startup junkie

A video of my latest talk - at Silicon Valley Bank’s 2013...

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:58:00 -0400

A video of my latest talk - at Silicon Valley Bank’s 2013 CEO Summit - just got posted and I’d love feedback. The goal was to distill 5 concrete lessons from my startup journeys so far for the first-time entrepreneurs in the room. What do you think? What could be improved?

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of keynoting EclipseCon 2013...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:23:40 -0400

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of keynoting EclipseCon 2013 in Boston and the video of my presentation is now online - I hope you find it interesting!

At Twitter, we’re exploring the cutting-edge of mobile app development in our efforts to continually optimize our software engineering and release process, and I wanted to share some of our thinking so far.

I’m also pleased to announce that I’ll be keynoting AnDevCon at the end of May, where I’ll be sharing a deeper dive into where we’re headed!

Another trip back to the un-published video...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 18:36:08 -0400

Another trip back to the un-published video archives.

Here’s a tech talk I gave at Harvard describing the back-end server architecture we used at Box to process hundreds of thousands of files. Crashlytics was built in an almost identical manner and this approach is highly flexible and easy to scale. If your startup involves processing jobs reliably and rapidly, I’d encourage you to check this out.

For those more technically inclined, I present a fast message queueing architecture built on top of RabbitMQ.

Hello! It’s been a while :) I’ve gotten increasing...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:48:00 -0400

Hello! It’s been a while :)

I’ve gotten increasing requests for the video to this talk - so here’s a relink. This past fall, I had the opportunity - and honor - of speaking at RedisConf 2012 on how to build an analytics solution on top of Redis. With support for Binary Operations in Redis 2.6, it’s amazing what can be accomplished in an extremely time- and space-efficient manner. I hope there are some tips and tricks here that you’ll find interesting.

Observations on the Boston Entrepreneur Ecosystem

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:40:00 -0500

It’s been a year since I moved back to the East Coast and Jason over at GreenhornConnect asked me to put my thoughts together on some of the differences I’ve noticed between the startup worlds in Boston and Silicon Valley.

For some it’s a touchy subject - hundreds of thousands of words have been penned on “what makes Silicon Valley special?” and “is it possible to replicate?” and, most aggressively, “can [insert locale here] ever compare?” Not only is this not of interest to me, it’s unproductive. Every community is impacted by so many different variables, most of them entirely outside their or anyone’s control, that it leads to over-simplified analysis and hypotheticals. That said, there are some very real differences between Boston and Silicon Valley that deserve to be surfaced.

These don’t make one place better than the other, just different. And to succeed anywhere, I think it’s pretty important to understand the ecosystem you’re in. Continued…

I’ve already gotten a lot of great feedback on the post and would love to hear yours as well. You can find the whole thing here: http://greenhornconnect.com/blog/observations-boston-entrepreneur-ecosystem-year-boston-startup-scene-jeff-seibert

Debugging with Valgrind on OpenSuSE 11.2

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:30:59 -0500

Have you ever tried to use Valgrind on OpenSuSE and run into this strange message:

valgrind:  Fatal error at startup: a function redirection
valgrind:  which is mandatory for this platform-tool combination
valgrind:  cannot be set up.  Details of the redirection are:
valgrind:  
valgrind:  A must-be-redirected function
valgrind:  whose name matches the pattern:      strlen
valgrind:  in an object with soname matching:   ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
valgrind:  was not found whilst processing
valgrind:  symbols from the object with soname: ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Possible fixes: (1, short term): install glibc's debuginfo
valgrind:  package on this machine.  (2, longer term): ask the packagers
valgrind:  for your Linux distribution to please in future ship a non-
valgrind:  stripped ld.so (or whatever the dynamic linker .so is called)
valgrind:  that exports the above-named function using the standard
valgrind:  calling conventions for this platform.
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Cannot continue -- exiting now.  Sorry.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. All you need is the correct debuginfo package for your version of glibc:

sudo zypper install http://download.opensuse.org/debug/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/glibc-debuginfo-2.10.1-10.4.x86_64.rpm

Take care to adjust the above line if you’re not running x86-64.

