dorkitude | 9 months ago | on: GCP Outage
dorkitude's comments
dorkitude | 9 months ago | on: The copilot delusion
If it's satire, it's brilliant: because most of the comments I see (here and elsewhere) are clearly written by people who tried agentic coding before Opus 4, and haven't given it a fair shake over the ensuing five days.
IMO the most important engineering skill in 2025 isn't low-level programming, or the craft of debugging, or even having a firm grasp of system architecture. Believe it or not, I truly believe the vibe-first juniors will learn that stuff too, over the course of their careers, just as we did: through necessity (As an aside: if you don't think they'll encounter such necessity, then it's inherently not one any more than the countless other once-honored, fastidious hallmarks of craft that have since been rendered obsolete. And if you don't think they'll learn even upon encountering a true necessity, then you underestimate them.)
No, the most important engineering skill in 2025 is non-attachment: constantly update your priors, and hold your opinions very loosely. Because those opinions could be fully wrong before the essay even gets shared.
dorkitude | 1 year ago | on: The fastest and more relevant search engine
dorkitude | 9 years ago | on: Fabric is Joining Google
For users of Fabric/Crashlytics/Answers, is there a TLDR somewhere for the new terms? (specifically, the delta between their new terms preview and the old terms)
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
For your article, you may be interested in a piece I wrote about Demo Day pitching specifically:
https://keen.io/blog/41079734225/how-to-write-your-demo-day-...
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
You're right: practice really seems like the key to getting this stuff down. One can have a clear intuitive understanding of their vision long before they have a clear way to express it in English.
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
It's validating to hear from an industry veteran that our thesis isn't totally off base :)
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
Keen IO takes an API-based approach to the problem, which means:
- developer abstractions are higher level than rolling your own
- scalability is as easy as "my bill went up" (as opposed to "my ALTER statements stopped working!" or "I need to leave mongo and buy a book on distributed system engineering!"
- ability to cover new/emergent use cases is a lot higher than you would get with an off-the-shelf analytics product
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Lessons from a Failed YC Pitch with Paul Graham
Now that I've pitched 80-90 additional times, I must say PG's approach in this video is above average, if anything, when it comes to giving the entrepreneur the benefit of the doubt -- so in my opinion it's really not on him.
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Making Phil Libin style cohort visualizations available to everyone
Question: What's missing from our API? Are there any qualitative or quantitative limitations that got in your way?
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: The Open Source Identity Crisis
I don't mind being called out when I'm out of order, because I see it as an opportunity to become a better community citizen. But it's hard to become a better community citizen without some corrective advice.
Would you please point me to the code of conduct (and ideally to the specific rules I've broken), so I can be better in the future?
dorkitude | 11 years ago | on: Heroku PM (Amazon, PayPal Alum) Matt Soldo on "Selling More with Math"
dorkitude | 12 years ago | on: How to be a great software developer
Couldn't agree more about the four hours per day piece. The best work I did in my career as a dev was the year I worked 20 hour weeks.
dorkitude | 12 years ago | on: Why We Chose Keen IO.
You may be interested in an upcoming feature we currently have in private beta, which does this:
your events ----> Keen IO ----> your S3 bucket on AWS
We have a great, standard format for representing the events in files in S3. If you were using that feature, you could just write an Elastic MapReduce job to perform these sorts of custom calculations (we'll be open-sourcing a bunch of these sorts of scripts). Another option would be to pay one of our partners to write this analysis code for you.I wonder: would that feature be interesting to you? Would it have perhaps allowed us to win your business?
dorkitude | 12 years ago | on: Why We Chose Keen IO.
You're right that this is definitely one of our dominant use cases.
It's taken us by surprise to see just how much traction we've among B2B SaaS companies who just wanted to give reports their customers.
Glad the scoped keys are working out for you! If you could add one feature to our product, what would it be?
dorkitude | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is there a model for a healthy, long-term API policy
From studying these, I found that the best practices aren't all that surprising: versioning, discoverability, and following HTTP standards.
dorkitude | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2013)
Analytics Backend as a Service for modern developers (web + mobile + internet of things)
Our API's usage is doubling every 6-8 weeks. We need help supporting that load.
Keen IO is a fully managed cloud API that lets developers build complex, hyper-custom, large-scale analytics and data science features directly into their web, mobile, or Internet of Things applications.
Our currency is event data, and events are a pretty broad abstraction. Every time someone draws a breath, clicks a link, loads a website, pauses a song, or starts a car, there's an event. Events like these, in large aggregate, are extremely useful -- and therefore valuable :)
It's probably worth mentioning that we're a platform company, not a product company. This means our customers are using the platform to build for an emergent and rapidly growing set of use cases. The same flexibility that makes us future-proof for a given customer also makes us future-proof from a market perspective. So while a product company seeks a certain kind of product-market fit, we allow product-market fit to come to us: our customers build it for themselves.
Things we look for in a new team member:
• Learning agility
• Abstract reasoning
• Empathy
• Potential is more important than credential
• Confidence, but tempered by humility & the drive to get even better
Some things we believe in: • Mission = The Discovery of Truth.
• Radical transparency
• Design with a capital "D"
• Introspection
• Distributed innovation
• The importance of laughter
• Relationships are everything
• Play to your strengths; patch your weaknesses with diverse collaborators
Apply: https://angel.co/keen-io/jobsdorkitude | 12 years ago | on: What does it take to close a great Series A right now?
All too often founders fall into a cycle like this:
Pitch failures begin to beget a habit of fear or panic or other forms of negativity, which of course beget more pitch failures.
I had this happen to me in a bad way once, and it almost cost us our company. But if you find your flow and fundraise when things are going well, it gets a lot easier.
Cloud console does nothing.
They should host their support services on AWS and vice-versa.