emilam

I've been paid $100/hr with no proof of experience or that I could finish the project.

My school has been primarily blackboard, but some of my classes were actually ported to canvas at the beginning of the spring term. I have to say canvas is a lot friendlier and actually a joy to use. I dont know if its how my school has Blackboard signed up, but just the fact that I stay authenticated for longer than 10 minutes is a nice step up.

Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.

I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.

I'm a big fan of IEEE Software magazine. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/software/home

They have a lot of good authors who focus on different aspects of design and architecture.

I also enjoyed Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck. It is not so much on the architecture of the system, but focuses on the implementation of classes and routines.

Are they a VC firm you would like to work with? It is as if you are taking investment money from them if you are an EIR. I would do the same due diligence you would do if you were taking capital from them.

Talk to some of the companies in their portfolio and see what they think of the VCs.

"... programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake." - The icing on the cake is the important part. A lot of communities forget the base steps such as the meetups and the forums and they jump right to the funding. This limit the growth of the entrepreneurs and the community just as Brad discusses.

Creativity and persistence are great, but the time still needs to be channelled in a constructive way. Otherwise you end up with products no one wants or ruining something with new many scope creep and feature bloat.

I've enjoyed the hackers and founders meetup in mountain view. I really do enjoy how unstructured it is compared to Launch Up and the Web Startup Group.

Another good group is the CTO Breakfast hosted by Phil Windley at the Novell Cafeteria http://www.windley.com/cto_forum

This reminds me of when Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from their users' kindles. It seemed to just piss users off, and is kind of a scary feature.

This is probably a good sign for your app and will improve your "whole product". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_product

I don't know how disruptive your app is, but Geoffrey A. Moore goes into detail on this in his book Crossing the Chasm. He discusses how the support from others(such as this book) boosts your product in the eyes of your customers and future customers.

Are those of us who got denied on a waiting list if spots do open up?

My favorite is "I can't believe I only got 3 hours of sleep last night because of that party".

Now you can claim you are cool cause of your lack of sleep and because you don't need to study.

Shipping a product is a hard thing to do. It takes a lot less work to make a copy of x in 23 hours. The actual "work" of a product often comes right before you release the product. The last 10% of the project is 90% of the work most of the time.

It seems they are doing it because they don't have the willpower to put the finishing touches on and have a shipped product.

I thought this previous post covered it pretty well. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162371

They recommend why's guide to ruby which is a fun book to read through even if you do understand basic concepts. http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

There is a HBS Press book that goes into this in detail. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/142214657X?ie=UTF8&tag=...