With the emergence and success of services like Heroku for simplified development and hosting, I am pretty sure this is the next natural step. I think these kind of services, with development, revision system, deployment, hosting all integrated, with be huge within a year or two.
What if it becomes the dominant way of developing software? In that case, Apple might finally lock down the Mac since people can just visit "xcode.apple.com" or whatever.
The big question here is: is Tim Ferriss that self-righteous naturally, or does he do it on purpose to gain more attention?
Few people can deny that being so self-righteous that other people get provoked is one hell of a personal marketing strategy. I just keep wondering if the people who succeed in personal branding have thought this out and planned their self-righteousness strategically, or if they just are that way naturally and got lucky.
"Tim Ferriss that self-righteous naturally, or does he do it on purpose to gain more attention?"
Your personality is just a strategy that was devised by your two-year-old self in order to keep you safe and get attention: http://vimeo.com/16260822
That said, once you're an adult and you no longer rely on others for safety, you get to start over and make whatever changes you want. Obviously if you want to be famous then you need to choose live a life and adopt a personality that will make you famous. The whole package isn't especially natural or fun for anyone, but some people naturally have bits and pieces of their private persona that also work well in public if you ham them up a bit.
It's like Richard Branson. Do you think that Richard Branson wants to fly to tahiti to go rock climbing every weekend? Of course not. Some weekends he'd much rather curl up with a pot of tea and read the newspaper. But he can't, because he's Richard Branson and that's not what Richard Branson would do. Does he enjoy being Richard Branson? I'm sure there are things he likes about it, but most likely his personality was only really developed after he made a bunch of money to spend on personal coaching and stuff.
That's really ridiculous, actually. Why wouldn't a billionaire just do whatever the fuck they want? Do they think that everyone is going to notice that Sir Richard isn't rock climbing this weekend and never fly virgin again? Does this go for all billionaires or just the more extreme ones? Would bill gates and Warren buffet rather be climbing everest and running marathons on the great wall of china than playing bridge online, but can't because of the shackles of their personal-coach-inspired fake personalities?
"Would bill gates and Warren buffet rather be climbing everest..."
Different people have different schtick. Why do you think that Bill Gates has a 12-year-old autistic kid do his powerpoints instead of hiring Nancy Duarte or whoever?
There are a lot of forces that influence what personalities will resonate with people, but one of them is that people tend to like stuff that's masturbatory. That is, things that make themselves feel like they could be successful doing what they're already doing. That's why for every life choice you could conceivably make, no matter how stupid, there is some incredibly successful person who has made it. There has to be, the market demands it, and if there wasn't then the market would anoint someone. Hence cheech & chong, william s. burroughs, ann coulter, etc.
Couldn't part of this problem be solved with an algorithm that identifies when several pages have roughly the same content (ie. original wikipedia article + 5 copies of it elsewhere on the web) and then giving the oldest occurance in the index a much higher rank?
That would kill incentive to create these spam-sites and give the user the result s/he was looking for.
All you people suggesting "do both" - do you really know what you are talking about? We may have different definitions of what a startup is.
If by startup, you mean a one man website that is some kind of low-maintenance subscription service, then yeah sure, go travel the world.
But if you define startup as I do, as a venture-backed, aggressively growing company employing people, then how the hell are you going to travel the world while managing that? Please tell me if you have a way, because I would be genuinely interested :)
I entirely agree. You can sustain a travelling lifestyle with web work, whether a niche, "muse" product or freelancing work, but that's not a startup. A startup requires a lot of "personal, on site" touch.
Oops! Will fix as soon as I'm in front of my computer (on my iPhone now). I hate it when people misspell my name... But to be fair, I did try to find your full name and couldn't find it on your blog or on twitter, so I had to make a guess :-)
Doing the former - a low-maintenance, mildly profitable company in your spare time whilst travelling the world - certainly doesn't harm your chances of succeeding in a venture-backed, aggressively growing company employing people later in life.
This. I've traveled quite a bit before building my startup and I can attest to A) how distracting the experiences across the world are (why travel and bring work from your country of origin and not travel and work in your destination country, bartending or cleaning dishes, something more cultural?) and B) how involved building a startup is.
With a small, niche, business; I can see it happening no doubt. Like running a small remote consultancy or e-commerce site selling drop shipped products. But a startup needs its founders present, communication face to face is unbeatable and often times your cofounders aren't set to travel the world with you.
So, what's my advice? Live some life while you're building your startup, man; go on short trips, go to Burning Man, visit Prague or fly to the B.V.I for four days. Be sure you have some fun. Once you've either succeeded in making FU money from your startup, or your startup has failed, then go experience the world (you don't need FU money to see the world, hence why you do it even if your startup fails).
My plan? Either FU money, passive income, or a failed startup. Once one of those things happen I'm planning on crewing on a sailboat to get to Europe (or SA, or Aus) and living life for a while outside of the USA (think...years).
It helps to leave one poor sap in the Bay Area to talk to investors, but the rest of you can certainly head off into the sticks.
I've done my share of remote consulting for venture-backed, aggressively growing startups. For the last 6 years, at least, I haven't physically set foot in any of their offices.
If you want to do it with a whole team, here's how I've done it in the past:
I hear this more and more lately - and sure, competition would be good.. but, what's wrong with textmate at this point?
I bought a few copies a few years ago, and I've been using them ever since, lots of extensions, still nice and light, still awesome to use... I dont' find myself sitting around thinking "Man I wish this guy would hurry up and bring out a new version!"....
like, it's not minecraft....
