crcarlson

I have worked ~ 10yrs in each.

Larger companies can have better structure and mentoring available. They can also have more resources and work on more impactful problems. Public companies can have more liquid equity if that is part of the compensation.

Smaller companies can often provide opportunities with more customer impact earlier in your career at the cost of drinking from a firehose and with less resources available. Total comp wise, on average, startups will pay less because their equity is often illiquid and ultimately worthless, however the home runs can pay dramatically more than a large public company will.

I self identify as a roboticist and a generalist. Holistic systems thinking can be very valuable to a broad range of businesses in my experience. Keep learning the mental and mathematical models of your field and it is likely to payoff.

This is a super neat idea. I have made wedding bands for friends over the years, I usually provided a stainless steel band the right size to wear for a week or two and found that often we would tune the sizes by 1/4-1/2 size or thickness. For expensive bands, it might be neat to offer a trial size for a reasonable fee since wedding rings can have a long life.

Congrats guys!

This may have been an unfortunate tactic used in the feud between Westinghouse and Edison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me personally I referenced the sections on coding conventions and defensive programming for new employees all of the time.

The other practice I picked up from Steve was stepping through each code execution branch in the debugger to informally confirm the correct behavior when I was building w/o explicit unit tests.

The site looks great guys, can't wait until I can order my cards and wrapping paper from chirply.

I recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality.

When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice to get out of slumps: usually) actively recharge with rest/sleep, when under the gun) coffee.

Congratulations guys! I like the redesign. I check the site for deals every weekend before doing the weekly shopping and always find at least one good deal. (I am still looking forward to seeing the expansion to Whole foods :)

I am sure you already know this, but https for the passwords would be nice to see when you have a few min to look into it.

Apple's design is well known and impressive, but even more impressive IMO is their ability deliver it with such incredible operational efficiency. My favorite insight from this article was that Sony was the production role model for Steve.

That is a nice machine. I have been trying to convince myself that if I want to build a custom set of cabinets that should build a 4x8 router to make the whole job easier :)

Yes my web page is lame and written by hand 7 years ago, but it does have a few pics.

http://www.crcarlson.com/Personal/cnc1/cnc1.html

http://www.crcarlson.com/Personal/cnc2/cnc2.html

I built two CNC machines. The first one essentially from scratch components: bearings, plates and beams. And a second higher performance machine by converting a manual machine to servo control. Hardware is fun.

We are working on an alternative http://gantto.com

It is still Beta and we are very actively working the kinks out. If you find it is close to serving your needs and send us your requests, we will do our best to make them happen for you.

One traditional way of dealing with this issue is to have a mandatory retirement age. Pre-tenure and usually pre-full professors usually do a good job of hustling for money and growing the university. And after attaining full titles the inertia of their work carries them for a while. Then some go on to continue being research (money) making machines and others start to milk it. Mandatory retirement makes room for more ambitious younger professors to bring in more work.

Running a research lab at a university is a lot like running a startup. I believe the professors should get to enjoy the fruits of being successful early in their career later on after being tenured. Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.

It seems like a half way decent financial model and an intelligent management of investments should be able to continue to make a system like this successful. The current focus on tenure as the problem is more of a reaction to poor financial planning by the endowment managers IMO.

In sports the ultimate prevention against doping (if someone wanted to prevent such a thing) would be to test frozen samples every year for say 20 years with progressively more modern technology and threaten to retroactively remove trophies or awards of those discovered to be clever cheaters. I wonder if there is a similar analog for financial institution managers where one would place their compensation in reserve and only dole it out based upon proper risk management behavior (as well as returns) as proven out by future events.

The best way to start marketing is to start listening to anyone who will talk to you.

Start with a list of needs or gaps that you feel you understand or are very interested in and then talk to anyone you can about them. During the conversation try take the person through the experience of the problem you are trying to solve. See how quickly they get it, or if you have to illustrate that it is a problem or need. Then ask them how they might go about solving the problem. Now bounce your solutions off of them and get their take. Now challenge your ideas with theirs, did something better emerge? Do this enough and it is called upstream marketing. If you want to get crazy, try to pick solutions that have an obvious way of making money.

If you don't have any ideas that you are in love with yet, start a bug list. Simply write down everything you find that bugs you, no matter how trivial or personal. Do this for at least two weeks to get comfortable with challenging the way things are. I find people's bug lists start getting interesting when longer than 100 entries. Pick your favorite bugs and brainstorm them into opportunities (solutions) then start talking to people. By all means, brainstorm with friends or business partners.

