Also be sure to find out who will actually own your project once it's done! It'd be a shame to build something you'd like to continue working on after graduation only to have it be owned by your school instead of you.
I also got my MBA after getting my BS in Computer Science and while I think I could have learned most everything we talked about by reading books, I did learn:
- public speaking because we had to do a presentation just about every other week
- how business people with little or no technology experience think and their perceptions about technology
- how to talk to the people in the above bullet about technology
- firing people because one of my groups had a member that was not pulling her own weight, and we were told to fire her from the group
I also agree that the branding aspect is also (somehow) helpful. I recently moved from Florida to SF and when I was looking for jobs you wouldn't believe how many people were really excited/impressed/whatever that I had an MBA in addition to being able to answer the tough software questions.
If I had a choice to go back and either spend $50k on an MBA or spend it traveling the world, I would definitely choose the latter, though.
I always liked the air cooled 911s myself because I remember playing with a MicroMachines 911[1] and they had all of the cool vents (which I guess are silly reasons), but man the new water cooled ones are fast. I think the eggplant headlight change from (I think) 97-01 was a bad move though. I'm glad they're back to the more traditional oval headlamps...
I can't believe that there is so little going on here considering all of the nearby schools (FIT, BCC, Kaiser, UCF Cocoa Beach Campus, etc.) and all of the industry (Harris, Northrop, Lockheed, GE, NASA, etc.).
I guess these two factors don't necessarily contribute to the startup pool, but it DOES mean there are a lot of technically minded people around. Thanks for taking the initiative and starting this. If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know!
I agree with all of your points, but I'm wondering about the case where it's a solo technical founder that has to do EVERYTHING - marketing, development, customer relations, billing, etc. In that case do you think it makes sense to outsource non-core functionality just so he/she can accelerate development in order to get a more complete product out there (beyond MVP)?
For a project I'm working on right now, we're using HighCharts[0] which makes use of SVG. There's a ton of examples of how it works, so I won't delve into that, but I'm thinking you could probably do this by making use of HighCharts like you normally would, but using output buffering [1] and headers [2]
- I'd change the 1st 2 paragraphs in the about section to "Jobs Tractor looks for people trying to hire developers on Twitter, but filters out tweets that are from recruitment agencies or jobs boards."
- Love the map view
- Does the search field allow you to filter by location, keyword, or both?
- Group by location maybe?
- I'd take the word "jobs" out of the logo - to me it looks cluttered
- Do you save the posts or is it just what the Twitter search API pulls up? Jobs might not get tweeted about more than once, so a posting could still be legitimate after a week or so
I was actually in a meeting today where someone was showing us mockups using Balsamiq. First time I've ever seen it - looked pretty cool. He was able to make interactive PDFs so when you click on an element of the mockup (say a button) it showed the action (like popping up a dialog). He seemed to like it well enough too, but like you said it's not free and requires Adobe Air...
That's a pretty cool idea, but I don't like that it's an added step for the user when submitting a form.
I used to get a TON of spam on my website(s) until I threw in a hidden text field. When the form is submitted I assume the submission is spam if the hidden text field's value isn't blank. I don't get spam anymore and people don't have to mess around with a captcha (plus nobody's complained).
...although I'm sure it's only a matter of time until the spammers figure this technique out.
Out of curiosity, why'd you change from Cow's Milk to Goat's Milk?
I temporarily switched to Almond Milk because it doesn't have lactose (which doesn't promote estrogen production), has the same amount of protein, more vitamins, and at the time it was way cheaper than organic whole cow's milk. The biggest drawback was that it tasted kinda gross, which I remedied with a bit of cinnamon, but now that it's fairly expensive I switched back to cow milk.
Thanks for the insight! I agree completely - the only reason I ever did free work for them was because they were literally my first customer ever, and I wanted to keep them happy.
http://www.coolmaterial.com/ is a website dedicated to affiliate referrals. While they do use a bunch of affiliate programs, it seems like Amazon is their primary source of income.
Unfortunately I don't know anything about their conversion rates, but it looks like they've got pretty good numbers on compete.com (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/coolmaterial.com/). Maybe someone on here knows?
Yep, though it was internal to the company I used to work for. The project I was on had probably one of the best teams I will ever be on - everyone (for the most part) followed coding standards and if someone didn't then they were called out on it. It was a pretty mature project, and though the source code we inherited had been thrown together in haste, over time we refactored a good deal of that code.
Whenever we had to write new code, we had to propose to our peers what we intended on doing and how we intended on doing it. Keeping senior members of the team in the loop kept the younger guys (like myself) in check when it came to implementations and design pattern usage.
On top of that, a handful of the people on my team were RELIGIOUS about writing comments first and then coding to the comments. All in all, it was a great experience for me having been fresh out of undergrad.
