I’ve been wondering if Twitter is useful for mainstream people now that it has gone mainstream.
I used bufferapp on Friday and as an experiment posted a 2 pleas for help. Bufferapp calculates the most opportune times for sending tweets.
It’s been great for driving traffic to my blog but not so great with actual engagement.
Here are the results:
0 Retweets
0 Replies
24 clicks
The tagline for the scifi film, Aliens, was “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream.” Twitter is very much like space.
Is my job going to be outsourced?
1. Your job is something that the cool kids aren’t doing.
It’s no longer important to just keep your skills up to date. You actually have to be innovative and one step or 2 ahead of the curve.
Basically the curve looks like this: fortune 500 companies are 5 – 10 years behind; companies of 100 – 1000 people are 2 – 3 years behind; and small startups that fail lots and have few successes are pushing the envelope. If your job isn’t something that startups are doing, there’s a good chance they’ll outsource it – the more global the company, the better chances.
2. It’s getting automated or easy for non-experts to do.
This is nuts but sometimes it’s cheaper for a company to hire labor across the seas than to spend money on automation.
A good example of this is folks who use Mechanical Turk. Also, Ruby on Rails is getting easier to do so you’ve got more folks just outsourcing it.
I predict that most technologies will move away from MVC as a design pattern and just focus on the Model (big data), or just Views (jquery). The controller will be supplanted by APIs and will involving nothing more than cobbling different APIs together. If there’s any “controller” work left, it will be cheaply outsourced.
3. You get a promotion to manage a team offshore.
You get a promotion. There’s a bump in pay, or maybe they just give you a new title. Day after day the team takes on more and more of your former responsibilities. Eventually you give them access to servers you used to control. Then one day you are locked out and shown the door.
Don’t let these good economic times for techies fool you. The cold hard logic of Capitalism hasn’t disappeared just because you are making more money than you’ve imagined. A serious correction is headed our way. When? I’m guessing 4 years after the Facebook IPO.
To prepare for it think of things you possibly wouldn’t want to outsource: data mining of sensitve information (financials, hospital records), design where only the minimal art direction can be given, sales engineering.
Here’s my quick and dirty guide to building PHP with nginx and fast-cgi on EC2:
yum install mysqld yum install mysql yum install mysql-server yum install mysql-devel service mysqld start /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'your_password' /usr/bin/mysqld_safe &
yum install php-fpm php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-eaccelerator php-magickwand php-magpierss php-mbstring p hp-mcrypt php-mssql php-shout php-snmp php-soap php-tidy
yum install spawn-fcgi # Next, download spawn-fcgi init.d shell script: wget http://bash.cyberciti.biz/dl/419.sh.zip unzip 419.sh.zip mv 419.sh /etc/init.d/php_cgi chmod +x /etc/init.d/php_cgi # Start php app server, enter: /etc/init.d/php_cgi start # check to see if it's running netstat -tulpn | grep :9000
Your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file should look like this:
https://gist.github.com/1961501
This is a quick and dirty guide to getting Ruby on Rails working on Nginx with Passenger on Mac OS X Lion:
brew install nginx gem install passenger cd ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew/ tar zxvf nginx-*.tar.gz cd nginx-* passenger-install-nginx-module
Now you to edit this file:
/usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.0.11/conf/nginx.conf
Make sure there’s something like the stuff below:
server {
listen 8080;
server_name localhost;
root /Users/me/repos/my_awesome_rails_app/public
rails_env development;
passenger_enabled on;
charset utf-8;
}
nginx lynx http://localhost:8080
Guides Online:
http://mrjaba.posterous.com/rails-31-asset-pipeline-with-nginx-and-passen
I just signed up for a twitter account that I am going to use for giving bits of Buddhist wisdom for coders. The twitter account is @BuddhaCoder.
2007 was the year that Twitter made a huge splash at SxSW. It was the year that Facebook threw an awesome party.
I thought Twitter was so cool when when Karina Longworth followed me. Here’s a smart, geeky, beautiful film critic following me on Twitter and it was so awesome to meet her at that SxSW in 2007.
It’s now 2012. I’m in LA moving out of my apartment. I’ve wondered about how life was feeling stale. Where could I find and give inspiration? I created BuddhaCoder on Twitter, and when you sign up for Twitter this is what happens:
1. Sign-up is optimized with just name, email and password.
2. You are asked to follow a bunch of celebrities in different categories.
3. You are asked to have Twitter search through your contacts to find friends, but we know what that really means. *cough* Path
Once this is all done you see the tweets of folks you’ve followed.
