We’re a Venture-funded team of 6. We’re young, fun, we’ve got some rapid growth in our target market, but we’ve got a chip on our shoulders and a lot of work to do. We’ve been in the game for a few years, we earned our wings during Techstars Boulder 2008.

Do I fit the profile? If you’re young, hungry, do fantastic work, are looking to make an impact and make some new friends, then you just might be the hacker-ninja-badass we’re looking for. For a list of technical skills, check the deets here: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/eng/2218416800.html

What’s in it for me? Great learning experience and the chance to get hooked into the NYC startup scene. A chance to sharpen your skillz, make a few new friends, and be a part of something big. Oh, and we’ll pay you.

Sounds sweet, what’s next? Send us a blurb about you, your resume, and a link to some of your work. If we like you, we’ll reach out and invite you to our sweet Union Square Office for coffee.

Know someone who might qualify? Bonus points / drinks on me if you pass this post around.

Each of these businesses are top 100 sites in the USA and have “grown up” in the past 10 years. Each screenshot is half “retro” and half “current” (either left/right or top/bottom). Click on a screenshot to see the comparison full-screen.

Apple: 2000 vs. 2011

Yahoo: 2000 vs. 2011

Wikipedia: 2002 vs. 2011

Twitter: 2006 vs. 2011

Paypal: 2000 vs. 2011

Google: 1998 vs. 2011

Facebook: 2004 vs. 2011

Ebay: 2001 vs. 2011

Blogger: 2000 vs. 2011

Youtube: 2005 vs. 2011

Wow, how the internet has changed in the past decade! I wonder what the faces of these businesses will look like in 2020. One thing is for sure: There will be many new additions to the Top 100 Websites in 2020!

A Computer Circuit

One of the amazing things about our human mind is that it enables the capacity of abstract thought. As software developers, we are taught to program computers. Doing so, we are learning to disembody ourselves from the physical everyday world of our lives and speak the language of bits and bytes, 0s and 1s. We use our capacity for abstract thought to put ourselves into a world where statements are strictly true or false, the boundaries of objects are well-defined.

Tron legacy was in many ways a disappointment. The plot left something to be desired. The one-liners that the main character muttered between the action scenes were awful. The main character was obviously cast for his chiseled-in-stone good looks rather than his acting ability. The “world” that was envisioned was very 1980s science fiction. But, in other ways, the Tron sequel was a compelling follow-up to the original. The special effects were cool. And the imaginative genius of the Tron series is that the writers took some chances with a vision that was not easy to visualize. It was probably non-trivial, to say the least, bringing to fruition that vision on the big screen.

“I tried to picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. What would they look like? Chips, Motorcycles.. With circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thouht I’d never see. And then, one day, I got in.” ~Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy

I think the coolest takeaway from Tron is the imaginative aspect of the series. As a computer scientist who is deeply immersed in scaling a business, I tend to think about things as systems. When I’m approaching a new problem, I tend to ask the heavy, fundamental questions first. What function does the system serve? What are the resources involved? How are the they distributed? How was it built? How is this system maintained on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis? Who are the stakeholders? Who are the benefactors? How does the system protect itself from internal or external threats? What are the changes to the system over time? Are they accelerating or decelerating? How is the performance of the system measured?

A city

At my work at Ignighter, it’s a necessity of my job that I’m in the habit of asking these questions every day. We’re beginning to scale. Things are growing. There are many deltas, some expected, some unexpected. We track everything we are able to. It’s my first project that’s lasted more than 3 months where I’m the “maker”. At a high level, I understand all the moving parts of the system. I’m intimately involved with each of them on a day to day basis. And if I neglect a piece here or there, I’ll have to revisit it. Sometimes you get a text message at 3am telling you that something is broken. Those times are the real “oh shit” moments, but if you are prepared you will handle them quickly and concisely. And you learn from your own mistakes. It’s very “Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance” for the 21st Century. Maybe some day somebody will write a book about being a startup CTO called “Zen and Digital System Maintenance”.

The Evolutionary Tree

It’s the end of the year. Holiday Season. A lot of folks are reflecting on their lives and making resolutions on how they would like to see them change. Maybe to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but this year, I’m thinking about my life as a series of systems. The relationships I’ve built or destroyed, the projects at work that’ve grown or flailed, the daily habits and hobbies that make me who I am. They’re all systems. Some are big. Some are small. Some important, others not. With the gift of hindsight, you see that you neglected some and over-invested in others. Some are changing on daily, weekly, monthly basis. Some, even longer terms.

