Finding the Next Great Opportunity

Head of Amazon Web Services on Finding the Next Great Opportunity

First Round Capital - The Review
April 17, 2013

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With the frequency that you hear “cloud computing” mentioned at conferences and in the tech press, you might believe it’s just a tired buzzword that salesmen use to induce boring people to get excited about buying enterprise services.


James Hamilton wants to convince you otherwise. He approaches technical innovation from a skeptical perspective, with a flair for hands-on empiricism. As a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team, he’s been hard at work building the basic technology of cloud computing before the first impeccably coiffed consultant first uttered the phrase.

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Lessons from Pixar: Why Software Developers should be Story Tellers

Lessons from Pixar: Why Software Developers should be Story Tellers

First Round Capital - The Review
Martin Reddy, May 9, 2013

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Film Concepts in Software

“ Talk to users in their own language. Use concepts and processes that your users are familiar with in order to communicate software designs as naturally as possible. ”


It's often said at Pixar that “story is king” and that this is the primary reason for Pixar's success. Appropriately then, all films at Pixar begin with the Story Department, where the initial script is developed and expressed on storyboards to refine the look and feel of the film.

In many ways, designing a great software product is like creating a great story. It’s not surprising that modern agile processes refer to “user stories” as a way to capture requirements from the perspective of the user. So very early on we took this concept to the next level and created a Story department in our software group.

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The one cost engineers and product managers don't consider

The one cost engineers and product managers don't consider

First Round Capital - The Review
Kris Gale, VP Engineering at Yammer, June 20, 2013

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I talk a lot about costs. I believe good engineering is about finding the most cost-effective solution to a problem, whether that cost is measured in dollars, hours, morale or lost opportunities. Some costs are paid immediately and some are assumed as debt. Everyone in business knows this intuitively, but some costs are less obvious than others, so it's important to point them out to your team.

Among the most dangerously unconsidered costs is what I've been calling complexity cost. Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

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Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

Life predates the Earth!? If this is true....wow!..

MIT Technology Review

The Physics arXiv Blog 

April 15, 2013

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As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so.

But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.

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The Uses Of Difficulty

The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.

Ian Leslie
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2012

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Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: "ease of use". When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.

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The Nine Circles of Hell: Front-End Development for Sharepoint

My condolences.

If you’re reading this book, it can logically be assumed that you’ve been tasked with completing a project that involves working with Sharepoint; in fact, it’s probably safe to make the assumption that you’re a front-end developer who stumbled upon this text after hysterically Googling “MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT SOME1 PLS HELP,” tears streaming down your pudgy cheeks, fat fists wildly bashing the keyboard of your MacBook Pro. 

a quick-start guide
by J. Ky Marsh
jkymarsh.com

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All is not lost, my friend. I found myself in exactly the same position some time ago; well, aside from the crying, anyway. What are you, some kind of wuss? Christ.

The fact of the matter is that up-to-date, clear-cut information on front-end development for Sharepoint is frighteningly difficult to find. Sharepoint itself is chock-full of bad practices and front-end code taboos that will leave you scratching your head (and potentially crying, since you’ve apparently shown a propensity for doing that, Nancy).

Furthermore, Sharepoint’s default front-end code (that is, the HTML, CSS, and JS that are used by default within a fresh install of Sharepoint) is so horrific that you’ll likely begin immediately assessing how to rewrite or overhaul the existing code in a desperate attempt to bring it in line with modern web development standards.

Don’t panic. I’m here to help.

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How to hire a product manager

It's been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company

By Ken Norton

Group Product Manager, Google

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At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5-8 interviews a week. It was a never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I wasn't always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I was usually on the interview team.

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