Inspiring talk by Kyle Vogt, co-founder of Justin.TV/Twitch.TV

Truly inspiring talk -- especially where he dives into the trough of sorrow. Here are the notes I took in regards to the 16 lessons learned:

Buy catered lunch -- employees would be waiting at long lineups or walking far just to get lunch -- Keep them at the office so they can socialize.
Use Google Apps -- Simplifies email, calendars, and document sharing.
Use data-driven development -- metrics on new features / AB Test
Use hiring screeners
Keep your job interviews short
Don't hire a PR firm -- Marketing associate instead, leveraged his own connections..full time thinking about the product
Put one guy on fund-raising -- This should be a focused initiative
Work from home -- You don't need an office nowadays, keep costs down... need one room for a separate phonecall
Use the cloud while you're small -- don't buy actual hardware unless you're a hardware company.
Listen to your users the right way -- Users can tell you what's wrong..not what they want, observe the pain points
Use a .com -- .tv was a marketing failure because people would go to justintv.com.
Be transparent with employees: how much longer can the company survive with current funding?
Don't outsource your core components
Hire specialists when needed (if no one has domain knowledge, build or buy decision)
Hire people smarter than yourself
Have a plan for actually making money

Cheers,

Jaime

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TextMate Tutorial: How to add a Strikethrough keybind to your Markdown bundle

Markdown is awesome for quickly generating Readme's on Github. After looking at other projects using the strike tag, I've decided to create a custom keybind for it in my TextMate Markdown bundle. Here's how:

1) Click the + sign on the bottom left and click New Command.
2) Paste this into the editbox and make sure you name your command "Strikethrough".

For the input field, select WORD in the drop down.
For the output field, select "insert as snippet".
As for the keybind, you can totally map it to whatever you're comfortable with but I chose Command-D as it is the same thing in Microsoft Word.

Cheers,
Jaime

Plenty of Fish - Lessons Learned Meetup

Today, I had the fantastic opportunity of going to a retrospective by Plenty of Fish. As you may know, Plenty of Fish is the largest online dating site and it was all started by a local BCIT graduate named Markus Frind.

Below are notes that were taken on my iPhone. I do apologize as I am continually editing this blogpost.

What is Plenty of Fish? An online dating site.
Why enter the dating market? Back in 2003, it was the only thing that was interesting to build. Markus already knew ASP but wanted to learn more about building web applications with ASP.NET and improve his skills on his resume.
How do you deal with the network effects problem? In the early days, Plenty of Fish gained traction through Vancouver and Toronto. There wasn't any silver bullet or magic around it -- Plenty of Fish heavily relied on organic user growth and SEO. The focus was to retain users more than go out and acquire new ones.
What are some early challenges you faced? Markus actually ended up doing every…

Using Git Hooks: Prepare Commit Message to automatically prepend branch names on commit messages

When you're practicing branch by feature with distributed version control, typically you'll get assigned a ticket or issue and that ends up being your feature branch. Instead of always typing in the branch name in every commit, you can edit your Git hooks (specifically prepare-commit-msg).

Assuming that this is a brand new git repository:

mv .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg.sample .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg
vi .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg

Edit the file by commenting out what was originally in the file and then add this:

Now, whenever you make a commit, it should show up like this in the log:

Since GitHub and Bitbucket both support Emojis inside commit messages, you can do something cute like this

Want more emojis? check out the Emoji Mardown Cheatsheet!

Tales of the CodeStorms

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