Articles on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Making the Best of Your Time Resting and Vesting

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 21:07:17 +0000

First, go on vacation for a few weeks, to the south of France or something. For a while, you will likely focus on ensuring your team lands nicely and navigating integration processes. You could try climbing the corporate ladder, but you probably won’t if you plan to start another company.

After a few months, you’ll wonder what to do with yourself while you wait for a vesting cliff or finish building your dream home. You can do several valuable things at a large company while resting and vesting.

Discussing Startups and Intellectual Property with the Boston Inn of Courts

Fri, 01 May 2015 16:16:00 +0000

On Wednesday I had the privilege of being part of a panel before the Inn of Courts in Boston. This is an organization of patent litigators that meets for continuing education and discussing the practice of their craft. For this meeting, they invited a panel of practitioners from startups and academia to listen to lay people talk about how intellectual property is working (or not) for us.

Topics were quite broad including a focus on copyright, trademark, and trade secret as well as patents and licensing. In the end because the panelists were mostly from the software space we focused more on software patents and software licensing.

In Sales, Questions are More Valuable than Answers

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 09:10:00 +0000

Inspired by “A day at the park” by Kostas Kiriakakis.

I spend a lot of my time helping people sell the software I write. For scalability, this often means teaching them how to sell it themselves. When I’m teaching people, which happens informally and formally, often times they want to know the questions the prospect will ask, and what answers they should give. The FAQ, as it were, so they can have the answers at the ready. And they don’t just want the technically correct answers, they want the answers that will encourage the prospect to buy. “What should I say if they ask what I think about competitor X?”, things like that.

10 Tips for Not Giving a Sales Pitch at a Meetup

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 10:55:00 +0000

How do you give a sales pitch at a developer meetup? Don’t.

Developer meetups are technical, so it can’t seem like a sales pitch. Even if you paid for the pizza and beer and everyone knows you are there to pitch them on something with commercial upside for you, they want to feel like it is a technical community event where valuable information is being shared. This is the epitome of the evangelical or educational sale.

Identify and Manage the Honey-Badger Developer

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 12:10:00 +0000

A few years back I read Rands’ blog post about the Free Electron developer archetype: “the single most productive developer you’re ever going to meet.” This is a good archetype to understand, identify, recruit, and retain. I would like to discuss another related archetype which can be quite powerful if properly harnessed: The Honey Badger.

“There is no other animal in the kingdom of all animals, as fearless as the crazyass Honey Badger.”

Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 08:34:00 +0000

A year ago this month I attended startup weekend in Boston. The company that I helped to launch there, http://sellercrowd.com, is now a successful ongoing concern, with funding and a handful of employees. So I think that counts as a success story for startup weekend, and my conclusion is that it’s a great program and can work well if you make the right choices going into it. To that end, I’d like to share some of my lessons learned from my first startup weekend, and solicit anyone else to add them in the comments.

Recommending the Franklyn D Resort (FDR) in Jamaica

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:09:00 +0000

I just got back from a week in Jamaica, and I’ve been talking off everyone’s ear about the experience. That’s because the Franklyn D. Resort has one major thing going for it: every family gets a full time nanny for the duration of your vacation. Larger families, particularly with multiple age groups of kids, often had two nannies. The resort seemed especially friendly to large families, with big multi-bedroom suites and reasonable rates for additional children. For our trip they were also running a “grandparents stay free” promotion, which I think they do every January. If you are planning a family-oriented vacation, particularly with young kids, you have to consider the Franklyn D. Resort.

Toddler Science and Big Data

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:16:00 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time following my son Patrick around watching him explore the world. I’ve shared a few of his important discoveries with Twitter and with friends, under the tag “Toddler Science”. Key discoveries include that tissue boxes contain a finite supply of tissue and that cat magnets do not stick to cats. I spent the New Years weekend with friends, and they too had an opportunity to watch Patrick learning.

Book Review: Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:21:00 +0000

“>As someone several years into a successful venture backed enterprise software startup, I find myself spending a lot of time looking at the green grass on the other side of the startup fence: angel funding and quick flips. People have mixed opinions on flipping, both the practicalities and the ethics of quickly flipping a company. Ethically, I tend to agree that “Flipping is Good“. But practically, there are a lot of moving parts in a company and lining them up for a quick windfall seems to require more than a bit of luck. It was in hopes of better understanding these practicalities that I read Basil Peters book Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists).