The Solar System

The coolest thing about being at a growing startup is that you learn to recognize the patterns around you, and you are empowered to act upon that information. And that’s what allows you to make each year better than the prevoius.

2011 is gonna be a hell of a year. I’m stoked.

By the way, Ignighter is hiring. If you want to be in the know when new positions are opening up, keep in touch.

Photo Courtesy flickr.com/re1000

It’s nice to remember that you’re not alone. Especially in a city as impersonal as New York. Every week, new web services are launching here. They face huge challenges, just like you and me. Coworking spaces and startup accelerators are launching in New York City. The community is growing. 2010 is a fantastic time to be in NYC tech.

It also helps to remember that overnight success is preceded by years of trying really really hard. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t, but most of the time you need to really earn your overnight success. If you’re like me and you haven’t yet, I think Jerry Garcia said it best when he said, “Keep on truckin’”.

Given that the vast majority of google users don”t opt-out of the recording of their web history, and that the Justice department in the USA has subpoenaed millions of search results from Americans, I find the following Google search autocomplete endlessly fascinating.

In each of these queries, the bare intention of the typer is so obvious to a 3rd-party reader.

It”s ironic that, by even typing the above queries into the search box, these users put themselves at risk of being caught (read: the exact opposite of getting away with their various indiscretions/vices). Whether search history is made available to a snooping spouse via a guessed password, or it is made available via subpoena from a federal, state, or local government, that information is in most cases available. It”s alarming how few people know their actions on the web are, in fact, actually trace-able back to them.

Think before you type.

Here we go:

1. Version control, and the tools to make sense of it.

I can”t emphasize how important good version control is. We use subversion, although git is popular too.

Versions is a great tool to navigate your codebase through time, across files, or between revisions.

2. Infrastructure Monitoring

As newly minted CTO, you”re serving a lot of roles. Programmer, database admin, sometimes design, and system administrator. As system admin, your #1 priority is to keep your site online. I recommend munin if you”re just starting out, nagios if you”re a little more advanced. Both are free, and can notify you via email or TXT if something becomes wonky with your server.

3. A good web host

4. A good IDE

Since the success or failure of your newly minted startup will likely depend in some part on the speed you can get iterations out the door, you”re going to be doing a lot of coding. Since you”re going to be doing a lot of coding, you”ll likely spend a lot of time in an IDE. Because a good IDE can save you a lot of time, it”s probably worthwhile to do some analysis on the different products out there. We used to use Adobe Dreamweaver, but have since moved over to Coda.

5. Requirements management software.

Good requirements management software can save you a lot of time and help you work out the kinks in the communication process between the business unit and development unit in your company. I recommend pivotal tracker because it”s free and has only a small learning curve.

Bonus: Photo editing software

If you are trying to add INSERT DELAYED queries to your application, and your rows are not getting inserted into your table, then you should check out your global status and variables:


mysql> show status LIKE ''%Delay%'';
+--------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+-------+
| Delayed_errors | xxxxx |
| Delayed_insert_threads | xxxx |
| Delayed_writes | xxxx |
| Not_flushed_delayed_rows | xxxx |
+--------------------------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

If you are seeing that Delayed_errors is being incremented, and your query works without the ”Delayed” element of the statement, then you might want to look into your table structure. Something about having an ”auto_increment” table and replication enabled caused my delayed inserts to fail.

Turns out if you add:

ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ID=ID+1;

to the end of

INSERT DELAYED INTO `Table` VALUES (NULL, ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'' , ''val'');

to get

INSERT DELAYED INTO `Table` VALUES (NULL, ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'', ''val'' , ''val'') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ID=ID+1;


it works. Turns out there was a duplicate key on the autoincremented ”ID” column of the table.

Did you find this useful? Extremely boring? Leave a comment and let me know:

1. Cleanup the Desktop.

There are two main things I”ve found really helpful to eliminate distractions on my desktop:

1. Archive every file that is not a part of my current task.
   I put these files in a subfolder called ”file”, which is then subdivided into the folders ”notes”, ”pix”, ”projects”, and ”misc”.
2. Get a clean dark wallpaper. The key here was finding a aesthetically pleasing wallpaper that I don”t find distracting.

Rethinking my desktop has allowed me to easily find files that are related to my current task, and eliminates the clutter of the dozens of other items that used to be on my desktop.

2. Rethink the dock and learn to love Spotlight.

I used to be guilty of dock clutter. Every application I”ve ever used would be in my dock, irregardless of if I”ve used it in the last hour, day, week, or even month. I think I may even have had iMove and Garage Band in my dock (two programs that come installed by default on OS X, which I”ve never used).

