Many startups experience a chicken-and-egg problem with growth: they want to run experiments to gain more volume, but lack the volume for experiments to be practical. This guide helps companies determine if (and how) they could staff a Growth team to start running experiments. First, we’ll diagnose what is achievable with the amount of traffic currently available. Then, we’ll dig into what…
From a recent investor update: …and 40% of our purchases in Q1 came from organic traffic I, uhh, don’t believe you. A purchase from organic traffic is: the customer had the problem your product solves they googled they clicked on your website from the organic search results and then bought it. I too would rather live in a world where this was still a thing. But this was probably not what happened.…
Caveat: Yes, yes, almost everything about the interviewing / recruiting process is broken. Sometimes though, you just have to play the hand you’re dealt and settle for minor improvements. The 75-minute HMTPS is my proposed minor improvement. Hat tip to The Oatmeal What is the HMTPS It stands for “Hiring Manager Technical Phone Screen.” Since you asked, I’ve been pronouncing it “ham-tips.” It’s the…
Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. – Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency The Situation “Ugh, the codebase is just such a mess,” my new Tech Lead said. “It’s just cruft on top of cruft, never cleaned up, always ‘after the next release’. No wonder we keep getting bug reports faster than we can fix them.” Not what you want…
Originally published as a guest blog post on interviewing.io . Thanks Aline ! “The new VP wants us to double engineering’s headcount in the next six months. If we have a chance in hell to hit the hiring target, you seriously need to reconsider how fussy you’ve become.” It’s never good to have a recruiter ask engineers to lower their hiring bar, but he had a point. It can take upwards of 100…
I’m here to warn you about the dangers of front-end user tracking. Not because Google is tracking you , but because it doesn’t track you quite well enough. What follows is a story in three parts: the front-end tracking trap I fell into, how we dug ourselves out, and how you can go around the trap altogether. Part 1: A Cautionary Tale The year was 2019. Opendoor was signing my paychecks. We were…
“Alexey, do you feel the points you bring up during our post-mortems are productive?” my tech lead asked at our 1:1. Well, shit. I had thought so, but apparently not. Earlier in the year, I became the Engineering Manager on a team responsible for half of the outages at our 2,000 person company. After each incident, the on-call engineer would write-up a doc and schedule a meeting. “How come this…
2013 Marissa Mayer bans work-from-home at Yahoo 2020 Jack Dorsey permanently institutionalizes work-from-home at Twitter. Working remotely: not just for COVID-19 anymore. From academia to the Open Source movement, remote collaboration is not exactly novel. From Github to DuckDuckGo, remote-first successful businesses are no longer rare. Remote work occupied the cultural relevance of something…
Create an open source project, they said. It’ll be great for your resume, they said. Part 0: Wherein we provide context The year was 2013, Meteor was the hip new kid on the block and Coffeescript was a reasonable JS dialect choice. We were fresh out of college. Meteor was hosting their first ‘Summer Hackathon’ in San Francisco on 10th and Minna, and we figured this was our shot. Sequestering…
For most 1 engineering tasks, I prefer to avoid TDD, or Test Driven Development. Yet when I job-hunt, I use TDD religiously 2 . It has been tremendously helpful. Hmpf. Why? Most interview challenges actually come in two parts. Can you take a broadly-worded problem and nail it down into something unambiguous? Can you implement a challenging but unambiguous spec in the allotted time? TDD forces you…
2015 and 2016 could not have been more different. 2015 was mostly spent living out of a carry-on bag, traveling from Estonia and Berlin to Tokyo and Taipei helping run trips for, and building, Hacker Paradise . It was great. Wanderlust: satisfied. 2016 found me receiving an H1-B visa, moving back to the Bay Area, and obtaining honest-to-goodness employment. Different. Here’s how becoming sedentary…
Giving back to open source projects you benefit from is one of those obviously-good-in-theory-confusing-in-practice ideas, like eating healthy or being carbon-neutral. Many services - flattr, bountysource and gratify, among others, offer widgets that developers can put on their projects to encourage subscription donations. None has been a breakout success. There needs to be a fast and…
I found myself planning a series of flights for Hacker Paradise , flying from Tel Aviv –> New York –> San Francisco –> Tokyo –> Tel Aviv with a few days of flexibility for when to take each flight. I spent about half an hour on Skyscanner and Google Flights, and couldn’t find flights for less than about $3,000. Which is a lot. At roughly the same time, Vlad from Flystein reached out and offered to…
Nick Meyer and I gave a talk at HackCon II in February about a hackathon we ostensibly threw. Hackcon III is at Github HQ in SF this summer.