2010 The Year in Bookmarks

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:45:00 +0000

As you may have heard, Delicious is going away, or at least being sold off, or otherwise being destroyed by Yahoo. In the last 72 hours, I’ve tried out the two leading alternatives, Diigo and pinboard. Along the way, I got to wondering why I keep all these bookmarks around. I do often search back for things. And in paging through my 1173 bookmarks from 2010, they formed an interesting lens through which to look back at the year. And so I present 2010, the year in bookmarks.

There Can Be Too Many Suckers at the Table

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Everyone knows the old saw about poker: If you can’t spot the sucker, it’s probably you. It’s nice to think you could sit down at a table with incompetent players and take their money. It probably works in poker. Mark Suster applies the aphorism to angel investing in his post Dealflow – Are You Sitting at The Right Poker Table? It’s a good post, dealflow is really important. But the poker metaphor falls short. Too many suckers actually ruin a startup market.

Yes Virginia, You Can Work on Great Technology at Startups

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:17:00 +0000

You can work on great technology at startups. You wouldn’t think that would be a controversial statement. But it is if you believe Ted Tso’s defense of Google, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap.” Ted dismisses the engineering that goes on in a startup, saying:

Similarly, you don’t work on great technology at a startup. Startups, by and large, aren’t about technology — at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc. They are about business model discovery. So if you are fundamentally a technologist at heart, whose heart sings when you’re making a better file system, or fixing a kernel bug, you’re not going to be happy at a startup. At least, not if the startup is run competently.

Three Months Without Cable

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:03:00 +0000

As was widely reported in the media, the second and third quarter of 2010 show a steady decline in cable subscriptions. This is earth-shaking for the cable companies, who have seen growth in US subscribers over their entire history. It’s a key indicator of not only consumers being more careful with their spending, but the rise of Internet-delivered media as a compelling alternative.

In August of this year I joined the ranks of people “cutting the cord”. I was moving, and when we set up Verizon FiOS at the new house we left off video. Three months later, I’d like to fill you in on how it has gone and what I see in the future of consumer video delivery.

Captchas: The Bear Proof Trash Can Problem

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:03:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been selling a lot of things on Craigslist. Along with adventures in capitalism, every post to Craigslist requires filling out a CAPTCHA, specifically a reCAPTCHA. I’ve noticed that they have gotten quite difficult. In fact, at least one of the captchas I got recently was in Greek.

Captchas area a really clever idea, but they represent a special kind of arms race. The spammers are always improving their automatic and semi-automatic captcha solvers. At the same time, the average web user is not getting any better at solving captchas. The goal of the captcha company is to hit the window between what motivated spammers can do automatically and what web users can do manually.

Proactive Assumption Violation: Avoiding Bugs By Behaving Badly

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Bugs are a fact of life in software, and probably always will be. Some bugs are probably unavoidable, but a lot of bugs can be avoided through good architecture, defensive programming, immutability, and other techniques. One major source of bugs, especially frustrating bugs, is non-deterministic behavior. Every programmer has experienced bugs which don’t reproduce, which require a special environment, or special timing, or even just luck to make happen. To avoid these bugs, programmers learn to favor determinism, making sure their software behaves the same way every time.

What the Rally for Sanity Meant for Me

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 22:46:00 +0000

The weekend before last my family went to the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington DC. We went for a few reasons: because we hadn’t been to DC in a while, because a lot of our friends would be in town, because it was a cheap trip thanks to points/miles. It did end up being a fun trip, even if the rally was too crowded to be safe for the baby and we saw less of the stage presentation than we would have seen on TV. Many friends were in town, everyone was in a good mood, and there were lots of things to see and do.

Lean Startups and the Theory of the Firm

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:28:00 +0000

If you spend much time in the entrepreneurial corners of the blogosphere, you’re certain to have heard about lean startups. If you haven’t, check out Eric Reis and Steve Blank. The core of the lean startup is two related ideas: continuous validation and building the smallest company that can validate an idea. The result is dramatically reduced costs, reduced time-to-failure, and reduced risk. A lot has been written and can be written about validation. But what I’m concerned about now is how small the smallest possible company is, and specifically why it is usually more than one person.

Apple is a Luxury Brand, Android Will Never Be

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are shielded from feature- and performance-based competition, enjoying higher margins and more stable revenues than other consumer electronics firms. The future of the iPhone and iPad and their strategy for competing with Android will be based on Apple’s luxury brand.

