And what for a +40 someone? Can't go and waste time at school again.
I got contacted by my cofounder. Back when Rails was hot, he looked on forums, found some posts of mine, investigated further and contacted me.
Didn't work out though. Project got started, has been making profit for years, but not enough to drop the daytime job.
I find that reliable people my age really have such an outdated view on business that I know in advance we're not compatible... younger people lack experience.
I'm thinking lately of switching roles. I had been looking for a non-tech cofounder, as I've got more than enough coding/sysadmin experience. But the last 7-8 years, I'm the director of a small business (not my own), learning marketing, pr, bizdev, hr, ... so I'm thinking I might rather look for someone to handle the tech part.
Is this going to be a real product, or is it a joke? 20% of me thinks it's a joke that I'm not fully getting (I'm not native English speaking, so that might be the problem)
If it'll be a product: why not focus more on what sets it apart from the competition?
Hi, it IS a real product :) You can try the beta version, you just need to sign up on the website.
About what sets it apart from the competition - maybe we should add something like this: for example itemz have the feature of showing all task from different projects at once, on the main board. That's pretty unusual and we probably should write more about things like that.
Thanks a lot for your comment :)
You do have extensive logging, especially around the buggy code?
Do you have source-level debugger that shows your variables and that can step/trace through code?
These are the 2 tools that I have found most indispensible when squashing bugs in the past. Somehow source-level debugging seems to have disappeared from the developer's toolbox the last couple of years. I am told you don't need it anymore as you can write tests (???).
Supporting your suggestion; I find that GDB is the best weapon in my arsenal. I am also fond of assertions that end the app and squawk loudly if a constraint is unmet.
Yes, we once had a more or less finished base product. But at that time my co-founder had to start doing sales so he shited his pants and suddenly invented a whole new addition that would surely sell.
I worked my ass off, and in the end when it was released, it turned out more than 90% of people only use the base product.
I think I'm still mentally recovering from that one and it it was the initiator for the spoiled relationship with the co-founder.
It takes courage to contact people, ask for a meeting and tell them what your plans are.
But it beats spending months working on something no one wants.
I once failed a test because I wasn't good at abstract thinking. And they decided to be a good developer, you had to be a good abstract thinker. At that time, the test was already more than 10 years old.
I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with.
One of the references also stated that I was really good at thinking 'out of the box', finding a solution while everyone was blindly staring at the problem. That is abstract thinking, no?
I'm CEO now... And it might be me, but I've worked with some abstract thinkers and whatever they cook up hasn't resulted in anything concrete yet. (except for a huge consultancy bill on occasion)
If you're good at abstract thinking everything is the same. Even being the same is the same as not being the same ;). Really a good skill for software design, as you can build a lot of functionality that looks different on the same base and save a lot of time. Your software will also become easier to maintain and to extend.
Thinking "out of the box" is creativity. This isn't the same as abstract thinking, though you can "fake" being creative by seeing things are the same and proposing a solution that worked for the other problem.
It is my experience that purely abstract things are not usable in the real world by real people. They simply won't get it or making it do things is way too hard (inner platform effect). A good piece of software has a abstract core and a very concrete interface.
Blah! I just did some abstract reasoning tests and i had an excellent score. Now, the tests on the net might be crap... Bu who says the tests HR uses aren't?
People aren't even able to make a good estimate of how long a project will take, or if it will even get finished. So how can they determine which kind of people are a right fit to work on those projects?
I got contacted by my cofounder. Back when Rails was hot, he looked on forums, found some posts of mine, investigated further and contacted me.
Didn't work out though. Project got started, has been making profit for years, but not enough to drop the daytime job.
I find that reliable people my age really have such an outdated view on business that I know in advance we're not compatible... younger people lack experience.
I'm thinking lately of switching roles. I had been looking for a non-tech cofounder, as I've got more than enough coding/sysadmin experience. But the last 7-8 years, I'm the director of a small business (not my own), learning marketing, pr, bizdev, hr, ... so I'm thinking I might rather look for someone to handle the tech part.