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  Should a startup focus on good user experience or ship something out quickly?

For a startup, there are always arguments about whether to build a good experience or instead ship something workable out quickly. These two seem contradict with each other and it is usually hard to decide for many startup founders. But in order to win over competitors and gain large portion of market shares as soon as possible, founders must think fast and make their life change decisions. So how should we decide whether we should focus on good user experience or we should ship out the product...

   User experience,Startup     2014-01-20 06:48:28

  The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

A friendly reminder: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven Pressfield Some stuff is just hard. We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself. The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a s...

   Business,Problem,Strategy     2011-12-07 08:37:29

  Apache Tomcat Installation and Configuration

When you want to install Apache Tomcat on Windows System. You may find that there are some tricky parts. Next I will elaborate the steps to install and configure Tomcat. If you want to install Tomcat as a service without GUI. You need to download the 32-bit Windows.zip from http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi. After downloading this zip file. You need to unzip this file to the directory which you want to put this software to. After unzipping, you can go to the bin directory and find t...

   Tomcat 7,Windows,Apache,Install,Configur     2011-04-10 14:17:21

  Is Facebook becoming Tencent like?

Recently there is news that Facebook is developing a Reader application which is to compete with Flipboard and Pulse. This reminds me a few movements of Facebook in the past few months. First they built a copy of Snapchat named Poke which failed badly at last. Then they launched a new feature on Instagram named Video on Instagram which allows users to shoot and share short videos up to 15 seconds. This feature is to compete with Vine from Twitter. It seems Instagram wins over Vine on this. You c...

   Facebook,Tencent,Copy     2013-06-24 01:17:27

  Location matters for your startup

18 months ago I relocated from my home town of Glasgow, to London, just 400 miles away. An important reason for the move was because I had just started working on my new startup, Teamly, and I know that location matters, even when running an internet business. Don’t kid yourself otherwise, your chance of success is seriously improved when you’re in a startup hub.18 months later and moving to London has proved to be a smart move, for all the expected reasons, as well as  t...

   Startup,Location,Company,Brand,Popular location     2011-10-22 13:01:39

  5 Reasons to Join a Startup After Graduating

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to ...

   Startup,Graduation,Work,Advice,Passion,Learn     2011-11-23 08:12:13

  On being happy

For the whole past night I lay awake without sleeping a minute, mostly because I am still fully jet-lagged from the move to Europe yesterday. For some reason, the one thought that entered my mind was one about what it means to be happy. Yes, of course, being on an exciting startup journey, there are other goals which are more in the foreground. There is creating a product users love, getting funding or earning enough money to sustain yourself. Whilst I greatly enjoy this product and user fo...

   Happiness,Attitude,Steve Jobs     2011-12-26 08:59:08

  Becoming a Better Developer, Part 1: Making Fans

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. This is the first of what I hope to become an ongoing series about non-technical ways to improve yourself as a developer. Becoming a better developer involves more than learning new technical skills; learning about your company and co-workers will dramatically improve the software y...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:38:26

  HTML5 Video and DRM

Many people call HTML5 an Adobe Flash replacement and I agree. Adobe already discontinued Flash on mobile devices. So HTML5 Video is a must for video on mobile phones and tablets. On the desktop Flash Video players are used more than HTML5 Video players but HTML5 video will work with a current web browser on a site that supports HTML5 video. Commercial video sites like YouTube will play partnered content in Flash even if you turned on HTML5 video at http://www.youtub...

   HTML5 Video,Flash,DRM,Comparison     2012-02-05 07:18:23

  Redesigning the Technical Hiring Process

Since my last post on technical interviews, I’ve been fairly involved in hiring at Pulse as we grew our team from 6 people when I joined last November to 14 full-timers. In my previous post, I suggested that technical interviews, in the conventional sense, are not especially effective (by technical interviews, I mean the traditional 45 minute coding-at-a-whiteboard and algorithm puzzlers interviews). Those do a great job of telling you how well a candidate is at acing those types o...

   Career,Recruitment,Process,Developer,Ski     2011-09-14 12:01:37

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