Non-Destructive Process Inspection on OSX: Blog Post Recovery

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:13:00 +0000

Moments ago I was writing a different blog post, about home renovation. Unfortunately just as I posted it a bug in ecto, the aging client I still use to edit blog posts, caused the complete loss of the text with no backup copies. Because messing about with system tools is more fun than rewriting that blog post, I present instead a brief howto for creating a core dump on OSX without killing a process, and inspecting that core dump to attempt to recover your data.

Platonic Browser Session Management

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 01:04:00 +0000

Firefox just crashed, and when I restarted it I was informed that it had some trouble reopening my 115 tabs. Understandable, but I went ahead and clicked the button that encouraged it to try harder. The result, after consuming what would have been several thousand dollars of computer time back when they charged for it, is that I’m back in the mess I made myself, with an unmanageable collection of pages open, covering topics like faucets, washing machines, coffee brewing, JVMs, whatever else came out of Google Reader, and the research I was doing for this post.

DEBS 2010 Highlights

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:49:00 +0000

I spent the first half of last week at DEBS 2010 at King’s College in Cambridge, UK. It was a great conference, many good papers and interesting attendees. As usual some of the best ideas came from the hallway sessions. But I’d like to provide some pointers to my favorite papers of the conference:

David Jeffery’s keynote on Betfair’s event driven architecture, past present and future. David presented not only on the performance challenges of running the core betting exchange, but also on the soft benefits. Thanks to their event driven architecture, Betfair is able to do more experimentation with less disruption, and be more agile as an organization.
Dan O’Keeffe presented Reliable Complex Event Detection for Pervasive Computing, a system for compensating for missing data. Most importantly, it lays out a selection of strategies that developers can select and the system can use to automatically choose the correct approach, based on wether the system should be optimistic, pessimistic, or something in between.
Quilt: A Patchwork of Multicast Regions was presented by one of the local students on short notice, because the author was not able to attend due to visa problems. This is especially frustrating when the paper is so interesting and the analysis quite strong. Quilt is a system for combining multiple delivery mechanisms to achieve efficient wide area distribution. Combining overlay-network based protocols with “patches” of true multicast where available, Quilt optimizes message routing for efficiency, reliability, and latency.
An Approach for Iterative Event Pattern Recommendation which was also presented by a colleague rather than one of the authors due to visa issues. The paper describes a system for recommending event patterns to domain experts based on their initial attempts to define the pattern. In a controlled user study, the recommendation system substantially reduced the time taken by users to define novel patterns. It was good to see a real user study of a programming efficiency system, but there is lots of room for further measurement.
Experiences with Codifying Event Processing Function Patterns, presented by the author Anand Ranganathan, dealt with a different kind of pattern. In systems using Ranganathan’s system, developers build template network flows, annotated with tags to define what components can be used in the flow. Any component that matches the inputs, outputs, and tags can be inserted into the template, and all possible template instantiations represent a domain of valid applications. End users are able to search this combinatorially large domain with a flexible interface, to find and instantiate applications that meet their needs.

There are many great papers and talks not listed here. Obviously my own bias shows, as does the fact that I didn’t attend every talk or read every paper.

Passive Personal Networking: How to Let Others Network for You

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:46:00 +0000

Talking to some friends recently, I’ve realized that many people don’t think of themselves as networkers. They are reluctant to get started playing that “game”. Even when they are highly capable engineers looking for a new position at a startup, they don’t want to “ask their friends to find them a job.”

Everyone knows that networking is the best way to get a job. Not everyone is prepared to attend “networking events”, hand out business cards to people they meet, or spend all their time maintaining professional relationships. If you are one of these people, I have good news. You can still benefit from networking to find jobs and other opportunities. Merely by being non-hostile, open to the possibility of networking, you can benefit from the networks of people you already know, your friends and coworkers.

Analysis of May 6th: The Importance of Near Misses

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Since writing about stock market crashes and normal accidents, I spent even more time talking about the events of May 6th. Good analysis is starting to come out. The best I have seen so far is Nanex’s Flash Crash Analysis. Their conclusion is that the crash was precipitated primarily by a queuing and timestamping bug at NYSE, which lead to understandable but unfortunate flash mobbing by high frequency trading firms attempting to execute against the delayed prices being quoted out. I recommend their analysis and the supporting charts, which are quite compelling.