I’m putting Estonia on hold - still excited to go there, and hoping to do so in April or May, once it warms up again. In the meanwhile, I’m heading to Costa Rica to help facilitate Hacker Paradise a 12-week digital retreat. The location has all the benefits of nomadism (cheap, beautiful location with delicious food and friendly people) while bringing together a small community of hackers working…
TL;DR : My US work visa runs out in a month, so I’m leaving for about a year to go travel. I start on August 2014. …actually, that’s it. FAQ Wait, you’re not American? I’m an Israeli citizen born in Ukraine. I came to the US for my undergraduate degree. I kind of sound American because I went to the American International School for elementary through high school in Israel. So what’s the story…
I helped organize HackCon , a conference for student hackathon organizers, this past weekend in NY. I gave a talk about Hackonomics , trying to quantify the financial benefit for hackathon sponsors and figuring out what the future looks like. I then annotated the slides - on Medium, for a change. The writing style here is a lot more like the talk I gave - more stream-of-consciosness than…
I gave a talk at the latest Meteor Devshop a couple of weeks ago about Houston , the Django-Admin like tool that Greg, Geoff and I are working on for Meteor. With over 200 stars on Github , I think we might almost be real Open Source Contributors now. It’s fun! If you’re into web development and Javascript and real-timey things, check out Meteor . If you already know about Meteor, you should try…
2013 hasn’t been a great year for new content on this blog. Let me try to change that. ###First, what’ve I been up to since January? I did some engineering consulting work , with the bulk of the time spent working for Baydin , Tencent and Dropbox . Started The InternProject , a “let’s make sure interns in the bay area have a great time” non-profit with Alex , with major help from Tess , Geoff ,…
August 2016 Update : Divvy now has a native guide for migrations. Use that instead. If you’re having trouble importing, it might be because the URL Divvy gives you is too long. I solved this (on a Mac) by, rather than pasting the URL into the browser, opening a terminal window and typing. open ‘Divvy Backup URL’ instead. (Where the ‘Divvy Backup URL’ is the one you got when exporting I’ve been…
At an event last week, I was introduced to the CEO of a post series-A startup I’d been following and found quite interesting. We spoke about his company for a few minutes, and he asked me to email him in case there were any opportunities for me as a freelancer to help. I followed up. A few days later, I got the following email: Hi Alexey, Thanks for your interest in [Company]. We don’t have…
1. Where were you in 2012? Fourteen months ago, in my last semester of college, I began working on a start-up idea with a few folks I had met through school. The company we started is off to a good start. As it turned out, (as it surprisingly often does ) it’s not always a great idea to start companies with people you know only by reputation. We spent quite a bit of time over the second half of…
Hackathons are a thing now. Over the past two years I’ve had the benefit of participating, helping organize, watching demos for, and (soon) judging more than 15 hackathons. One of my favorite things about the hackathon community has been how quickly best practices have spread from organizer to organizer. To that end, here are some “hackathon hacks” I’ve noticed or come up with over the past few…
I still remember the first project I ever worked on that went viral. Cobol on Rails was a re-design of the Penn’s online Course Review system. The original was written as a Senior Design project a decade ago and kept on life support by the University IT. It was (by the time we got to it) rather outdated. It looked like this. Cobol on Rails was built in PHP and mySQL. It was the first serious web…