Who follows you back or @ replies you?
Spammers.
The magic of meeting a Karina is gone.
Here is how I’d fix it:
1. Create Twitter ambassadors who reach out to folks as they join. Someone like Calvin Lee (@mayhemstudios) would be great for this, or Sarah Austin of @pop17. 3000 or so ambassadors that get special badges would be more than enough to handle the onslaught of 300k new users per day.
2. Pool anything spammy into a job queue for approval if it is directed at a new user. This will require something extensive in the Natural Language Processing realm that Jacob Perkins of Stream Hacker would know about.
tl;dr – No, waste of time.
Let’s face it. The world is a cruel place, and there are far more awful people than awesome people.
This is one of those first world problems, and my solution for it. Should you follow your frenemies?
A frenemy is someone that is your “friend” in social networks but in real life is out to get you. They “get” you economically or politically but they aren’t out to kill you.
I used to believe that you should “friend” every one but I soon realized that my on-line presence soon became a node for opportunists to get up a rung higher in the game of status.
Now, I’m selective. There are lots of folks that will say to you in the face, “Hey, let’s catch up.” Or “let’s do lunch soon.” But they do not really mean it. There are lots of folks that are plain nasty. One person invited me out to lunch just to say that he perceived me as lazy despite working on weekends and at the time having #1 apps for their segment in the Apple Store.
Anyways, I am un-following these folks. I don’t care about using foursquare to avoid them. I don’t care if they’re talking to my boss. The key here is to stay as light as possible.
Next year I definitely want to apply to Y Combinator. It’s simply not fun anymore to look at a bug list and make it smaller. It’s simply not fun to tell people over and over again to use best practices that are already 5 years old.
Instead, I think it will be more fun to change the world, and maybe in the process do a TED talk called, “How to Defeat Evil.”
I read the Y Combinator Application How-To.
Here are my favorite sound bytes:
‘Whatever you have to say, give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms.’
‘The first question I look at is the 7th, “What is your company going to make?”‘
“The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise.”
“One test of whether you’re explaining your idea effectively is to ask how close the reader is to reproducing it.”
“One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It’s like Wikipedia, but within an organization.”
“If a group of founders seemed impressive enough, I’d fund them with no idea.”
“The reason a lot of big companies’ software sucks is that they have some kind of natural monopoly.”
“The best startup ideas are generally outliers that seem crazy to most people initially.”
“If this wasn’t already clear, we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.”
“Investors are optimists.”
“Most people are threatened by ambition.”
“Tell investors you’re going to start the next Google and they immediately perk up. They don’t default to skepticism, because they like risky bets.”
I saw this on Mashable and got permission to repost this awesome infographic about the Facebook IPO.
Infographic created by: Accounting Degree Online
If you go to the MySQL web site, and do a search on data type integer, you’ll notice something strange. The first result is a MySQL newsletter from May 2010.
It wasn’t always like this. A few years ago I blogged about how Sun broke MySQL. Sun went on to claim that MySQL working out of the box was something that was broken with MySQL, even though lots of sysadmins every where relied on this to get servers up and running quickly.
If you compare the search with what they have on Google, you’ll see that the first result and the many results below are *all* relevant.
Why do large organizations break what works?
I’ve just moved to San Francisco. It seems that every coder I know is moving back to San Francisco these days. There’s a good reason for it. Thanks to people who want to figure out how to invest 10000 dollars – startup investment in certain neighborhoods has gone up as high as 300% since 2009.
Katerra
Founded in 2015 by former Tesla interim CEO Michael Marks, Katerra raised a total of $865mn. The funding was secured exclusively from SoftBank Core’s Vision Fund. The company is based in Menlo Park and specializes in offsite design and construction solutions that are disrupting the US residential construction market. To fuse architecture and design prefabrication techniques into a linear, end-to-end design-build process through offsite ‘constructuring’ of cross-laminated timber, windows, walls and other components scored by its own end-to-end supply chain.
Let’s take a look at the 94105 zip code in San Francisco.
Investment in this area since 2005 looks like this (in millions of US dollars):
A more detailed analysis can be found in this spreadsheet.
Are you part of a startup looking to move into the 94105? WeWork, which is also in the 94105 and where I’m currently working, has lots of space available. We’re leasing about 5000 square feet at low prices which should accommodate a startup of 50 – 75 people, if you’d like to get started, check this online brokerage.
Thanks Crunchbase for the raw data.