Normal Accidents and Stock Market Crashes

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:31:00 +0000

In the weeks since the precipitous and brief stock market crash on May 6th, I have found myself answering questions about it from people outside the capital markets and discussing it with insiders on many occasions. While I have some thoughts about what went on, I’m often unable to satisfy people’s desire to blame a single precipitating cause. I think what is going on is that too few people understand the nature of complex systems and what is called a “normal accident.” Given the sophistication of the markets, the number of safety checks and balances, as well as the complexity of the implementations, it is not surprising that events such as May 6th happened, nor should people think it is possible to entirely eliminate them.

A Timeless Way of Building or Why do all these houses suck?

Sun, 16 May 2010 18:12:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of houses. I’ve also been reading A Timeless Way of Building (ATWB). The net result has been a deep dissatisfaction with the available housing stock in Arlington, and probably in the entire United States. So while I would like to recommend the book, it comes with the disclaimer of being hostile to casual house hunting. Instead it will help you develop opinions about everything.

Device Convergence, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Kindle

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:05:00 +0000

A number of months ago I posted my disappointment in the version 1 Kindle. I’ve also tried out the version 2, and continue to be convinced that the Sony Reader is a better piece of hardware for dedicated book reading.

But (if there wasn’t a but there wouldn’t be much of a post here) the Sony eBook store is painfully terrible. Titles are expensive, hard to search for, and often not available. The result is that my book buying on the Sony gradually trailed off. On my last two business trips I haven’t bothered to bring the Reader, and it sits on a shelf right now, probably running out of battery.

End of the World Insurance: the Financial Halting Problem

Sun, 02 May 2010 21:30:00 +0000

In computer science, the halting problem is very well known. The problem states that it is impossible to build a software program that can analyze other software programs to determine if they will eventually terminate, or halt. This is a useful problem to understand, because many software problems that look possible at first can be reduced to the halting problem and thus demonstrated to be impossible. It’s common to hear someone say “actually, that seems like a halting problem” when discussing compiler optimization, program analysis, and related problems in computer science. This is much like a physicist might say “but that’s perpetual motion.”

Quick House Update

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:45:00 +0000

My last post ended with me losing the house due to being outbid. In a strange turn of events we may have won the bidding war without ever submitting the highest offer. I’ll try to provide more details at a future date, if it turns out they are interesting. At the moment we are still in negotiation with the seller.

A Computer Scientist Bids on a House

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:33:00 +0000

I was going to favor you all with a post about Java’s System.nanoTime. That post will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I spent the day (arguably the weekend since 3:15pm on Friday) putting in a bid on a house. I won’t bore you with the details of property, inspections, financing, etc. However, I think the details of the bidding process are quite interesting.

To quote a friend of mine, when asked how we much we should bid on the house:

Synthetic Biology and Big Ball of Mud

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Researchers at the MIT OpenWetWare project are attempting to engineer Synthetic Biology, creating reusable and composable biological components that can be combined to create useful organisms. In the process, they are discovering that biological systems don’t follow the same patterns of good architecture familiar to us from software.

In software engineering, architecture is perceived as critical to the success of a large implementation project, and also to the ongoing maintenance of the code created. Since software is very expensive, there is a lot of focus on architecture, choosing the right architecture, and making sure that the architecture is faithfully executed. Some of the biggest changes in software in the last 30 years, like object oriented programming and service oriented architecture, have come about because of a need for clearer architecture in ever larger collections of software that run modern life.

Acela WiFi: Finally Here, Could Be Better

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Riding the Acela to New York yesterday, I had my first opportunity to try out the new WiFi service. I’m glad to see Acela moving into the 21st century and joining the ranks of BoltBus and LimoLiner by offering WiFi on trips to New York. It’s been a long time coming, and now that it is here I was looking forward to having good bandwidth through the swamps of Connecticut, rather than depending on my fickle EVDO card.

Parque de las Ciencas aka Space Rocket Plaza

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:19:00 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since I posted, partly because of a vacation spent in Puerto Rico. I have a few posts in the works, but before I get to those, I hope you can indulge me in a bit of travelogue.

It started with a quest. On our way to Arecibo we had seen this strange structure off in the distance, and been unable to identify what it might be. Even when we got up close, it was unclear what was going on. The possibly-associated giant stone cross only increased our curiosity.

10 Days with the Google Nexus One

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:40:00 +0000

On Tuesday January 5 Google announced the Nexus One smart phone. On Thursday January 7, my Nexus One arrived.

For context, I’ve historically been a BlackBerry user, but have been steadily driven away by the browser experience. My wife was a zero-day iPhone adopter, and I’ve spent a lot of time using an iPhone. I also own an iPod Touch which I carry every day and use regularly as a gaming/apps/media platform.