Warning: Boris and Alex are friends and former classmates. I am utterly biased. Crowdfunding doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. You can’t get the top-tier guys to crowd-raise. “What for? It’s just more complicated.” If you can’t get the top-tier companies, you can’t get the companies that follow whatever top-tier companies do. You end up with wanterpreneurs tricking Grandmas out of their paychecks.…
A quick public service announcement about MongoDB, for those of us new to NoSQL land: ** By default, mongo will not let you know if a query that you ran failed miserably.** On the bright side, you on longer need to wait for mongo to unblock for updates or inserts, which makes production code run quicker. Unfortunately, this also means you’re going to spend more time tracking down bugs that would…
For the past few months I’ve been using Sidecar whenever I’m in SF. The service is a sort of Uber meets Gypsy cabs , allowing ordering on-demand everyday drivers , who will give you a ride across town at a price comparable or slightly cheaper than a Taxi. </img> A post about the service’s legal standing is probably worthwhile but not for me to write. Should you use Sidecar? Yes, if you’re looking…
Whenever a friend visits our HQ, I proudly show off my combination sit/stand desk . Often, that results in an email asking where one buys such a thing. One buys such a thing on amazon. </img> Wait, why a standing desk? Sitting is killing you , apparently. I don’t get as much exercise as I’d like now that I’m out of college, and at the least, standing for part of the day means I’m getting at least…
My weekend hack is a Markov Chain baby name generator. @MarkovBaby will come up with a new baby name once an hour and tweets it out. The result : Follow @markovbaby on Twitter . [ View the story "Sample Names" on Storify ] What is a Markov Chain? Read the wikipedia entry for a more thorough introduction, but in our case, a Markov Chain is a simple random process to generate text that looks sort of…
I worked on non-technical hiring over this past week. Some Lessons Learned There are a lot of people on craigslist. We got over 160 applicants for our post. Some are pretty darn good 40 or so were potentially interesting, and I ended up with about 5 candidates I was very happy with at the end of the process. Applications should be hard Our application form included several paragraph answers,…
I may be a bit late to the Jekyll party, but with Posterous being acquired by twitter a few months ago, I figured why not try it out. Two weekends later I’ve migrated enough that I’m comfortable shipping, though I imagine a bunch of silly bugs will remain. Please email me with any issues you find, and I’ll get to them when I can. In the meantime… Moving from Posterous to Jekyll: What you need to…
I tried Exec for the first time today. TL;DR - don't half-ass the task description/understanding what you actually need. Motivation: I had found a blog post with a ton of discussion online that had some great comments showing a deep understanding of the material. "These people are awesome," I thought. "Let's see who among them we could hire!". Huzzah, finally a chance to try TaskRabbit andExec. My…
I showed up at stumbled upon was tricked into an Iron Blogger SF meetup on Saturday, and was not allowed to have any of the beer until I found out what the meetup was about and convinced to partake. Iron Blogger is simple. Write a blog post once a week. If (and when) you don't: you owe $5. When there's enough money in the digital pot to afford a sufficient quantity of beer, a meetup is convened.…
"Well, I wasn't really going to intern at X (say, Zynga, or Morgan Stanley) but they offered more than anybody else." Don't do that. It's easy to focus on the financial aspect of an offer, especially if it's the first time you've had a chance to make anywhere near this much. It feels kind of surreal. It's not that money isn't a valuable proxy for how valuable the company perceives you to be. If…
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/stop-looking-for-a-technical-co-founder/ A pretty surreal/cool experience. I should expand on the process at some point.
Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area , and join the 2012 Facebook group . (via this guy , via this guy ) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, No matter what you do, get a good summer internship. As…
The flight landed at 11:18 pm. The first bags came out 40 minutes later. Mine came out just after midnight, so about 48 minutes after landing. People were pissed off, wondering (correctly) if anyone at all was dealing with the baggage. At one point a small purple bag came out and drifted around unclaimed and disappeared. Nothing else came for at least ten minutes after that. “They’re…
I've known about Kembrel in a sort of by-the-way, there's-also-this-clothing-company sort of way for a few years now (I think I walked by a Kembrel physical sale last year), but never bothered to figure out what exactly it was that they did. Until a couple of weeks ago, when Meeteor suggested I meet Stephan , one of the founders. So I did; here's his (and Kembrel's story). Who is Stephan? Stephan…
[Context: I'm one of the Dining Philosophers , the Computer Science Club at Penn ] InterviewStreet offered to sponsor a Study Break to help promote their upcoming CodeSprint . We contemplating doing a study break, but given that it's finals week and most people are working at home, we weren't sure what kind of turn-out we'd get for an event blocks away from where most people are. We brainstormed…
I gave a talk to the Wharton MBA E-club (I think?) earlier today about the difficulties of finding a technical co-founder. If I find the time, should probably turn this into a post, but for now, slides for the curious Also available at git.to/cofoundertalk TL;DR: Cheat Sheet Don't spend your time looking for a technical co-founder, it's not an efficient use of your time. Instead, either: Learn to…
You: a CS student looking for your first or second part-time job while in school, eager to try some of this ‘programming’ stuff in the real world. Them: Somebody you're contemplating working for. This: A list of questions you should ask to make sure this job is going to be a good fit. Modeled after The Joel Test Do you already have technical people on staff? If you’ve never done…
I'm a DP columnist this semester, writing once every two weeks for the school newspaper on technology and entrepeneurship. The below is a reasonably useful list of applications that students should be using, both for Penn students and college students overall. Non-penn specific apps Fiesta.cc Whenever working on a team project, there’s always that guy who forgets to reply-all —…
Dear Future Intern, Welcome! You just got an internship at this amazing start-up, so you're starting to look for housing and are getting pumped for your summer. Rightfully so - the Bay Area is awesome ! I spent my last two summers out here as an intern, first at Facebook and (am currently at my last day) at 2bkco , an early-stage, awesome start-up. It took me a while to figure out what the things…
So, you've handed over some hard-earned cash to sponsor a hackathon - awesome! On behalf of hackathon organizers everywhere, thank you. Let's make sure you maximize your return on investment. Aside: why should I be sponsoring a hackathon, again ? I go into more detail here , but the TL;DR version is: meet and recruit top up-and-coming hackers, expose them to your company and build relationships…
TL;DR: Friend everybody you can on LinkedIn, then write recommendations for people you actually feel you can endorse. I've struggled to keep my LinkedIn connections limited to people who I would feel comfortable vouching for , but all that led to was an inbox full of ignored invitations from people I met at tech meet-ups and fellow Penn CS students. And now I look bad, both because I'm rejecting…
This isn't quite polished enough to be a blog post, but I'm putting it up for now to make sure the idea is out there. Release early, release often, right? Via a hacker news post earlier today. The Internet is at a dangerous inflection point. Facebook Connect is quickly creating a monopoly on identity [...] That's a huge risk to every other company on the Internet. [...] There is a terrific…
There are quite a few impressive bloggers within Penn's CS community. Now, thanks to Yahoo Pipes and twitterfeed it's possible to get everybody in one place: Subscribe via RSS | @PennCIS on Twitter Email pennappslabs]at[gmail.com to get your blog added to the list. - courtesy of PennApps Labs and the Dining Philosophers .
This is a second in series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps, as well as from participating in HackNY and PhillyGameJam and the hackathons at Facebook last summer. For other posts in the series, see here . The first PennApps hackathon took place on September 2010, and was put together during the summer before, working nights and weekends. Below is a…
"The future is here. It's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson Venmo is something of a futurist's dream except that it just so happens to actually exist. Simply put, Venmo is your mobile wallet: either through an iPhone or Android app (or SMS), you send and receive money from your friends. Venmo takes money in from your credit card and withdraws it out to your bank account whenever…
This is a second in series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps , as well as from participating in HackNY and PhillyGameJam and the hackathons at Facebook over the summer. For other posts in the series, see here . With finals over, we are starting to lay the groundwork for the next PennApps 2011 hackathon, scheduled from September 2011. As we go through…