damien7579's comments

CloudCARDS | Senior Software Engineer | ONSITE or REMOTE | Full-time | Limerick or Dublin, Ireland CloudCARDS.ie is an aviation startup founded in 2013 that is disrupting the asset management and aircraft leasing software side of aviation. The business was founded by two brothers with 20+ years of industry experience who see a massive opportunity to help bring the aviation industry into the modern technology world of always on cloud computing and the benefits that brings.

Our technology stack includes C#/.NET, Azure, SQL Server, Salesforce, DevExpress reporting and more.

We are looking for our first technical hire - a senior software engineer to come and join us on our journey. We've a lot done via development partners but to take us to the next level we are in-housing our development efforts. We're looking for someone with full stack web/backend experience who wants to join a company as an early employee where their contributions will have a large impact. We offer a friendly, flexible and hands-on collaborative environment with autonomy to get shit done. We will consider both onsite and remote working and even short term (3 months+) contracts - so if you're interested, please get in touch at jobs/@/cloudcards.ie or via my profile.

Yeah probably. Seems it was mostly BASIC + asm for that age range. Rock on GWBasic! It's probably where you learnt to use your first GOTO like a billion times :)

Yes, I voted for BASIC too but ASM was what I first messed around in on an Amstrad 512k using the manual that it came with. Remember when manuals had pin outs of all the ports and sometimes circuit digrams and included a reference manual of the CPU instruction set and sample programs?? Oh those where the days =)

Me too. then I discovered you could call interrupts in quickbasic and you could inject hand rolled ASM and execute it so upgraded to 4.5 and never looked back. rapid prototyping in DOS :)

A good point and they're making things simpler in the process - here's the product, it's $35 and this is what it does - no more messages, reminders about a pro version and removal of timebombs. Plus future versions will probably get even more serious features because they can justify it commercially with invested time vs income.

You know where you stand.

Snap... then moved to QuickBasic..ooooooooowwww. Remember the bundles source for gorillas,money and nibbles?

Where's Assembler in the list :) I loved me some MASM. Did no one learn this in the late 80's early 90's? It must still be used a lot for embedded systems ...

What I liked about it was a) it was hard and made you really really think about what you where doing (in terms of memory and CPU usage) as you where in total control of both at all times and there was often no abstraction (well unless you wrote in binary I suppose). b) it was super tedious and required keeping a lot of code in your head at one time so when moving to say C/C++ it made you review your code with some sympathy of how it will run and how to optimise it (say rolled and unrolled loops etc). When things went wrong in C you could look at the produced ASM and understand perhaps why.

Do I miss it? Heeeeeellll no!

You can look at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper... from some useful tips from the wisdom of Joel Spolsky

+1 for redmine. Had it installed on Windows 2003 server and used its superb built in migration tools to go from mantisbt. Used it for about 18months and its actively maintained. Great for multiple projects and provides a simple UI. Its integration scripts with Subversion, GIT etc are also excellent.

Two good Microsoft technology ones (ASP.NET/MVC/C# etc)

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Yahoo user interface blog:

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/

Jeff Atwood's blog (lot of various things):

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

Interesting concept and sounds like a good way to start as a newbie angel investor.

I like it :)

drop me a message offline (see my profile) perhaps we can share our research?

Good summary of my waffle ;) I suppose the stats of startups making it out of the 5th year is appalling. Less than 10% as I recall which may be similar to US but every extra hurdle in the way doesn't help either! Plus US markets are generally larger so ROI is bigger for similar risk profile at a guess.

Thanks for the link to angellist - something I aspire to join but as I said in my post, you have to be approved to get listed and one of the requirements is you're not a newbie - you must have connections to other angels - in fact you must be referred by another angellist angel and have invested at least 3 times before. This was revealed in this great interview with one of the angel.co founders: http://www.danielodio.com/2010/10/21/fundraising-hacks-inter...

Good question: Yes I was in a UK startup. I feel that the risk adverse nature/attitude we came across significantly impedes innovation in the UK (remember this is in my experience and this was around 2001-2005). I believe we had to work harder to overcome this and this took focus away from our core activities at times. We often found no one was willing to invest unless you had 5 years of track record and £1mill/yr turnover and if you where doing something disruptive (like we were) and innovative in a new market, then it was even harder. So I guess I feel there is more chance that good startup WITH cash will fail due to being crushed by this problem. Plus I think the US is known for its better startup fostering nature and work ethic as suggested in this article. http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/20/european-startups-need-t...

Wooly reasons but having said all that, times have changed and I'm not against UK startups at all, I would just like to look at US ones first... I suppose if a UK startup was doing something disruptive in healthcare I might be more interested!

Thanks for the links - I came across those during my research and they all seem to links angels to entrepreneurs/companies looking for investment. I am more interesting in seed/startup/angle funds that pick the companies to invest in during the early startup phase.

In the EU? try Cyprus...

Agreed. Long morning showers have a profound effect on my ability to concentrate, meditate, think through problems and interestingly nearly 100% of my best ideas and solutions to problems come from the shower. Sometimes I have more than one shower a day to help work through tough problems (both personal, technical and business). I do live in a hot country and work from home so this is easier. If I don't have a shower to start the day I feel incomplete and a nagging feeling all day that something is not quite right!

I read all sorts of books to help unwind or enhance my existing knowledge or learn something new. Mixing genres of books each time is also good. I usually read scifi, fantasy (Terry Pratchett anyone?), biographies, history books,science/maths, technical, business... reading is one of mans greatest gifts!

Also, learn to do things like crosswords and jigsaws as a way to take your mind off things. Jigsaws are an amazing way to completely switch off - like stacking shelves without the significant labour! Mind wonders, but you also achieve something with each piece laid. Seriously dont knock it until you try :)

Exercise is critical. I swim 50+ laps in the pool each day and this really helps. But I hate exercise so you gotta find something that works for you.

And of course spending time with family - particularly children if you have them can be a real boon and gives you an excuse to play lego - anther wonderful invention of mankind! In fact I often build robots using technic lego with the kids which is a cool bridge between mechanical and computer skills.