stefl

Okay, thought I'd mention it because it's had such a significant effect for me. So that possibly means that in my case the Auth0 <-> Instagram connection is something to investigate further.

I've managed to work around this by changing the API host name from 'api.instagram.com' to 'www.instagram.com' for the Oauth authentication flow.

Here's my fork for the omniauth-instagram Ruby gem, which is now allowing me to consistently log in: https://github.com/stefl/omniauth-instagram/blob/master/lib/...

Usually the idea of a hackathon is you make something in a short period of time. Because you can start now, before the event has started, really it's "Hey developers, please make some stuff with our API and then come and show us on the day of our conference". Or have I got this wrong?

It's a good point that you can't be responsible for the things that people who recommend you say online.

The idea is that you'd share the link privately just with people you really trust, so it's unlikely someone you don't trust would add their recommendation. I agree - you probably need to be able to remove any recommendations that you don't think are appropriate...

I think Rdio is great, but unless I'm missing something, this isn't meant to be a joke. It just needs a line next to one of the images saying something like "Ryan is significantly cooler than you can ever hope to be".

I agree! I think "experienced" is open to interpretation.

Anyway, hence we're throwing it wide to someone who's got a passion and an itch they want to scratch. It's a bit of a stunt, obviously, but it's with good intentions. Thanks.

On the "free" idea, our main principle is "give a leg up to the little guy", and we thought that one way of fulfilling that would be to enable people to have a place to sell their things that doesn't incur the heavy percentage that some of the marketplaces take. By using Paypal adaptive payments and Stripe Connect under the hood, we've managed to make it so that the processing doesn't even go through our bank account. So essentially Bitsy is a software service, rather than a payments processor. Much like other freemium models, there'd be opportunities to offer value elsewhere via pay-for services. That remains unproven.

Makeshift is a "startup of startups" - our intention is to build a series of digital products/services by experimenting with many ideas. So rather than going the traditional "let's do a startup" route, we're following the foundry model.

Paul Birch, my co-founder had been investing in some pretty well-known companies for a few years, and wanted to get back to the craft. I've been doing lots hacks, and wanted to do something around taking rapid experiments and turning them into businesses (if they worked). Nick Marsh, the other co-founder is from a design background, and was similar inspired about building a studio that builds digital products. He talks about the Eames Studio of the 21st century.

We looked at a number of hacks for our first product, and picked Bitsy because we thought it would be quick to hack (we were wrong!), had a good prospect of being revenue positive early, gave a leg up to the little guy (our core proposition as a company), and it was about enabling people that we know to sell digital products online easily.

I have a bunch of friends who could or should be selling online but don't know where to start. Being unable to price for the UK market, having to set up a paypal account, the legal issues involved, are all barriers for those people, and we wanted to make a very easy way for them to do that. With some elegance (Jon Gold is on the team), focusing on selling socially (via Twitter, Facebook and so on), and in a way that supplements the marketplaces. If you've done the hard work selling something, why give away a large percentage other than for payment processing?

From a US point of view, it probably looks like a solved problem, but in the UK it's really not. So that's where the initial motivation came from - help our friends, and people like them, make income from the digital things they make.

Being able to work with data like I work with code is something of a holy grail. I'll watch this with interest.

Ha - it gets a second chance! I think the main problem is that Medium can have multiple URLs for the same article. So it got picked up as an editor's pick and so has a different URL. Doesn't HN usually give a vote to the previous posting if the URL matches?

Very helpful for anyone looking to hire such a person too - almost a checklist of things to ask them about from their experience.

Indeed, I agree, although I'd argue that I do try to learn as much as possible from the experiences of others. I only very roughly covered what "make it up as you go along" might mean as far as agile is concerned, because so much has been written on the subject and I assumed some familiarity. Perhaps I could have emphasised that more!

I saw a message when I went to write this post on Medium that it doesn't yet support mobile/tablets very well yet for writing, so they've disabled writing on those devices. I'm guessing there are similar issues with reading from time to time, then.

Ah, yes. Sorry - I should probably have pointed out "not that kind of bubble".