Project Euler, MIT Mystery Hunt Edition

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

The MIT Mystery Hunt starts this Friday at noon, and I’ll be participating seriously for about my 10th year. In the hunt, teams solve a collection of puzzles to discover the location of a gold coin hidden somewhere on campus. The puzzles may be numerous (sometimes over 100), are generally provided without instructions (except when they are provided with painfully explicit instructions), and the overall structure of the hunt is also unknown at the start. Hunt is nearly always finished before Monday, but during the 60 hours starting Friday at noon, many highly capable teams, some with several dozen members, will try their hardest to solve some very challenging puzzles.

Valuing Startup Options

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Nearly everyone who goes to work for a startup gets options, and the first question they ask is “how much are these options really worth?” When you are considering a job offer, particularly competitive job offers, it’s important to understand the value of the whole package. Putting a value on an option grant in a pre-IPO startup is quite challenging, and there are many opinions. I’d like to share the way I think about option valuation.

Advice to Those Giving Birth at Mount Auburn Hospital

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:44:00 +0000

I started this post shortly after bringing my first child, Patrick Tibbetts, home from Mount Auburn Hospital. Now he is nearly eight months old, and I am finally getting around to posting it. In the interim, I have shared this advice verbally with several friends. I’ll keep it short, just three pieces of advice that I wish we had known.

For those of you that don’t know, Mount Auburn Hospital is in Cambridge, near Harvard, and is the preferred full-service birth hospital in the Cambridge/Arlington/Somerville/Belmont area. Their Bain Birthing Center is very progressive for a hospital-based center. Unfortunately it is a bit dated, which comes from having adopted many of the now-trendy features of birthing centers (big labor and delivery rooms, wood floors, real furniture, bathtubs, etc) early.

The Real Reasons for Eliminating Non-Competes in Massachusetts

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:06:00 +0000

As I posted in December, there is legislation afoot to ban non-compete agreements in Massachusetts, and I support it. As momentum has picked up, more discussion has ensued. On July 22 the Boston Bar Association will host Freedom To Compete? A Symposium on Bills Affecting Employee Non-Compete Agreements, but for now the discussion is occuring online.

One frequent claim is that we who oppose non-competes are only doing it to emulate California. To whit, in the comment thread of Amrith Kumar’s post “In defense of employee non-compete agreements” he claims

Android G1 and Palm Pre versus iPhone and BlackBerry Benchmarks

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:26:00 +0000

In my last post, I shared benchmark data for the web browser on the iPhone versus BlackBerry. My theory is that web browser performance is critically important for smartphone user experience. Furthermore, the BlackBerry seems to be embarrassingly inferior to the iPhone in this respect. This begs the question, how do other phones stack up.

Thanks to two friends, I have SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results for the G1 and for the Palm Pre. Based on the graphs here, it’s clear that the G1 and the Pre are both considerably better than the BlackBerry Bold. Specifically, the G1 is 9.6 times faster than the Bold, and the Pre is 15 times faster.

BlackBerry versus iPhone – Benchmarking the Browser

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. They seem trendy, and I like gadgets. But I’ve started questioning what I would get from one that I don’t get from my current devices. I’ve concluded that what I want isn’t a netbook, it is a phone that is actually good.

I’m the happy owner of a BlackBerry Bold. I upgraded from a Curve the day the Bold came out. I’m pleased with the device. It has a great keyboard. The built in push-mail client works well, and the calendar is also very good. Third party apps complete the picture, including google maps and gmail. In fact, the gmail client for blackberry is arguably better than the built in blackberry mail client. The device is small. It has a great screen, and a great keyboard.

Should Your Honor Student be in Shop Class?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:25:00 +0000

Matthew Crawford’s essay in New York Times Magazine last weekend, “The Case for Working With Your Hands” really resonated with me. The primary focus is the intellectual challenges and rewards of repairing motorcycles, as compared with “knowledge work” jobs that our society seems to value. But one point at the end captured my attention:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

How long will PCs and Servers use the same CPU?

Wed, 06 May 2009 13:48:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at MIT on Cloud Computing. One of the questions from the audience was how cloud computing impacts high performance computing. The response was that in a cloud of inexpensive commodity servers, scientific applications must learn to spread applications across large numbers of parallel compute nodes. This is the most economical way to take advantage of state of the art computing in 2009.

