Before I moved to the dark-side of VC, I built + ran Uber's Public Policy Product & Technology division, which was a crazy and eye-opening experience going from ~1000 worldwide to 6000+ people when I left.
I am also one of the two founders of WP Engine (http://wpengine.com) but have not worked there since 2014, views are just my own, etc.
A long time ago I helped build the BBC News Website as a software engineer, back when Objective C was a server-side language :). I went on to design and run the BBC's developer platform and later I was Director of Engineering for MySpace's Developer Platform - back when MySpace was a thing, I promise.
Personal site: http://benmetcalfe.com/
You can email me at: hn AT benmetcalfe DOT com
- dotBen parentGive the government your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database in order to protest against the government having your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database.
- Remember Snowden outlined the Google<>US government interface:
The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.
If yes - FISA warrant was required
If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).
In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.
* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)
- Success here is the sum of an equation that combines publishing and distribution.
The early days of blogging, the distribution came from RSS feed readers. The minute those fell out of fashion, the distribution loop of self-publishing disappeared.
Medium was clever because it kind of created that built-in but it never took off.
The distribution loop has always been social media which is now drowned out with other noise (you don't need me to explain that dire state of social media).
The nth conclusion becomes newsletters because email remains the lowest common denominator of distribution (other than maybe text message but that isn't appropriate here).
I am a founder of a publishing platform (WP Engine) and my entire SWE background is content management. But I'm the first to admit that distribution is everything.
I think maintaining a personal blog or site is important to be able to have a source of record of important stuff you write. But it's a backup. It's not a destination for distribution.
- Stands like this have to be paired with an external keyboard.
Raising the monitor so that the top is as close to eye level as possible (while maintaining a straight back) is better orthopedicly.
It's impossible to achieve this and a good keyboard posture, so you must introduce an external keyboard.
Without an external keyboard, there is no value in using a stand, you might as well just keep the laptop in a neutral position.
- Fakespot is not infallible but a useful addition to any Amazon research process.
They try to hide it from the front page (a bit of a dark pattern) but you don't need to download the plugin to use it, just visit https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer
- It’s fascinating that Amazon Web Services have so many overlapping and competing services to achieve the same objective. Efficiency/small footprint was never their approach :D
For example, look how many different types of database they offer (many achieve the same objective but different instantiation)
https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...
- Sorry, but there's nothing about the NASA space program which has a "deal" to be transparent with the tax payer.
From being involved with high altitude spy planes and stealth planes during the Cold war through to thinking about the many satellites that are put into space that relates to national security and even the clandestine space plane, we have no idea what it's for...
There is simply no precedent to be upset about a lack of transparency from NASA. Some of that is national security. Some of that is to protect IP. Some of it is just because of the way governments work.
Factor in that actually it may relate to a private company's operational issue (SpaceX) there's even less reason for transparency.
I don't think we will ever know
- I've never vaped (/smoked/done drugs/etc I'm v boring) but can someone ELI5 why disposable vapes have been the preference?
Don't you just buy the capsules and put them into your regarchable vape? Or if you want to get exotic e liquid. I would assume that's much cheaper than buying a whole device each time much must cost more $$/££.
- The UK isn't a 'free country' in the way American's use the term. It took me a few years of living in America to understand the nuance. I think the 'freedoms' Americans have raises it's own problems for society (eg guns) and there isn't a right or wrong, just different.
The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't, in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can. :D
- How would you explain to a UI/UX designer how to do the data and BE work that you do?
As someone who has been a hiring manager for both roles I would suggest that they are reasonably different skillsets and personalities and not sure there's a high degree of overlap. If you fall into one camp I think it's better to hire for the other than to try to do both, assuming you are trying to achieve any kind of higher-order quality of work product.
- "large commercial entities" should (should from a moral, not legal standpoint) "pay back" to the open source software that makes them money.
...
I know some of the developer team at ACF personally - they're excellent people, making brilliant code, and most of them are putting huge efforts into WP as an open source project even aside from their efforts in maintaining and extending ACF.
The ACF team wiring that open source ACF code are on WP Engine's payroll.
- Very few people want to interface with a wearable locally and store the data locally (esp via a mobile app given the use case here).
I have spent my entire career messing around with APIs and platforms and I have no interest in doing this DIY. oAuth into Oura ring's servers, which is totally available to you, is just fine.
If privacy is this much of a concern, why wear a trackable wearable in the first place?
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M Series (minis) are an absolute sleeper and way better value than Raspbery Pis. I run one in my home network closet with a bunch of docker containers on for home networking, crawler projects that need to run from a non-datacenter IP address, homelab experiments, etc.
Cost me $100 'used' (open box), SSD, decent RAM and even a copy of Windows I didn't need. Install *nix, run it headless, good to go.
You can go cheaper but at a certain point who cares if it's $80 for an unknown brand or $100 for Lenovo, etc.
Small form factor, it can tuck in with wherever you store your router, or buy an aftermarket rack kit if you run rackmount network components like I do. OR 3D print one https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4769452
Eg https://www.ebay.com/itm/186591932407 - this is a great project server that can probably run tons of docker containers (depending on what you are doing).
- I have a ton of issues with Elon, and growing, on his social and political views, BUT...
...when you look at the zero-to-one of standing up Tesla and SpaceX from nothing, he's achieved something quite amazing - twice. Boeing has over a century of engineering experience and it has experienced more problems and more delays getting Starliner into operation than SpaceX did with Dragon.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have demonstrated fresh thinking, new ideas and new approaches to tired and incumbent thinking in both the automotive and aeronautical industries. While also getting the basics right. People bitch about panel gaps in Model 3's but Model 3s and Ys are actually the safest cars the EPA has ever tested in their class.
I think Boring Company is a bit silly and I'm not sure Elon can apply his thinking to X, but I wonder if we'll see similar performance to Tesla and SapceX from Neuralink.
I hold $TSLA and I would hold SpaceX if I could obtain some, I don't have any interest in holding $BA
- I can't emphasize enough how much of a genuine issue this is, especially where package managers are being used on production environments or within CI/CD pipelines. There's enough publicized cases of Chinese CCP operatives gaining pull request access to key packages, and I'm sure many more get discovered that are covered up/not made public. Even just turn over of package ownership from reputable entities to lesser known individuals is of course worrying.
As a SWE/EngMgr turned VC, I'm curious if there's startups or commercial companies providing some kind of assurance here (but also worried the $ TAM for solving this problem probably isn't enough to make it a standalone business).