The Technical Co-Founder

The jm3 guide to achieving technical startup success without losing your soul

Redis Stats in R

A History of ‘Pivot’ Press

New York’s business press like the WSJ and Forbes are classically slow on the draw… :)

Don’t Use Cucumber

Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-coders-writing-tests (and send me some fairy dust if you are!)

37 Signals

RIP Mister Dan Sicko.

Honored awesome collaborator, culture commentator, and friend. You acknowledged me here:

Techo Rebels acknowledgement

I acknowledge you, here. Thank you for all the awesome things you did.

Yours with notes of celery and anti-matter,

jm3

Ignite Speed-Talks: Lean Startup / Lessons Learned

Had a great time last night at Ignite: Lean Startup, a collection of speed presentations patterned after the Pecha-Kucha style in San Francisco, organized by Eric Ries

Everyone did a great job. Public speaking scares most people, and timing your presentation to slides that auto-advance is tough. These were the best of the bunch:

Gleb Budman (@GlebBudman) from Backblaze

backblaze server

Gleb shared an awesome walkthrough of how Backblaze created a 70 TB server in a plywood box.

Jess Lee (@jesskah) from Polyvore

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Jess gave a great talk on agile product development using “Fake Doors”, a technique that we also use at 140 Proof to evaluate demand for a feature before building it.

Shivani Khanna (@sk_shivani) from Fliptoast

fliptoast

Shivani gave an inspired, funny talk about the advantages of being lean without a full dev team.

Paul Howe (@phdc), from BlueSpark

bluespark

Paul shared an awesome example of lean startup prototyping using GreaseMonkey, which is a favorite trick of mine.

The ‘Your Business Card Sucks’ Soundboard

“Your Business Card Sucks!”

“Don’t let not having the tools be your trepidation!” — The Business Card Guy, at your fingertips.

Prank calls will never be the same again.

businesscards.jm3.net

Your Business Card Sucks - The Soundboard

Internet nerds will be familiar with the classic “Business Card Guy” video, a bizarre Youtube cult classic of a motivational speaker- type guy berating some bozos about the low quality of their business cards, and the high quality of his own ridiculously glossy business card.

Business Card Guy

Now the best quotes from this internet classic video are yours, for free, and are just a click away, for all your prank-calling and office hijinks needs. Introducing:

The HTML5 Soundboard for the Business Card Guy

HTML5 is pimp

Featuring:

Check it out, share it with friends, amaze your mom, baffle your dog: 

The HTML5 Business Card Guy Soundboard

If you haven’t seen the original video, you can watch it here:

License:

The Unlicense (aka: public domain)

Geeky Things I’ve Done This Week

  • Learn to use Vagrant to manage local virtualized dev environments
  • Found and fixed an internal performance bug using NewRelic
  • Deployed 3 Rails migrations

Jamie’s Awesome Internet Fame Talk: The JM3 Summary

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I have the rare pleasure of working with Jamie Wilkinson at 140 Proof, and Jamie has the rare talent of being an expert on ”internet fame.” He gave a great talk at the Vimeo Festival on promoting your work online, and I’ve summarized his presentation for those of you who are too lazy to watch the whole thing. Link and the full video follow at the end.

1 - Write Blog Poetry

Encourage many interpretations of your piece by combining multiple catchy headlines (some used in post), pictures, video w/music.

2 - Ride the Wave

Make work that’s relevant to existing online things that that are already popular and trending (remixes, riffes, parodies)

3 - Publish Early and Often

It’s impossible to predict what will become a hit, so don’t bother — instead, release as quickly as possible — ideally spend less than a day on a project — in order to increase the chances of pick-up.

BONUS 1 - The “Eggbasket Theory”

There are no “influentials”; anyone can launch an awesome project that goes viral, don’t focus on being the “influential” guy, focus on making LOTS of projects.

BONUS 2 - The “Min. Effort / Max. Output” Curve

Strive to hit the fast, valuable left side of the curve, quantity is better than quality.

BONUS 3 - “Pre-Document”

Telegraph your intent first with a page / blog post / video (ala Kickstarter), and you might even get press even before you start

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE:

THEN GET FAMOUS.