To clean up this area of my computer, first I needed a way to easily start programs that I was going to remove from my dock. (Turns out Spotlight is a great tool for that. More on spotlight, below). Then, I removed all items from the dock that were not vital to my workflow on a daily basis.

Here”s what”s left: Chrome, TextEdit, Gmail, Adium, Terminal, Activity Monitor.

Spotlight is a nifty feature of OS X that allows me to easily search my mac for any program, folder, or any other document. It”s stupid-simple to use: Just press Apple-Space and type the name of the item you want to find. (Also worth checking out: QuickSilver)

3. Minimize the menu bar.

This is an area that should be relatively easy to clean up. To reduce distraction, I removed all items that were not vital to my workflow. Here”s what”s left: Wifi, Battery life, Clock, Spotlight.

4. Learn to love keyboard shortcuts.

I”m a big fan of using keyboard shortcuts to manage all the application windows I”ve got open. To configure this feature, open up your system preferences, click ”keyboard”, and configure your keyboard shortcuts.

The big to-do with keyboard shortcuts is to build a mental map of them and work them into your work flow. I can”t do that for you, but I can recommend some of my favorites:

• Alt-Tab to switch between application windows.
• Apple-Space to invoke Spotlight
• F10 to show all windows
• F11 to show Desktop
• F12 to launch Dashboard
• Apple-H to hide current program
• Apple-M to minimize current program

5. Check out Fluid.

Fluid is a great app for turning any web site you commonly use into a desktop application. In my opinion, this allows much greater workflow management because I can manage the new application separately than all my other browser tabs.

How about you?

What are your favorite keyboard shortcuts? Application management techniques? What saves you time? Please post a comment via Intense Debate, below:

Figure A: Ambient Data-Porn @ Ignighter

Years ago, when I ran a web hosting company, I remember I”d hooked up my home computer to chime with a ringing cash-register when the site made a sale, and to play a less pleasant buzzing sound when someone emailed a complaint.

Nowadays, I”m more serious about collecting and reporting data on my product. Figure A, above, is the trends viewer we use at Ignighter. It”s nothing more than a regular pc with a web browser displaying some charts on updates every few minutes with latest site usage data, that we put in a prominent location. Pie charts, line graphs, and segmented data, oh my!

It”s ambient, it”s visceral, and it”s useful because it allows impromptu team chats about trends in site usage during the day.

And I think that”s a big win.

Bottom line:
Data is only useful for driving decisions when it”s relevant, easy to understand, and all around you. Make it stupid easy to see trends in your product.

He”s a physicist by calling, so it shouldn”t have been a surprise, given the context, when he quoted the founder of classical physics, Sir Isaac Newton:

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

~Sir Isaac Newton

That got me thinking. My grandfather was a pilot in the air force. He lived through the Great Depression. He ran a gas station in his later years. He had to work very very hard. My father worked years and years as a programmer and then a graduate student to get his PhD and, even then, it took him a decade to get his own team and make a name for his work.

Taking a look at my peers in the startup world and what they”re working on, it is clear to me that the business landscape has changed so much since the days of my parents and grandparents. Startups like Foodzie, DailyBurn, Devver, EventVue, Occipital, Retel, and Next Big Sound are creating massive disruption in their respective industries. In some cases, they are creating new distribution channels or even entirely new products. And, many of them are in their twenties and thirties! How is that possible?

They are standing on the shoulders of giants, of our forefathers. People like Linus Trovalds, the creator of Linux. Some are built upon the backs of hundreds of open source programmers, who write and refine languages like PHP or Ruby. Or, on Sun Microsystems., or the work at DARPA, or at Bell Labs. All of these projects created more value than they captured. And, all of those disruptive startups are dependent upon commoditized electricity, hardware, data storage, and internet access, among many many other things.

It”s truly amazing to take a look back and reflect on all of the things that had to”ve happened in order for the tech landscape to look the way it does today.

Sometimes, in technology, it”s easy to focus on the things that aren”t working. I know I curse AT&T every time my iPhone fails. And I poke fun at the Microsoft Windows machines my buddies in corporate America have to use every day. But, on the other hand, you have to respect what those companies have done to grow the technology sector.

Life in tech today is pretty great. The internet is very much a meritocracy, and the barrier to creating a company has probably never been lower.

Take some time and reflect on all the things that had to go right to get you where you are today.