

Become Efficient or Die: The Story of BackType (YC S08) - nathanmarz
http://www.slideshare.net/nathanmarz/become-efficient-or-die-the-story-of-backtype

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chaosmachine
_"Don't add process until you feel the pain of not having it."_

Great set of slides, thanks for posting this.

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jwr
"Don't add process until you feel the pain of not having it."

Excellent phrasing of what I've been preaching in our startup all along. We
apply this to every angle of our business and I find this is very, very good
advice for startups.

And it's not just for software development, either! Need an order processing
system? No you don't — you can handle things manually at first, thus learning
what you really need. Need a CMS? No you don't — the bugtracker you use for
your software can probably help you enough in the beginning. Examples abound.

Follow this philosophy and you'll build a lean company. What's even better is
that once you actually _do_ add process (or buy external solutions, or hire
additional people, etc), you'll know what you're doing, because you will have
learned the real requirements.

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kleinsch
My favorite part of the slides: _"First, make it possible. Then, make it
beautiful. Then, make it fast."_

Having personally been bitten by doing each of these out of order, they make a
lot of sense.

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OstiaAntica
It is risky to put design second.

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shanked
I think the point is that it is risky to design before you fully understand
the problem you're solving. From my interpretation of the slides, they are
often working on tasks they have little experience with. Instead of spending
time thinking about potential design issues (which may or may not exist),
build something that works and the patterns which the feature requires will
emerge, enabling an elegant design afterwards.

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cagenut
I love the "garbage collection for your codebase" thing. Nice simple approach
for moving things from the "should" pile to the "done" one.

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jacques_chester
They're using a stop-the-world garbage collector. Surely we've come further
than that in the past few decades?

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wicknicks
Suffering-oriented programming: A great mantra for startups. If you don't face
the problem yourself, then there is no point in building software for it --
chances are no one else has it too.

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ruycer
I agree. Only when you know how the pain feels, you are capable to create
products that alleviate that pain.

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herdrick
_Ran into a lot of problems with Neo4J and rewrote it later using Sphinx_

Really? I'd love to hear more about this.

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thiagofm
Nice read, really good app also... btw, clojure rocks!

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orlandu63
Does anyone have a direct link to the PDF file?

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gumbo
Great one. Subscribed to your blog, there is alot of useful articles to read
there.

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rokhayakebe
"3 employees, 2 interns, 1.4M in funding"

What will the money be used for? Are you still trying to reach product/market
fit?

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dpritchett
I'll bet the cost of 1-200 machines is adding up pretty quickly.

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xiaoma
Having to click 64 times to get through a brief story is not efficient.

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MediaBehavior
Which is why I like to be able to download a SlideShare item and then view the
PPT as a pdf.

But this one DLs to an OmniOutliner doc ?!? Unfortunate. And author's site
(nathanmarz.com) does not even mention this presentation. Can you help us out
Nathan?