Thoughts on Mac Application Development

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:58:15 -0400

Imagine we - yes, that’s right, you and I - are about to start designing and building a new Mac application. How should we proceed? I’ve recently had to put some thought into this, so here goes…

I feel pretty strongly that if we are going to release a new Mac app, we should aim for it to be one of the greatest Mac apps ever written, both in terms of functionality and design. Otherwise it’s not really a project that’s worth working on.

Given the recently released screenshots of Mac OS X Lion, it’s clear that the design language for Mac OS X going forward is rapidly converging with that of the iPad. Applications will be more graphically intense and beautiful than ever before, and it will be harder than ever to create a stand-out Mac app. But we should try.

Characteristics of World-Class Macintosh Applications

Having now spent more than twelve years using and observing the Macintosh platform, there are a handful of attributes that all of the very best apps have in common to some degree:

As simple as possible, but no simpler. Einstein had it right, a half century before the first Macintosh: our app should do precisely what the user needs it to and no more or less. Even more importantly, these features should be immediately intuitive - no explanation required. Our app is not going to ship with a ReadMe or any other documentation. Sorry. Does that change your attitude?
People are busy; they shouldn’t have to think about our app. It should seamlessly integrate into the user’s life and require no presence of mind. It should “just work” and fade into the user’s mental background. To be specific, we’re going to use direct manipulation whenever possible. No modes or modal dialogs and no alerts or mental context-switches unless absolutely necessary. Let’s get our work done and get out of their way - time is precious, and more is often saved through a well-designed UI than a highly-optimized inner loop.
The world is watching - let’s dress to the nines. Consider every minute a person spends using our application a gift. How do we repay them? The least we can do is prevent their eyes from bleeding. When brought to the foreground, let’s put on a show that will please and surprise the user. Watch the typography, watch the spacing, and add touches of animation where it helps inform what is happening. The screen is your canvas and the very best developers are artists too.
Every app is a platform, so make it easy to leverage. One of the best ways to rise above the crowd is to a establish a platform for your domain. If our app will be used as part of a workflow, let’s make it scriptable or automatable. If it will benefit from being modular or extensible, let’s publish the plugin SDK. At the same time, let’s leverage the platforms that already exist. We should Growl and Sparkle with the best of them (not the worst of them). If we have an opaque document format (go directly to jail. do not pass Go. do not collect $200) let’s provide QuickLook and Spotlight plugins. Again, we’re building this to be used, so let’s make it usable.
Look after the elderly but focus on the young and yet-to-be. Software development should be forward-looking, with a quick glance to the past for compatibility. The Macintosh platform moves rapidly and the majority of the active user-base is on the latest release. Think about it - are the people still running Tiger (or even Leopard) really going to be those springing to purchase our brand new app? I’d argue it’s always better to aggressively adopt new technologies to sell ourselves to the users of the future than burden ourselves with supporting everyone that ever was.

The Cross-Platform Dilemma

Designing a world-class application is even harder when it comes to making the app cross-platform, because the tendency is to decide on the feature-set and UI once, and implement it on both platforms. There is not a single instance I can think of where this has resulted in a successful Mac application. (e.g. the greatest version of Office for Mac in recent history was 2004, when it differed the most from the PC version. Adobe Photoshop has only continued to decline on the Mac as it asymptotically approaches the PC version’s UI.)

I’m not saying that things should be different simply to be different - these stem from very real differences in user behavior. For example, the vast majority of Windows users store all of their files in their My Documents folder or a subfolder thereof. On the Mac, however (due primarily to legacy OS 9 behavior, but also because the UI does not enforce it) a significant percentage of users stores files in directory trees at the root of their hard-drive or on the desktop. If we have any hope of our users making our app a part of their daily routine, we can’t ignore this.

And it’s not just this: the availability of multi-touch gestures, the deemphasis of right-clicking, the different keyboard shortcuts, the availability of system services, the single-menubar-multiple-window metaphor, and many more differences all need to be accounted for in the design process.

To give one more example of the pervasiveness and importance of these user behavioral differences, realize that they impact website development as well. On the PC, the typical user fills their entire screen with their browser, resulting in a usable width of over 1000 pixels. On the Mac, the typical user centers their browser window on their screen, with space on either side reserved for access to the desktop and, often, an IM application. This results in a usable width of 900-1000 pixels regardless of their display size. Yet another thing to keep in mind.

