carbon8's comments

I'm sure that there are companies that have a valid engineering need for perpetual staging environments rather than feature flags, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that staging servers are commonly engineering driven. Certainly in every part of the web startup world I've had contact with or heard about, staging environments have consistently been for product QA in organizations with heavy-handed processes and/or product management by non-technical stakeholders.

Edit for the people responding: This is not about haphazardly pushing to production. You should familiarize yourselves with continuous integration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration) and the various deployment strategies of major web companies.

What I think it really has to do with is that GitHub seems to make an effort to hire doers, whereas many companies develop processes to deal with non-doers, eg, having staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers. Remote work also doesn't serve the interests of non-doers, since they want to Have Meetings and Make Decisions.

"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders [of companies that have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees] was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."

http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...

http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-te...

* http://misc.si.umich.edu/media/papers/wsdm333w-bakshy.pdf

* http://www.digitaltonto.com/wp-content/uploads/WattsandDoddi...

"Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web," the book by Paul Adams @ Facebook (http://www.amazon.com/Grouped-groups-friends-influence-socia...), talks a bit about this.

Anecdotally, I've also seen quite a bit of evidence first hand that suggests the impact of influencers is not clear-cut.

"It appears to split, so I’m guessing the main mass split there. That’s not surprising; it’s happened with previous falls (like Sikhote-Alin). That means they could have disintegrated at different times, so there may be multiple places where pieces could fall."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDqYclzto7k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ozSq3yEm3g

Segall’s description of Jobs includes an important additional component: obsession with keeping things simple (hence the book title). Segall provides numerous anecdotes of Jobs beating an idea with the “Simple Stick,” as he calls it, and compares it favorably against his relatively frustrating experiences working with other companies like Intel and Dell.

Academic publishing is what needs a serious overhaul.

After having worked in an academic library and, more recently, leading technology operations for a prominent new ebook publisher and article archive, the first two words that come to mind when I think of both publishing (academic and trade) and librarianship are "waste" and "bureaucracy."

Librarians are supposed to be the ones advocating for the readers, but they are hobbled by a culture of committees, conferences, and politics. They work within organizations that are heavily stratified ("librarians" and "staff"), with all the worst aspects of severely hierarchical organizations.

Recently I was also was privy to a variety of details during the formation of a new academic digital publisher, and it was the same kind of top-heavy, anti-"lean" structure you'd expect. The amount they were raising just to get started seemed absurd, especially when we were in the process of building a larger organization that did more with less funding.

The point being, when you look under the surface, it's no wonder that everything in this space seems to cost more than necessary.

There must be enough of us fed up, skilled, and idealistic enough to disrupt this space, creating new, actually modern publishers and/or publishing platforms if necessary.

Does anyone with more domain expertise have any advice about where to start or what to focus on?

"Finally, a note about why we will not be concentrating very much on the fate of the New York Times. A remarkable amount of what has been written about the fortunes of American journalism over the past decade has centered on the question of what will happen to the Times. We believe this focus has been distracting.

"In the last generation, the Times has gone from being a great daily paper, in competition with several other such papers, to being a cultural institution of unique and global importance, even as those papers—the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, among others—have shrunk their coverage and their ambitions. This puts the Times in a category of one. Any sentence that begins “Let’s take the New York Times as an example ...” is thus liable to explain or describe little about the rest of the landscape.

"The Times newsroom is a source of much interesting experimentation—data visualizations, novel partnerships, integration of blogs—and we have talked to many of our friends and colleagues there in an effort to learn from their experiences and make recommendations for other news organizations. However, because the Times is in a category of one, the choices its management can make, and the outcomes of those choices, are not illustrative or predictive for most other news organizations, large or small, old or new. We will therefore spend comparatively little time discussing its fate. While the Times serves as an inspiration for news organizations everywhere, it is less useful as a model or bellwether for other institutions."

The analytics on every site I've had access to in the past couple years suggest otherwise. iPad web traffic has been steadily rising and accounts for a significant portion of traffic on some sites. I've seen as high as 30+% on sites that haven't even been optimized for tablets yet.

Byliner Inc. is a publishing company and social network built around great stories. We are an online archive of long form journalism and fiction, as well as a publisher of original stories for iPad, Kindle, and other mobile devices.

We use Ruby, MySQL, Redis, Sass and are making the shift to using Backbone and CoffeeScript on the front-end. We also produce ebooks.

Looking for both UI and back-end developers. Full Time and/or contract.

Also starting to look for a designer for help with static HTML/CSS and graphics on a contract basis.

More info: http://byliner.com/jobs

Byliner Inc. is a publishing company and social network built around great stories. We are an online archive of long form journalism and fiction, as well as a publisher of original stories for iPad, Kindle, and other mobile devices.

We use Ruby, MySQL, Redis, Sass and are making the shift to using Backbone and CoffeeScript on the front-end. We also produce ebooks.

Looking for both UI and back-end developers. Full Time and/or contract.

Also starting to look for a designer for help with static HTML/CSS and graphics on a contract basis.

More info: http://byliner.com/jobs

As I understand it, at-rules are basically directives to the CSS parser and, according to the spec, should be ignored if the parser does not recognize the identifier. Given that, the use of at-rules for variable names has always seemed, IMVHO, to break the purpose of at-rules.