The Downsides of Limited Intellectual Property in Psychiatric Care

Wed, 06 May 2009 11:47:00 +0000

As a software entrepreneur, intellectual property is a fact of life for me, like death and taxes. Between patents and DMCA protection, free software and licensing, it often feels like software is handicapped by the amount of intellectual property protection available and the ways it is applied. Innovation spreads naturally in software, and patents hinder it more often than they help. Traditional copyright is sufficient for enforcing basic software licensing, and even that may be too restrictive if the goal is to maximize innovation.

Hello Wordpress!

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:02:00 +0000

I switched to Wordpress. Let’s see if anyone notices.

CTO at StreamBase

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:43:00 +0000

Welcome Mass High Tech readers and others. As many new visitors to my blog know, I’ve recently taken on the position of CTO at StreamBase, the company which came out of my graduate research at MIT and where I have until recently been Chief Architect. Old visitors to my blog surprised by this post can read the official StreamBase Press release, or the Mass High Tech article linked above.

StreamBase is a top vendor for Complex Event Processing (CEP) software in Capital Markets, Defense, and other sectors. Customers use our software to implement business applications which can identify, transform, archive, and respond to events, with sub-millisecond latency, at hundreds of thousands of events per second. Doing all that requires a combination of programming language design, compiler technology, database technology, networking, performance, and developer tools. I’m lucky, because this matches my own interests precisely. In my new role, I’ll continue to be hands on with all these areas of technology, and expand my work with StreamBase customers and industry organizations.

Ban Non-Competes in Massachusetts

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:17:00 +0000

I have never liked non-compete agreements. As an individual, I find them annoying. As an employer, they have caused me headaches. And politically, I think they impinge too much on individual rights. Furthermore, they are one of the ways in which Massachusetts is inferior to California for startups. That last one really bothers me.

The good news is at least one legislator is doing something about it. Will Brownsberger has announced that he will be sponsoring legislation to abolish non-compete agreements in Massachusetts. Xconomy reported about it in a story earlier this month, “Legislator Drafting Bill to Outlaw Non-Compete Agreements in Massachusetts“.

Thinking about Tufte: Resolution Isn’t the Key

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:56:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Edward Tufte’s lecture in Boston thanks to StreamBase. This was one of his standard lectures on information presentation, for which he has become famous. As usual, it came complete with a set of his books. This was convenient since sometime in my last 4 moves and 3 jobs I lost my set.

I’ve been a fan of Tufte since I first encountered his work as a freshman at MIT. His books contain wonderful examples of good informational graphics, graphics that display quantitative and relationship oriented data, drawn from many modern and historical sources. They are entertaining to read, and provide lots of inspiration for user interface and graphic design.

Exchanging my Kindle for another Sony Reader

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:12:00 +0000

I replaced my Sony Reader with a hipper new Amazon Kindle, and I’m totally disappointed. The Kindle has a few good ideas, but it is terribly executed. I’m returning it today (something Amazon is making pleasant enough) and buying another Reader.

Read on for more detail…

About 6 months ago, I bought a used Sony Portable Reader from a friend of a friend. I travel a lot, and have a lot of open-format stuff I wanted to read (pdfs, html manuals, etc). I’ve always through electronic ink was interesting technology, and buying used appealed to my cheaper inclinations.

Buy It Like You Mean It and Vendor Relationship Management

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:14:00 +0000

I just got back from the launch party for Buy It Like You Mean It, a startup non-profit that is “enabling the socially conscious consumer”. I’m a big fan of what they are doing. As a free-market capitalist, I like to think that the power of markets can solve all kinds of problems. As a realist (and Wall Street technology vendor), I realize that market actors can have wildly different information and expertise.

kdb+ now available for free download

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:05:00 +0000

If you’ve talked to me about programming languages and Wall Street in the last 4 years, I’ve probably mentioned kx. This is a company which makes a combination programming environment and database based on a language called q which is derived from APL. (Yes, APL, the language invented in 1957 before there was a computer to run it on.) And this environment is in turn used by many of the top quants on Wall Street (and other parts of the financial world) for both research and production systems. Becoming a kx programmer is a good way to double your salary and quadruple your job security.

When neither a column store nor a row store is the answer

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:34:00 +0000

A few days ago I found myself giving database advice to a friend with a new startup. His problem is a pretty common one: he has a very large corpus of data, over which he will run compute-intensive proprietary algorithms. Both the data and the computation will require a cluster of machines. He has a prototype based on Postgres. His question to me: should I continue to use a row store (Postgres) or should I use new technology, specifically a column store?