Web 2.0 on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

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.

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.

Me.dium Beta

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:27:00 +0000

I got invited into the Beta at Me.dium, a new collaborative/social browsing system. It’s no dis-similar from the third-party-comments system I was pondering back in the spring, if anyone remembers that. However, rather than being focussed on comments, it is also focussed on real-time browsing. You get a side-bar that shows you what people are looking at. It also has a facility for inviting your friends and sharing browser state with your friends. If anyone is interested in an invitiation, let me know.

Book Review: Defensive Design for the Web

Sun, 29 May 2005 11:17:00 +0000

37 signal is one of the neatest
companies out there in terms of advancing the state of the art in web
design. It seems like they do almost as much as
href=”http://google.com”>Google, presumably without spending such
embarrassing amounts of money. If you haven’t check out some of their
projects, like Basecamp,
href=”http://www.tadalist.com/”>Ta-da Lists, and
href=”http://backpackit.com”>Backpack, you really should. They
build really nice web apps. Not only that, but they give back to the
community with things like
href=”http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000558.php”>the yellow
fade technique and a presentation on
href=”http://www.37signals.com/presentations/sxsw2005/37s-bigthingssmallteam.pdf”>How
to make big things happen with a small team (
href=”http://www.37signals.com/presentations/sxsw2005/37s-bigthingssmallteam.pdf”>slides)
(
href=”http://www.terrystorch.com/2005/03/sxsw_how_to_mak.html”>summary).

Setting up Typo: RubyOnRails, lighttpd, FastCGI and being a bad sysadmin

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:10:00 +0000

I took most of my evening last night to set up FastCGI and lighttpd. My goal was to serve a Typo, a blog engine based on RubyOnRails. I was thwarted by not knowing RubyOnRails very well, and by knowing FastCGI and lighttpd not at all.

The first issue was that Typo doesn’t like to run in a subdirectory on a webserver. That is, it wanted to be at ntsh.innocuous.org/, not innocuous.org/ntsh. This offended my sensibilities somewhat, so I decided to beat it into submisssion. This involved tracking down a bunch of places where paths were hard coded, which included a few places in the templates and the CSS.