor to produce economic value, or wealth in non-academic terms, for those who own the means of production. It thus includes knowledge workers and white-collar workers who work for a salary. This last aspect of inclusion is critical to us because a lot of developers fall into this category. The more pragmatic corollary is that a vast majority of today's developers who fall into middle class from an income status are really proletarian.

Andreessen Horowitz famously coined the phrase "Software eats the world" which signifies the increased use of technology and the penetration of technology in just about every aspect of life. One can imagine as software technologies grow more into our lives, so will the amount of programmers who write them. Technology will be one of the cornerstones of our future society and there is no doubt about that but what about the programmers who will write them? As technology and software becomes ubiquitous, so will those who can work with them and optimize them. Currently, development costs are very high however in near future, the costs will become lower because of an increasing influx of developers. Programming will become the skill of the century and we can imagine in a short period of time, a new middle-class based on software development will arise. For such social developments to take place, the prevalence of software development will peak with a few major themes at play including the wide use of programming leading to its adoption in more areas and the speed of development decreasing dramatically to show it's potential benefits to an industry.

At this peak, we will begin to see for the first time, the costs of development going down due to increasing competition. Many efforts and programs to teach coding at a younger age at some schools are increasing the rate at which developers enter the industry and over the time this will become even faster as more developers work on new technologies inviting more to join them in a cyclic loop.

In some sense, the owners of means of production are visionaries who can see a major change coming in near future. They take actions based on their intuition and either start a new trend or help nurture it during it's infancy. We might expect this peak to come about in another 10-15 years and concretely what that means for developers now is to become familiar with as many technologies as possible. During this peak of software development, we will notice the costs go down and the supply of developers increase. For developers who currently start following the best trends and become experts on them, this adoption will be incredibly beneficial in the long run. Let's look at this coming age at large of programming in terms of Crossing the Chasm.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore presents to us a customer acquisition model. In this mode, as an app is released, the first customers to try it out are those innovators or power users. Then the app needs to make a jump to early adopters who are also similar to the power-users and generally this segment is acquired by the word-of-mouth from the power-users. Then comes the big chasm that tech-startups need to cross to get the first early majority. But instead of using this to understand customer behavior, let's try to use it to analyze how the proletarian effect will happen and how the developers will be impacted.

In this transforming proletarian society, the ones to own the means of production will be the ones who currently start following and learning the best tech trends, i.e: Early Adopters and Innovators. This is the same group that learned programming and software technologies currently and as time went on, they kept up with new innovations. More concretely, this can be a group of people who start learning javascript, and then become more proficient at it. Following that, they get into freelance development work. Then into a popular open-source project and eventually become one of the core-members. This group has been following all major developments that happened over the time as the age unfolded into the programming boom. Due to that virtue, they will be the ones who control means of production.

As the developer boom happens, more people would want to join in order to easily find jobs and make more money. In the chart, this categorizes everyone in early majority onwards. They drop into an already competitive market where programmers will be relatively easy to find. The Chasm here is the opportunity to gain means of production in near future. In the near future, we can expect to have a middle-class emerge comprised of programmers, and those who learn the trade will fall into the proletariat of cheaply-available programmers. However the future technology markets will have a very different support from venture capital and the capital markets itself would have gone through a multitude of changes, so who knows who the proletarian effect will change the world.

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Rule of 2

If you think you have a decent idea, spend just 2 minutes internally fleshing out the idea.

If still think its a good idea, give it 2 hours to more thoroughly brainstorm and consider the tradeoffs.

If you still think its a good idea, give it 2 days.  At this point, you might want to get other people involved for consultation.

Still? Give it 2 weeks. At this point you want to be fairly serious about coming up with a pitch and prototyping the product.

Finally, 2 months. At the end of 2 months, you want to be relatively sure you are fully committed and can make this into a business.

This progressive strategy for committing time allows you to explore new ideas while also constantly re-evaluating if the project is going to be successful and worthy of more time.

Taken from Jeff Nelson's answer on Quora.

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Roles in startup

I've talked about this previously in a DevOps post but here it is again in a more tongue-in-cheek fashion

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Tools of Trade

This is by far one of the best resources and the largest list of tools for software developers. Dive in and enjoy!

Tools of trade on GitHub