Sounds like a weird and bad situation. Here's a question, you are going into debt over this company... is the CEO also doing the same? Is it shared pain? Or... are you the only one who is under pain? Or under-paid?
I've seen startup situations where the CEO earns > $250k but pays everyone else < $100k. And says there isnt enough money. But the truth is the CEO himself is squeezing the company dry and killing it. Are you in that kind of company?
Another thing to consider, are the founders ethical? Are they good people? Have you considered if they are sociopaths? Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
The reality for me is that I would never ever ever take a startup job less than break-even cash. That means I am not paying for my day-to-day living out of savings while taking a substandard salary. Because in a properly backed startup, they CAN afford to pay people $120k a year. If you are taking major cash hits, you need to be a founder.
On the founder side, it's a pretty clear cut rule... are you a founder - if the answer isnt "yes" immediately, without a doubt, the answer is in fact NO. First employees arent founders. Employees with stock options (ISO or otherwise) arent founders. "VP of X" or "Director of Y" - not a founder. "But I did the technical due diligence" - not a founder.
Being a founder in major part is also about how the other founders treat you. Are you an equal business partner? Usually if you were hired in substantially after, the answer is NO. They might respect your opinion, but also reserve the right to ignore it. Real founders and partners don't get to ignore the other's opinion without consequences later on. This is true in business and your personal life as well.
In short, if your founders are the Dark Triad type, you may wish to extract yourself. If they are not, you may be able to come clean with them, and come to a negotiated situation. Such as allowing you to find consulting work, or perhaps paying you more, etc.
Well, let's face it, the most revolutionary things have all started sounding silly and insane. People will buy things over computers without having actually seen or touched them? Humans will fly? Will travel to the moon? Everything is actually well modelled by equations that imply that everything is a wave and has probability it exists?
So just because YOU think it sounds crazy or insane, doesn't mean it doesn't have a chance at something big.
After all, who would want to communicate in 140 characters only, or have a real time feed of everything their friends do, or want tiny square pictures on their phone?
On the subject matter, I've lived in SF for a few years now and I was born in Canada. In the US people will give you a chance, in Canada companies want to know what you have done and get you to do more of it.
Interesting paper, I hope to see a follow on that actually describes the algorithm in full. As written, it doesn't cover the failure recovery, data-drift and timeout cases.
Also maybe you could speak to a few constraints:
- missing updates
- unique index
and outline your thoughts as to how an application developer might avoid pitfalls. Most applications I have seen tend to require/run in to these issues.
I'm sorry but this is possibly one of the worst comments I've seen... There is a conservation of complexity that you just can't get rid of in an application. To suggest that Scala encourages small programs, you are also suggesting that Scala is only appropriate for small problems, and thus it isn't a scalable language.
Ultimately, the baseline requirements drive the minimal complexity of code. Sure a poor programmer can drive up the complexity with unnecessary constructs, but the converse is not true: a great programmer can drive to simplicity. For example, a flight control system for a 777 can never be reduced to a single file of 700 lines of code. It will likely always be 2000+ files, and have lots of inter-dependencies.
So I guess (run time safety issues of Scala aside) Scala is not an appropriate language for complex problems by your own words?
Question, doesn't the full configuration require you to put your config stuff in multiple files? A lot of files?
The sbt 'directory of configuration' was always a bummer for me. The single pom.xml is a nice mechanism. Also maven has good CI compatibility.
The way I think of it is that maven has a good way of specifying a build. The mvn command is the slow, but complete, way of building. The normal development lifecycle is to load your maven model into an IDE then go from there, using IntelliJ's incremental build support, etc.
SBT in other words, solves a problem I don't have.
The other major problem is last year, SBT was a fucking train wreck between 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 and 0.10. Now that we are a YEAR out from that yeah sure maybe it's a lot better. I'd give it another year before I'd seriously try it again.
In the mean time, I am more interested in kotlin for sane static typed JVM languages, and clojure for real functional sauce. Scala is too slow for me :-/
you can edit the pom.xml file, and have your project adjusted immediately. intellij will download and add the new jar to the classpath... BAM
intellij is really a much better experience in developing than eclipse. Lots of fit and finish things, also intellij is very keyboard-centric, so whereas eclipse had lots of graphical widgety things, intellij has all your normal day to day stuff fully keyboard accessible. It's the closest to emacs in an IDE I've ever seen.
i really just want intellij compatability. sbt doesnt offer that. it's incremental compiling is not useful because I do my java dev in intellij. So SBT offered me nothing that maven didnt already have, minus a few weirdo things (like putting the scala version in the name/version of a scala library).
To me, I had to give up scala due to lack of tool support. Maybe if you are used to an emacs/gcc paradigm, but I've gotten quite productive in intellij, as much or more than any C++-styled development. Why have another window with compiler output when you could have it inline with the code and using the typographic features?
I could go either way, but with Java, intellij I have 'develop and run anywhere' going on. Sure there are some super edge causes at the highest performance profiles, but that is always hardware specific, and unless you are developing on the same server class boxes you wont find it.
I was neutral on this guy until I read the wired story, and then I became a fan.
He is a self made man (way more so than romney!), he suffers from persistent discrimination (overweight) and he has cycled thru the hero's journey.
I have heard a lot of these "major success stories", but they are people who have been put in ideal situations and then they made the best of it. That is just emotionally dead for me. Kim's story is more interesting because it is relevant to ME. I can imagine myself in the same spot, and it overlaps with my own personal history (timewise) a bit too.
Ultimately, I believe there is minimal legal differences between youtube in the early days (which was made successful via RAMPANT piracy), and megaupload.
I guess YOUR startup isnt technical... But there are in fact technical startups out there. It's just that they make more money than yours, do better and are generally cooler.
well, you got it in the first paragraph - because Windows isnt Unix, and people dont use it for production. F# is in theory nice, but devops'ing windows, I just dunno man.
I've seen startup situations where the CEO earns > $250k but pays everyone else < $100k. And says there isnt enough money. But the truth is the CEO himself is squeezing the company dry and killing it. Are you in that kind of company?
Another thing to consider, are the founders ethical? Are they good people? Have you considered if they are sociopaths? Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
The reality for me is that I would never ever ever take a startup job less than break-even cash. That means I am not paying for my day-to-day living out of savings while taking a substandard salary. Because in a properly backed startup, they CAN afford to pay people $120k a year. If you are taking major cash hits, you need to be a founder.
On the founder side, it's a pretty clear cut rule... are you a founder - if the answer isnt "yes" immediately, without a doubt, the answer is in fact NO. First employees arent founders. Employees with stock options (ISO or otherwise) arent founders. "VP of X" or "Director of Y" - not a founder. "But I did the technical due diligence" - not a founder.
Being a founder in major part is also about how the other founders treat you. Are you an equal business partner? Usually if you were hired in substantially after, the answer is NO. They might respect your opinion, but also reserve the right to ignore it. Real founders and partners don't get to ignore the other's opinion without consequences later on. This is true in business and your personal life as well.
In short, if your founders are the Dark Triad type, you may wish to extract yourself. If they are not, you may be able to come clean with them, and come to a negotiated situation. Such as allowing you to find consulting work, or perhaps paying you more, etc.
Good luck!