

Surprises - lackbeard
http://collison.ie/blog/2009/10/surprises

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ewingpatriarch
"Now, when coding, I try to think: 'how can I write this such that if people
saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does'."

 _golden._ i've been trying to pound this concept into my head lately, and
this is a very well-stated version of it.

~~~
pg
This is in fact a very powerful idea. It's been my rule for a couple decades
now. I think I learned it partly from Rtm, who has always been a kind of code
miser.

Curiously enough, there is one weird edge case where this approach can bite
you: when you're launching something new that you're going to publish the
source of, and which a lot of people are already predisposed to hate...

~~~
gord
A Feynman quote comes to mind :

'what do you care what other people think?'

~~~
dcminter
Pedantry: That was his wife, Arlene.

(Edit: Though I guess she was a Feynman too at that point...)

~~~
wallflower
OT: Seven hours of Feynman lectures online: "The Character of Physical Law"
(in case you missed the announcement several months ago, Silverlight required)

<http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html>

~~~
gord
I love watching Feynman in action, but refuse to install evil MS plugins.

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jack7890
The first point hit home big time. When you're doing a startup you feel like
every day is precious and the tide of change is racing along impossibly fast.
It's healthy to remember that the world doesn't reinvent itself every month.
The problem you're working on now will probably still be relevant in 1-2
years.

~~~
pg
It's true that you rarely have to work fast because the world will leave you
behind otherwise (though that has occasionally been the case with startups
we've funded). The reason you have to work fast is that your initial idea is
probably wrong, and you have to iterate till you get it right.

~~~
notauser
Plus you are probably in the process of running out of money and how long you
get to tackle the problem(s) has more to do with cash flow than the state of
the world.

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Harj
_How slowly things change._

depends on the context. for huge macro level projects e.g. iPhone reshaping
cell phone industry or FB having Google size revenue, ebay's network effects
being broken, that all takes time.

but in the same time period (past 2.5 years) a lot of things have completely
changed. FB platform has gone from launch to supporting companies that could
IPO (and made a whole load of single developers v rich). social gaming has
gone from scrabulous to now posing a credible threat to the entire console
gaming industry. the wii destroyed the xbox and ps3 within its first year of
launch and now sells more than both of them combined.

i'd argue that it's the faster moving trends that impact startups and startup
opportunities more than the slower moving macro trends.

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mkull
+1 for paying attention to international customers

For our ecommerce startup, we did nothing as far as internationalization goes
other then offering to ship our product outside of the US and Canada. We were
amazed at the response we got and it was one of the factors that helped us get
cash flow positive very quickly

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jasonlbaptiste
I have a lot of concepts, I'm still narrowing down and going through in terms
of what I'm working on next. Time and getting going is a big source of
anxiety. This post helped calm that down a bit. Worth the read.

~~~
gord
what about prototyping smaller pieces? - its a good way to clarify your
thinking, try out the tech, and come up with new ideas.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I really think through the concepts. Usually dont go as far as the coding.
Lots of mockups, design, specs, and sometime even database design.

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kniwor
For a web app, what is the least painful way to achieve internationalization?
What language/framework would you use if you were writing a fresh one from
scratch?

I had tried to convert a php web-app to handle utf8 correctly through and
through a few years ago and gave up after a lot of pain. Is life any better
now? Any guides/resources? Is life in ruby or python frameworks significantly
better in this respect?

~~~
geedee77
I've always done it with MS stack. ASP.NET, SQL Server etc all seem to handle
unicode correctly (as long as you don't expect your users to still be on
IE6!).

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10ren
Niche. For a startup or mISV, catering to a particular internationalization
locale makes a lot of sense. But I think you'd need some expertise in that
locale, e.g. be able to speak the language, for support, and know the customs
and conventions.

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ibsulon
I would worry about trying to specialize in internationalization. It can be a
lucrative market, and things like iphone apps are relatively easy to do.
Trying to aim for the international audience, however, can be deceptively
hard.

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axod
Surely the biggest surprise was auctomatic being acquired? and not seemingly
for the product but for the team. :/

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scythe
>and everyone was talking about Twitter.

Back in 2007, twitter's userbase was smaller than 4chan's and it wasn't nearly
as well-known. In 2009, they're now bigger than MySpace. These graphs should
show the difference clearly:

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+4chan&ctab=0&#...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+4chan&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+myspace&ctab=0...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+myspace&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

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eli_s
_"...a good product is so much more important than first mover advantage"_

couldn't agree more.

