dvo

I've seen too many poor re-implementations of relational database functionality in the application layer to ever recommend it as a standard starting point. Doesn't the concept of not prematurely optimizing apply here? Solve the scalability problem when you need to. That may mean moving some join functionality into the application layer, but the solution to any given scalability problem depends on the specifics of the problem. Just throwing out database joins as a rule seems drastic.

In my case, I would probably not benefit dollar for dollar from an unlimited vacation policy. I would either take less vacation or not benefit from the payouts. That's not to say that unlimited vacation is a bad policy. It might be a great policy, and I'm sure it depends on the details of how it is implemented and the culture of the company where it is implemented; however, it is certainly possible that the practical outcome is more of a net benefit for the company rather than the employees.

Since many startups these days are advertising unlimited vacation, I'd love to hear from both founders and employees about some of the practical ways in which this policy plays out.

On the topic of massive Perl scripts, I once worked on implementing a system that was an unholy maze of Perl, Pro-C, Pro-COBOL, Oracle Forms, Java, and PL/SQL. It was the first time I'd ever had to read and write Perl and Pro-C. I even remember reading Pro-COBOL at one point to debug a problem. Good times.

Since the above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I'll clarify that I certainly think we should strive to write excellent code and constructively help each other to that end. We should probably be very slow to dispense judgement but quick to share carefully considered, contextually relevant advice. You really do need to understand the context under which something was written to make any useful statements about goodness or badness (which is still probably not that helpful a measure). Something that looks bad at first may be fantastic work considering the circumstances under which it was written.

It all started when I saw a post about purchasing country-style boots from a discount country store. Then it got worse with posts promoting Walmart. I believe those posts suffered from the problem noted in this article. It looked somewhat like a friend promoting Walmart.

Does anyone know if there is a way to hide this stuff?

Certainly, I think it is important to practice self-awareness and self-assessment on a daily basis, but there are no shortage of good ideas on a strong startup team. Every few days someone has a great new idea that could be transformative, and from my experience, you try to question yourselves and your assumptions all the time (hopefully in as brutally honest a way as is necessary, though you sometimes wonder if you are fooling yourselves). Perhaps reality is simply more incremental, though it can look dramatic and transformative after the fact. Every sprint planning meeting and every board meeting is an opportunity for rigorous assessment. You just have to work hard to maintain self-awareness, to see things from a truly unique perspective and make big changes when necessary. Outside advisers certainly help. Otherwise, we are human after all, and it is easy to fool ourselves.

Do you really think the use of dynamically typed languages is an important enough factor to require justification? I don't want to imply that the distinction isn't significant. I'm sure it is. I just haven't had any experiences where it came into play when making a language choice, and I'm curious whether you can elaborate on the need for justification.

I've done consulting, startups, and free work on side projects. At this point, if I find people and projects that meet my requirements, I'd probably prefer to become a co-founder and make a real go of it. I don't think I've ever taken a small amount of equity as compensation for substantial unpaid development work. Under those circumstances, equity is not tasty. I'd rather do well-paid consulting work or find a great team and go all in.

Online marketplace for high quality woodworking plans and software on iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Windows for exploring woodworking plans in 3D: rotate, zoom, isolate, explode, etc... We released the IdeaRoom software very recently, so we have a lot more we plan on adding like resizing the project and customizing wood textures.