And through all of this, one thing is clear: Mac users want to use apps that feel like they have been designed specifically for the platform. Yes, they want to feel like they are special. Let’s grant them that gift.

On Marketing

As the number of available applications for a platform explodes, it becomes harder and harder to stand out. It also becomes harder and harder to get press. We’ve seen this already happening on iOS - the App Store has succeeded beyond Apple’s wildest expectations and the long tail is lonely. If we don’t make a splash and attract attention, we’re not going to see the level of success and adoption we were hoping for, nay, deserve.

There is only so much press to go around and only so many bloggers (“journalists”) available to write stories. With so many apps to pick from, how will they decide?

Once there is a critical number of apps, functionality starts becoming commoditized. There are dozens of alarm clocks, dozens of calculators, dozens of text editors, image processors, and drawing apps. What gets attention? In an age when everyone and their kitten can ship an app, the one aspect which hasn’t yet been democratized, the hard part, the time-intensive part: elegant design.

Assuming our app rocks its basic functionality (would we seriously be having this discussion if it didn’t?), the press is going to focus its attention on what makes it special. If the answer’s nothing, they’re simply not going to write about us, but if the answer’s a gorgeous UI, an elegant simplicity, and an element of joy, we’ve got a leg up on most.

It’s been 12 years since I shipped my first Mac app and, let me tell you, it was boring. I’d strongly recommend we try the flashier, more exciting approach if we want people to sit up and take notice.

Easier said than done.

Writing this is the easy part. The struggle is yet to come. I have no delusions of grandeur nor presumptions of success. There are so few truly great applications because they are so truly difficult to conceive of and build.

The worst of all possible outcomes, however, would be if that fact led us to give up and settle for mediocrity. Or, even worse, settle for above average, because then it’s clear we had the potential but let it slip at the end.

This is just the beginning. Far more can be learned by studying Delicious Library, Transmit, Tweetie for Mac, Courier, etc. What have I missed? Which other amazing apps strike your fancy? What makes them so special?

Are you ready? Fire up Photoshop. Fire up Xcode. Let’s build.

Bonus: Replace the words “Mac” and “Macintosh” above with the name of a platform of your choosing.

Deduplicating Running Instances (or how to detect if your Cocoa application is already running)

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:10:00 -0400

Have you ever encountered a coding problem that you would really like a solution to but you just can’t seem to find an elegant fix? So instead, you just put it on the back burner, hoping that one day, you’ll be smarter, and a beautiful solution will descend upon your project and fix everything?

Yeah. Frequently.

Well, today, the stars aligned and I suddenly realized how to resolve one of these delayed problems! And the answer was so simple that I had to share it…

The Problem

Let’s say you want to prevent the user from running more than one copy of your application at a given time. This is a likely scenario if your app depends on shared resources or takes some action during execution that would break if repeated. Fortunately, it turns out that there is a very easy way to detect this scenario during application startup.

The Solution

Using the NSRunningApplication facility in Snow Leopard, we can detect this with a single line of code. And, by loading all the information we need from the application’s bundle, this code will work as-is in any application:

- (void)deduplicateRunningInstances {
	if ([[NSRunningApplication runningApplicationsWithBundleIdentifier:[[NSBundle mainBundle] bundleIdentifier]] count] > 1) {
		[[NSAlert alertWithMessageText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"Another copy of %@ is already running.", [[NSBundle mainBundle] objectForInfoDictionaryKey:(NSString *)kCFBundleNameKey]] 
					defaultButton:nil alternateButton:nil otherButton:nil informativeTextWithFormat:@"This copy will now quit."] runModal];
		[NSApp terminate:nil];
	}
}

Once detected, it is equally simple to display an alert message to the user and terminate.

