abbottry

"The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness" by Todd Rose.

Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'

Came here to mention this exact thing -- you don't even have to be an attending, my wife and I have this loan through a different company, and she is still a resident. We had banks fighting over our mortgage. No money down, no PMI, and they portfolio the loan instead of selling it right away like a standard mortgage. We live in a Detroit suburb.

The largest issue I've run into with respect to issue tracking is making it accessible and easy to use/understand for the entire team. Non-technical team members don't have GH accounts, they don't know if what they are seeing is a bug, they don't know if its already been reported (because they don't understand the root cause), always seem to be afraid of doing it wrong.

Further, a tool that tracks the resolution of issues into a simple to read 'This was just deployed' or some kind of digest would be insanely useful. It's not an easy task, but so often someone is waiting for a fix, or waiting for a feature, and then gets upset or something gets overlooked because they didn't know the feature/bug was deployed.

Something simple, with an app-store style approach to customization could be really handy.

Should checkout http://scienceexchange.com/ while not the target, you can get access to super computers through the marketplace.

I don't think you understand. There is NOTHING in these houses. Its old, rotten wood, and crumbling brick.

The purchase of homes in Detroit is NOT to sell or repurpose ANYTHING.

I work downtown, and drive through these neighborhoods every single day to avoid traffic (thanks Google!).

Property taxes in Detroit are surprisingly expensive.

This assumes that each home has not already been stripped of copper, which is not the case. Most of these homes are bricks and wood.

Did rails development for 6ish years full time, about 6 months ago I joined a startup using Django. The admin is QUITE nice, its very flexible in terms of models but as well as templates, allowing you to override specific blocks from a standard template, rather than copying a template.

This looks like the very beginning of the Django admin, something that Rails could seriously use. Admin functionality isn't meant to be user friendly, its essentially a CRUD system that mimics your schema.. something that would be quite handy in Rails. While I've always painfully just created my own admin for every project, I've used https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin a few times, and known others who have as well. It's great, but again not nearly as simple as Django.

Personally I would love to see a Django Admin style tool for Rails.

Of course, you do kind of get this with Rails Scaffold, but its not admin, its all user facing as its produced with the model and controller, far from ideal.

Facebook Logo: https://www.facebook.com/images/fb_icon_325x325.png

["cross", "sign", "plus", "pound", "medic", "first", "icon", "jesus", "christian", "aid"]

Can you offer your general location? Might help those of us with connections that might offer employment opportunities you'd be interested in.

40 comments, not one trace of "Congrats", who cares what Obamas intentions were, for any founder out there you know this is exciting -- HN is becoming difficult to read.

Congrats guys, it has to feel great having something like this go so well!

As Miami as the Miami Dolphins.. are you suggesting that Miami is drastically different than it's surrounding area.. the city limits of Miami are quite large, and have many different types of neighborhoods. I love that everyone that lives in Miami thinks they are different, and never want to be grouped with 'outsiders' (folks that live in neighboring counties), but anyone that doesn't, considers all Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach the same. It's always referred to as SFL, South Florida.. All the startups, investors, etc mentioned in articles like this are not located IN Miami.. they are spread across SFL.

I wish I could say the same.

There are plenty of great places to build your startup. I don't think SF is one of them, but I'd live on the street in SF before living in Miami (again).

This is great! If only Hipchat would allow for image uploads... would love to send the image to hipchat with the push notification message

"However, the reality is that you need engineering more than they need you."

Whatever. I like the article, it makes some good points.

It's hard to write an article explaining one side of a situation like this without 'taking sides'.

I think the the PM role/title has become such a generic position that articles like this one are really taking a stab at anyone non-engineering, not that I am upset by it.

As a startup founder, meshing technical teams and non-technical teams is extremely difficult to do. The work environments, thought processes, personalities, etc. are so different.

I think side projects are very important. It's funny, a lot people have a hard time distinguishing between free time and work, without realizing that for some of the best engineers out there, they are the same. Just because my laptop is open, doesn't mean I have to be working. In the evening, on the weekends, or whatever you consider your free time to be, YOU go to movies, go out for dinner, go to the gym, go skiing, etc. But, as someone who really likes to build things, the time I would be doing those things (yes, I do those as well), I'm writing code.

The key is to hire people you trust to make good decisions when it comes to side projects, and the amount of time they spend on them.

But also on the employers, have you created and maintained an environment that someone wants to work for?

One of the things I think about most often while hiring, because it is true for me is that, I would be half the developer I am without side projects. My college degree and job I had out of college taught me nothing but concepts and theory, and how to be micromanaged. I WANT to hire people that have side projects because it means they ENJOY what they do, they dont just do it because someone is paying them to.

I recently wrote about this myself: http://ryanabbott.com/side-projects-learning-experience-vs-d...

This is the 500friends model right, lure people in by offering start up money after 2 years, create an environment that people dont want to leave.

Problem is the agreements were discussing typically have a 'non-compete' for a period of time. So you can't create anything that resembles work you were doing at your employer for typically 2 years. For this reason :)

"unsafe experimentation with new technologies" love this, couldn't agree more with this statement.

It's likely a different way of thinking, possibly an old vs. new. For me, if I work with people that are hacking on cool stuff, publicly, its a great recruiting tool, its reassurance that you've made a great hire, and its confidence that they code going into production is battle tested in more than just localhost.

This is very common. I think the key is that most of them wouldn't bother acting on it, UNLESS you were successful and for me, that was the biggest reason I was afraid it -- it scared me to start anything at risk for success.

Of course its a red flag, but when you're coming out of college, being told that jobs are hard to come by, do you really have balls to throw out red flagged opportunities? It's up to us as individuals to know and accept it as a stepping stone rather than a career.

I have features I've built, and entire products for that matter, that were nothing more than a Frankenstein of things I've picked out of side projects. Sometimes I learn 2 things completely separate from each other, and then 6 months down the line have a realization that those two things would be amazing together in application.

Product focused or not, there is no reason that you should prevent yourself from learning just because it doesn't have a TLD.