I'm a TM user, and I'm happy with the product, but there are some areas that could use improvement. First, there's undo. Undo in TM is letter-by-letter. That makes it pretty useless for moving very far back in to history. Then there's any kind of intelligent auto-completion. Auto-complete in TM is as rudimentary as it gets. It's basically word matching for the current document, or from a bundle.
I still think TM is the best editor for me, and I'd happily use it for the next 25 years without a single gripe if I had to, but I'm not sure the editor community is going to just sit around while TM stagnates.
I actually agree 99% with you- I happily use TM more or less constantly, and have since it was first released. That said, there are four features (or feature areas) that I feel like would add immeasurably to my TextMate experience:
1. Split-window editing
2. Multithreaded searching, pasting, etc.- having the whole app hang while doing a "find in project" is a major drag, especially when it's due to, oh, say, having a bunch of files open from a slow network share. Which brings me to...
3. Better handling of files opened from remote volumes- another case where multiple threads would probably help.
4. Better handling of really long lines when word-wrap is turned off. There is obviously something O(n) going on at the line level (where n is the number of characters on the line), and it makes handling long runs of text rather painful at times.
So, there it is: my TextMate wish list. Modulo those four things, TextMate is currently pretty close to ideal, IMHO. I love its syntax highlighting grammar, its snippets, its macro capabilities, etc. etc. The Latex package is fabulous, and has singlehandedly done a lot to make my dissertation-writing process bearable.
The big issue is that Textmate 2.0 was announced as a free upgrade years ago and it has yet to appear. Joe Hewitt's tweet kinda says it all: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/14998671708
While there are certainly some nice features in Kod it has a long way to go before it offers some of the features that textmate does (e.g. snippets). With that said, I'm hoping Kod becomes a real alternative to textmate!
Emacs is a fantastic editor (and I think I can say that I am what you call a power user), but Emacs Lisp is a terrible, terrible language. The more I use it, the more I hate it. And it's not because of the lispiness or parens -- Common Lisp was my Language of Choice for many years.
Having an editor that I could extend in a real programming language (and JS is actually very nice once you grasp stuff like prototype inheritance and learn to avoid the... uhm, bad parts) would be simply awesome. And if it was pretty and integrated with OS X I would be willing to pay hard cash for it.
If Node.js were to get a little bit of language agnosticism (write code and source debug in Coffeescript and anything else that treats Javascript as a compiler target) then you'd have programmable-editor nirvana for web developers.
I find it much more useful than the file trees in any of the gui editors I've tried. You don't need to leave your keyboard and you can create, delete and move files directly from the tree which some gui editors don't even allow you to do. If you haven't tried it give it a shot.
Fair enough I guess, although "doesn't look like crap" is pretty subjective. Based on the number of "switching to Vim" blog posts (some on OS X) submitted to HN over the past few months, I would say the old editors are still putting up plenty of competition.
TextMate is getting older and older. I would like to try something else, but I haven't yet found another editor with a sane file/folder sidebar, which is a must for me. Any tips? The sidebars I've seen for emacs and vim either look lika crap or use too big a font for them to be practical.
Of course the definition of success is different for every entrepreneur. My definition of success in this case is a sustainable company that is still alive and growing after 5 years.
Maybe the formulation of my question wasn't very good. What I meant was more like "How many percent of startups who get funding are still in business five years later".
I think it is fairly normal to go through the wannabe-phase. We all do it until the moment that we realize we aren't getting nearer any goals, and decide to become a doer instead of a talker/planner.
About two years ago I tried a lot of different frameworks and languages to find which one would suit me best. After having tried various PHP frameworks, J2EE, Perl I arrived at Django/Python. The plan was to continue on to Rails after Django, but I loved Django so much that I couldn't imagine that Rails could be any better. Seems like I was right ;)
Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.
As somebody who has used both Rails and Django commercially I can safely say that I prefer Rails over Django even though I like Python more as a language.
This guy marks several advantages of Rails as weaknesses.
Migrations for example. In Django you have to migrate manually, or lose data. Lack of migrations is not an advantage.
Templates. The Django template language is one of the worst in existence. It is utterly inflexible and hard to use. It is slowly getting better: now you can use `if a == b` instead of `ifequal a b`. Why not go all the way to a usable and powerful template language?!
> As somebody who has used both Rails and Django commercially ... In Django you have to migrate manually, or lose data
If you've been using Django "commercially", then how come you haven't heard of South? ... http://south.aeracode.org/
Everybody in the community that wants migrations is using it.
> Why not go all the way to a usable and powerful template language?!
In Django components are more decoupled than in Rails.
You can replace that templating engine.
Also, Django's templating system is really not that inflexible or hard to use ... quite the contrary, it comes with many things out-of-the-box that aren't standardly provided by other web frameworks ... like the ability to cache page fragments.
Of course those are valid points but we are comparing default feature sets here. Otherwise Rails has a crippled template language, database generated from model and automatic admin too.
Have you actually used Rails? Rails has fragment caching built in and you can use a different template engine very easily (just install the engine xyz you want to use and write templates with extension .xyz instead of .erb)
It's kind of odd that the default subsystems that come with Django are always replaced with something else -- why doesn't Django include some sane defaults instead?
From my experience that's hardly the case ... ActiveRecord (pre 3.0 at least) sucks big monkey balls compared to Django's ORM. And Rails also doesn't have anything like the forms API in Django.
> Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.
Some of it doesn't even work well for small projects--the first thing I do after ./manage.py startproject is change around settings.py so I can have local settings (namely db stuff) and not have to change things around when I push it to a server.
Pinax comes with quite a few example projects using a common directory structure, which is very well thought-out, separating media, reusable apps, common templates, etc.
