
I was the worst coder in the room... - andreipop
http://designcodelearn.com/2012/06/01/i-was-the-worst-coder-in-the-room/
======
fleitz
It's possible to build successful businesses by being able to put cheese,
tomato sauce and pepperoni on dough and put it in an oven.

I'm not sure why people think they have to be the smartest person in the room
to build a business.

~~~
patio11
While I like the sentiment here, I think the danger is that engineers might
come to the mistaken conclusion that making pizzas is the primary limiting
reagent to running a successful pizzeria. Running a successful pizzeria is
more about schlepping to local hotels and leaving them 50 copies of your menu
to put at the front desk, hiring drivers who will both deliver pizzas in a
timely fashion and not embezzle your (razor-thin) profits while also costing
next-to-nothing to employ, maintaining a kitchen in sufficient order to pass
your local health inspector's annual visit (and dealing with 47 different
pieces of paper related to that), being able to juggle priorities like "Do I
take out a bank loan to build a new brick-oven, which will make the pizza
taste better, in the knowledge that this will commit $3,000 of my cash flow
every month for the next 3 years, or do I hire an extra cook?", sourcing
ingredients such that they're available in quantity and quality every day for
a fairly consistent price, setting prices such that they're locally
competitive for your chosen clientele but generate a healthy gross margin for
the business, understanding why a healthy gross margin really doesn't imply a
healthy net margin and that the rent still needs to get paid, keeping good-
enough records such that you know whether your business is dying before you
can't make payroll and such that you can provide a reasonably accurate picture
of accounts for the taxation authorities every year, balancing 50% off medium
pizza promotions with the desire to not cannibalize the business of your
regulars, etc etc, and by the way tomato sauce should be tangy but not sour
and cheese should melt with just the faintest whisp of a crust on it.

Do you want to write software for a living? Google is hiring. Do you want to
run a software business? Godspeed. Software is now 10% of your working life.

~~~
dschobel
I realize that there are existential forces at work which would lead a
SEO/marketing consultant to emphasize the overwhelming and crushing complexity
in running a business but I've seen enough successful and completely beloved
hole-in-the-wall operations, run by people you would never mistake for
intelligent, that I question the fundamental truth of it.

Sometimes having a great product really is enough.

~~~
patio11
I don't think businesses are overwhelmingly or crushingly complex, because
mortals successfully run them _all the time._ I run three, despite not being
an untouchable ubermench, and by the standards of my fiancees' best friends my
work style looks indistinguishable from being unemployed.

I do think, though, that even low-sophistication one-man-shop businesses are
substantially more complex than "focus 100% on product and everything turns
out cool."

Don't worry, I'm not saying this to drum up consulting business. All of my
clients are _waaaaay_ past the point where what I said here would be
controversial. Many of them have CEOs who describe their own jobs as figuring
out ways to protect the engineering team from the other 90%.

------
nickbarnwell
Any chance you have screenshots/a public repo of the app? Would love to take a
look, as judging by the logo the design was nice indeed :)

Congratulations on winning the Hackathon! Did you participate in the December
Finals in Palo Alto and this blogpost is just many months late, or have they
started a new round competition? If it's the former, I believe we've met (I
was on the UW team), if it's the latter, best of luck!

My experience at the Facebook Hackathon was very similar - I was the only
Freshman to enter, our team had been cobbled together entirely by chance (2/4
were found by posting on reddit). We were some of the last to demo, and every
one that preceded us seemed, at least to me, far more technically impressive.
People had built real time games, written web-servers, designed Android apps
to handle streaming video, but (almost) no one had a use-case. We essentially
strung together API on top of API in some of the most hacky code I've ever
written[1], and somehow it all came together in the end to a) work for the
demo and b) seem like something people would actually use. Our idea for the
final round was far more derivative and banal, and we lost because of it.

[1] <https://github.com/nickbarnwell/SpunBy.Me>

~~~
xxbondsxx
I was at the finals with you! Funny how long ago that was :P

Also, I'm surprised that most of the students at the finals didn't interview
with Facebook. You'd think that a company centered around the hack culture
would be an attractive place to work...

~~~
nickbarnwell
Seems like ages, doesn't it? Did you end up getting a position with a company
down in the Bay Area for the summer? I'll be at Google and would love to meet
up with some of the people from the competition again, there was certainly no
lack of good conversation :)

I think we all got interviews at Addepar out of it, and one of the members
from the team that had the book-reselling app ended up taking a position at
Instagram shortly after, so I suppose he's working at FB in the end ;)

The follow-up was interesting though, in that there was virtually none. The
whole thing was very anti-climatic, really. Still very grateful for the
experience, and I'm certainly not sad to have it on the ol' resume. You
planning to try again next round?

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tokenizer
Great article. I really enjoyed how they solved a problem that came up during
brainstorming. I think that the easiest way to find a problem to solve is to
be picky with reality. Question everything you or someone you're with is going
through, that either takes a little more time, or a little more effort than
you think. And you might not think it would unless you question reality more.

Congrats to the team for going into this competition with the edge case
mentality. I didn't see any details of their work in the posting, but it be
interesting if we could all discuss physical locks with virtual keys some
more.

Cheers

------
EternalFury
In this world, where 90% of new start-ups seem to be born out of an exclusive
love for a technology or another, it's refreshing to read someone who believes
the tools are just...tools, designed to serve a greater purpose.

Now I can continue laughing at those outfits that believe their business
success is a matter of arranging Ruby, Python, Clojure, CoffeeScript,
JavaScript, Scala and other technologies in some semi-magical combination.

And I can return to my review of the state of Ruby on Rails, where, nearly 5
years after Zed Shaw' "Rails is a Ghetto", it's still awfully difficult to
install a single open source Rails-based app that doesn't lead you to
dependency and packaging Hell.

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conductr
Glad you wrote this. I am going on 15 years of being self taught and
constantly trying to learn more. I've built a whole lot in that time, but
nothing has ever seen the light of day and I've never* done anything with it
professionally. After much hesitation, I recently pulled the trigger and
signed up for an upcoming Startup Weekend event. The hesitation comes from the
thought that I will be light-years behind everyone else there, and basically
won't be able to contribute at their level. This give me some confidence that
I won't be a total drag on some team.

* OK not entirely true - I'm in finance, and I do quite a bit with Excel VBA - but I don't really count that as real programming, although it has served me well in my field

~~~
andreipop
Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for reading. I've always found most people at
hackathons seem to be super friendly and willing to help out. The last
hackathon I was at (Mozilla YVR) there were a few people there just writing
HTML and CSS and tagging along on other projects learning and helping out.
It's just an awesome community. Best of luck with Startup Weekend.

------
tantalor
The hack reminds me of "How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button",

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-
nas...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/how-facebook-hacked-the-nasdaq-
button/)

------
mehulkar
An upvote wasn't enough for me, wanted to just say that this was an awesome
post.

~~~
andreipop
Thanks mehulkar, glad you enjoyed it

