charls_Aws

Excuse me for saying this, but you don't have to put that disclosure sentence with every comment ...(personally, I find it kind of irritating)

While there was programmable web for getting the documentation and alternatives for the APIs. These guys have a small set of API for now, hope they can add enough to really be of good value.

I am not sure if that is the big use case for me. I liked using it to try out various APIs and then to compare what might suit my use case. This helped us to somewhat narrow down on the image moderation API integration we were looking for in our startup.

Absolute. I wish engineers could use better examples to explain capabilities.

Ordering a pizza as shown in the above example is very contrived, no one needs that, a GUI is much better to execute this use case. But the power of chatbots will light up if it can answer 'Would this pizza be too spicy?", "can you deliver this after 4pm?". What I mean is when the chatbots can take over more of customer queries which otherwise might be directed to the store via phone call. Or something which requires deep knowledge of the product and when not every corner case can be put on the GUI menu.

Have been doing this for about 8 years. As others have mentioned here is something you can follow:

1: Break tasks into as small as you can, say a few hours to a day.

2: Add time estimates for writing the main code, writing tests, doing integration test and code reviews separately.

3: Also take into the account the time which might be wasted to unknowns, things which you know needs to be done but do not have much idea on how you would do that. One way to refine this would to be to talk to other developers who might have some experience doing this part of the task.

4: Account for 'unknown unknowns' these are the tasks which will show up but you can't really predict these upfront. Any software developer who has done commercial software can tell you that for every project 10-20% time is used in this which we did not even anticipate. These things always show up.

Now if you break down tasks into these parts, add up the time and then add a 'buffer' say 10-20% on it and give your estimate. I am sure you will face pressure to reduce estimates, but having a break up allows you to provide some support to the numbers you come up with.

Hope this helps.

I rem that YC startup school lecture], I guess what the speaker missed out was that it also takes a lot of skill or luck to actually figure out which startup to work in. Each of these startups claim to be rocketships but in reality, only maybe a 1% of these ships even take off the ground.

I personally know a few friends who have wasted their prime years working in startups which never took off.

a lot of these people sitting in these big building, read a lot of hacker news if they are experienced engineers, browse facebook if they are young/new hires, read WSJ/Time if they are business folks or read Quora if they are having a mid-life crisis. [Based on real data on walking around the floor 10 minutes back] :)