I typically talk to my friends about ideas first, usually over cocktails. Even my best friends are still pretty biased towards being supportive though, so they are just the first sounding board. It is important to follow up with strangers or other people not unreasonably incentivized to be nice to you. I used to hate going to parties with people I did not know, but now I find I am liking them more and more because I can learn a new perspective on what I ideas I am researching at the moment.

A great technique for finding people I had to force myself to get into is cold calling. I use linked in, my personal network and even just e-mail people on their contact pages to get leads. I am still surprised at the number of people who take me up on coffee or lunch for the promise of a discussion about something they are interested in. As a bonus I have met some great mentors this way.

I think this is great advice. Part of perseverance is not letting anyone else tell you what you can not do but even more important is not telling yourself what you cannot do.

Sorry, I am not really a surf guru. I do know some people who used to surf off of the Sunset, but I think they were beginners so I have no idea of the quality. I do hear that the Sunset is essentially covered in fog for most of the year though.

You might try padmapper to get a sense of what things cost to rent by area in SF. You can always guess a location, find a job, and then move later once you have more first hand experience with the location.

I personally like the mid Peninsula. It is warmer and sunnier year round than SF and centrally located for work in the north and south bay so I don't have to move around so much. Most of my single friends prefer to live in SF.

There are a ton of kite surfers and wind surfers in the bay and on the north edge of the city if you are in to that sort of thing.

There are a few people I know living in Santa Cruz and commuting into Mountain View or Palo Alto. The traffic is pretty rough, especially coming over the hill from SC, and generally on the order of an hour during normal commute times. For me, an hour each way is a lot of pain to endure 5 times a week. It seems like the SOMA and Mission areas of San Francisco are becoming quite popular for software startups as well which would be an impossible drive from SC, maybe doable from HMB but painful.

If you are hoping to start a company or join a startup, I would try and live as close to the other founders as possible. If you are hoping for a 9-5 type job and don't mind sitting in the car listening to music or talking on the phone, then the longer drives might be worth it.

In addition to essentially input-output test driven development at the unit, subsystem and system levels, I am a huge fan of "design by contract" for identifying both design and implementation errors. In my personal experience no test suite has been fully comprehensive and rigorously placed assertions, invariants, etc. pick up all kinds of design and implementation flaws. I find they also help for debugging by taking the guesswork out of many intermediate possibilities.

A lot of people ask me why I applied to Y-Combinator in my 30's with cash in the bank. For me it was because YC offers big picture perspective on internet companies I could not get for a better price anywhere else. I also guessed that the community would be good to know, like a business school class. Now having been through a YC batch I can say the money provided was the least significant benefit and that the advice and community turned out significantly better than I had ever anticipated.

I had a stack of books that I felt were relevant on the new developer's desk the first day they showed up. The exact stack depends on what you are doing specifically, I started from the Joel List: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

Each week during our 1-on-1 I would review various concepts from each of the books and suggest reading for the following week. It was the best way I found to 1) get them up to speed on best practices and my expectations 2) help them see that my suggestions were (generally) founded on data.

Great feedback. Thank you. I honestly have no idea what it would take to accomplish this but we will start looking into it.

This is a really good idea that seems to resonate with a lot of people. We can not do this yet, but it will be one of our top features to get to work on. Thank you for the comment.

1) Our hypothesis is that those who use Gantt charts and want to present them either to executives (more status and summary) or to a team (more details and dependencies) and are sick of strange screen shots or hand-drawing outcomes in powerpoint. 2) There are several different scenarios where Gantt charts are helpful. A typical example might be when one wants to model dependencies to figure out what the optimal order of execution might be or what the critical path might be. Another example is if one wants to set a target date and work backward in time to figure out when a decision or task has to be finalized. 3)We used them all the time in medical device, less so developing this software product with a small team...

We agree it is strange that this idea has not been done by now. We keep expecting that we will find it around the corner, but so far it has not actually shown up. Basecamp is a great product for many elements of managing projects, but I feel it still falls short on the visualization end of things. They look to pretty openly support 3rd party extensions and they are on our road-map of data to visualize.

Thank you for the kind wishes! We looked all over the place for inspiration for our site. Though the resemblence here is just a coincidence, clearly we like your style.

Good catch, thank you.