Call this method from -applicationDidFinishLaunching: and everything will be taken care of.

hiten: via i.imgur.com

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:32:51 -0400

hiten:

via i.imgur.com

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:03:33 -0400

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail:

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”

The average…

SlouchPress: College Dorm Sensation Now at Major Retailer

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:39:30 -0400

SlouchPress: College Dorm Sensation Now at Major Retailer:

SlouchBack now carried at Bed Bath & Beyond

The SlouchBack, the “must have” dorm accessory for 2010, which The Boston Herald predicted would take Boston by storm, has “blown up” and expanded its distribution from Internet sales to the nation’s #1 We Love College retailer, Bed Bath & Beyond…

Two weeks ago I had the honor of speaking to my highschool about...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:08:16 -0400

Two weeks ago I had the honor of speaking to my highschool about entrepreneurship as part of an annual lecture series on business - a humbling experience given the long and successful career of the day’s other presenter (the Director of the Maryland Spine Center) and the fact that I vividly remember sitting in the audience and listening to this same annual lecture 6 years ago.

My goal was to encourage the students to seriously consider entrepreneurship as a career and hopefully give them a sense of the excitement I derive from the startup world on a daily basis.

Hope you enjoy the video (sorry it skips a few times!) and I would love feedback on what I could have done better…

Requisite thanks to the Cotton family:

The H.K. Douglas Cotton Memorial Lecture, established by Baltimore businessman Henry Kyd Douglas Cotton, annually features business and career lectures for students at Gilman School. The program was created by an endowment established by Mr. Cotton shortly before his death in 1979 and reflects Mr. Cotton’s strong belief in education and business.

Setting your $PATH on Ubuntu (everywhere!)

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:38:12 -0400

Really for my own future reference, here is a quick summary of how to set the $PATH variable everywhere on the system (for Ubuntu).

As an example, let’s say you have ruby installed in /usr/bin and REE installed in /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin and you’d like to use REE system-wide.

Your account: Add this line to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc file:
```
export PATH=/opt/ruby-enterprise/bin:$PATH;
```
Sudo access: Ubuntu is, ummmm, unique, in that sudo does not inherit the path of the current user “for security reasons.” However, this really isn’t that much more secure, and furthermore is particularly obnoxious. To revert this behavior, add the following to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc file:
```
alias sudo='sudo env PATH=$PATH'
```
System wide: For everyone else and other applications, adjust the PATH line in /etc/environment so it is prefixed with ‘/opt/ruby-enterprise/bin:’

"Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the..."

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:30:34 -0500

“Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.”

- Seth’s Blog: more, More, MORE! (via hiten)

Apart from the nonstandard button spacing, this is...

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:42:12 -0500

Apart from the nonstandard button spacing, this is brilliant.

hiten:

szymon:

I think one of the best WWF campaigns

"iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:40:15 -0500

“iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.”

- Joe Hewitt (via hiten)

Box.net Launches Flash-Based Universal File Viewer, Saves You Some Headaches

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:19:13 -0500

Last year, Box.net acquired a small company called Increo without giving much insight as to what they’d be doing with the technology. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that acquisition: Box.net is launching a new integrated Flash file viewer, allowing users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.

Read full article on TechCrunch…

"Remember about, oh, a decade ago? Before 9/11? After the Battle of Seattle, when everyone was..."

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:42:51 -0500

“

Remember about, oh, a decade ago? Before 9/11? After the Battle of Seattle, when everyone was talking about multinational corporations taking over the world, about corporate states and all of that?

Yesterday, we officially tripped over this point in history.

Take a step back and consider the situation: Google is threatening to embargo a superpower, in retaliation for an espionage campaign.

”

- Public Address | OnPoint

hiten: itchycosmicpocket: softerpassions: (via...

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:03:32 -0500

hiten:

itchycosmicpocket:

softerpassions:

(via cardinalfire)

The Lottery Lady

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:15:32 -0500

“Take the typical state lotto. If you knew all of the variables in the machine that draws the numbers, you can solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.”

Ummmm….yeah…I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Most of those machines blow ping-pong balls around with air, which is most likely turbulent, and they are blown up into the slots when the lottery lady pulls the lever for the slot. Since, at a minimum, you can’t solve for the state of the lottery lady, you can’t “solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.”

(Never mind the outrageous accuracy of initial conditions and precision of the calculations you’d need to solve for the movement of ~4 dozen ping-pong balls being blown around by turbulent air.)

From Slashdot comments, of course. And this doesn’t even breach the topic of Heisenberg Uncertainty…

[Re:Looking for god’s finger prints? Here it is.]