Disqus - Latest Comments for evanp

Re: Transaction 0x13ef98f1121ca7e870a1158f1262004fc21f15f774fc13f7f0771a1ed46c8032

Evan Prodromou — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 09:53:21 -0000

This was a hail from my friend Don Marti, who's going to use some EvanCoin for a session at Mozfest.

Re: Transaction 0xa09516009bc9df06b006abc261a6035da4a06449dcef88fc3aa10c62780d0c05

Evan Prodromou — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 21:44:49 -0000

Thanks! I think this was a friend just pinging me.

Re: 0x001be02a4742767000cc54a820686a3087e4d472

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 09:26:27 -0000

This is my main account that I use especially for managing EvanCoin.

Re: TWG and HIGHLINE just launched a summer camp for designers. Here’s why.

Evan Prodromou — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 18:08:41 -0000

Cool idea.

Spelling correction: I think you mean "sheer magnitude", not "shear magnitude." Unless you're talking about really big scissors.

Feel free to delete this comment when it's fixed.

Re: Why age in software is bullshit

Evan Prodromou — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 10:26:51 -0000

My advice would be to meet some older developers.

Re: Why age in software is bullshit

Evan Prodromou — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:10:31 -0000

Business folks like hiring younger developers. I think there are a few reasons, but younger developers usually don't say "no" as much.

Partly because they're in weaker positions of power; partly because they don't know what they can't do; partly because they get fascinated by the perqs of tech life; and partly because they have crummy work habits for which they feel guilty and so they say "yes" to please their bosses.

Sometimes, experienced developers say "no" to things that they could actually do; sometimes inexperienced developers say "yes" to those same things, and get them done.

Re: Happy 60th Birthday, Richard Stallman, Free Software God! - by Dan Lyons

Evan Prodromou — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:24:22 -0000

Posting unflattering videos of someone on their birthday seems kind of mean-spirited.

Re: Why you should learn to code

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:13:59 -0000

I totally think there are advances like 4GLs and visual programming that can make software development something more people can do.

We can give a lot more people power over their computing environment if we scoot the programming practice just a liiiiiiiittle closer to their hands. I think that'd be a lot more effective than enjoining them to learn.

Re: Why you should learn to code

Evan Prodromou — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:12:39 -0000

I'm also not crazy about code.org, but for a different reason.

50 years ago, the way that you interacted with a computer was that you prepared a big data file, ran it in one side of a computer program, and if you were lucky it would create another computer file out the other end, if it didn't blow up sometime in the middle.

Practically no software works this way any more -- except programming. We're expected to use this antiquated and unnecessary interface to make the cool software that does such interesting things for our users. Why?

I think technologists who want to democratize software creation need to take a hard look at the miserably awful tools that we use and say, what if we made these better? What if kids could move and compose software components the way they play Cut the Rope or Garageband?

It's stupid to enjoin people to use our crummy tools. We need to make software something that's not miserable to create. Easier, funner, more like other software. Then we won't have to beg people to do it.

Re: Venture Math 101

Evan Prodromou — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:26:19 -0000

I think a bigger question is, if venture capital isn't going to put more money into more startups in Canada, is it really the right vehicle for government stimulus of the tech sector?

I blogged about the question here: http://evanprodromou.name/2...

Re: Venture Math 101

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:55:53 -0000

Interesting response! I think there's probably something telling that most of the solutions I see are at the bottom end of the spectrum (more small tech companies) and the ones you see are at the top (more later-stage funding, big exits, and a healthier IPO market). We probably have to get both sides of the spectrum more robust.

Re: Venture Math 101

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:25:59 -0000

Canadian VCs funding Canadian startups is great for both sides of the table.

So, I see three ways to deal with this problem.

1. Shrug our shoulders.
2. Figure out how to make more VC-fundable companies.
3. Change the VC math for Canada.

Everyone who wants to choose #1 can stop reading now.

Setting that aside, how could we do the others? For the second, I see a few ways to get better startups here:

* Stimulate the "pre-startup" environment to generate more home-grown startups
* Bring startups from elsewhere to Canada.

What's the "pre-startup" environment? Developers and entrepreneurs starting businesses. Maybe small businesses -- but getting used to making money with technology. What works? What doesn't? One thesis is that a rich soup of non-scalable technology businesses will spontaneously generate scalable ones. I'm not sure if that's the case, but it's probably a thesis worth testing.

I think accelerators like GrowLabs and FounderFuel are doing an OK job with bringing startups to Canada, although I still maintain that specialization would make them stand out more and attract more world-class startups. I also think the startup visa program can help here, too.

For changing the VC math, I think there are a couple of ways to make it work. One is getting more government money. Although there are probably lots of ways that government can help, I'm not sure it's our biggest problem.

Another is to structure funds such that their investors benefit from the situation they're in right now -- Canada, 2013 -- rather than a theoretical market that doesn't exist.

Success in business come from finding opportunities that others are missing. Who's the fund who will find the way to make money from the world of Canada 2013?

I think an ideal situation would be a style of fund that stimulates "pre-startup" activity and still makes money. That'd solve two problems at once -- a nice synergy.

Re: Joining FreshBooks

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:30:21 -0000

He's like Anakin Skywalker.

Re: We expect too much of geeks

Evan Prodromou — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 22:08:48 -0000

I think there's another factor for many programmers that you're not mentioning, which is that for a lot of us there's a Higher Purpose in what we're doing.

Sometimes it's a purpose purely involved with the technology -- like advocacy for a programming language or operating system or hardware platform

Sometimes it's a purpose that's purely societal -- like defending people who can't defend themselves, or educating kids, or supporting people who speak a particular language, or electing a particular political party.

Usually it's at the border between the two -- open access, anti-censorship, open web, open source.

And it's almost always a daunting challenge. Usually, if you're trying to change society with technology, there's not a lot of money in it -- so there's financial stress. Usually, there's not a lot of people who care the way you do.

We expect a lot of ourselves because we can change a really disproportionate part of the world with the technology we make.

Re: 2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:20:32 -0000

I listened to this recording yesterday. There are few people who can give a perspective on being imprisoned for hacking like people who've actually been to jail for hacking.

I was also glad to hear Mitch Altman, who's been leading an impressive community effort to acknowledge depression and suicide in the tech community. I've also found the stories at http://bluehackers.org/ helpful.

1-800-273-TALK (8255) is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US and Canada.

Re: RIP, Aaron Swartz

Evan Prodromou — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:39:59 -0000

Everyone in our community needs to know that help is available if they're having suicidal thoughts. We just can't lose another person like Aaron to suicide.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline http://www.suicidepreventio... 1-800-273-TALK is a 24-hour free, confidential service that people who are considering suicide should call. Even people in crisis who aren't considering suicide are welcome.

The Web site also has a text-based chat interface for hackerly people who prefer typing to talking.

In Canada, http://www.suicidepreventio... has a list of crisis centres by province.

Re: Wikipedia’s travel site’s official launch coming soon; what to expect and not expect

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:45:21 -0000

You should probably read http://en.wikivoyage.org/wi... .

"Using only primary sources makes our guide more succinct: where there is
usually one or sometimes two primary source links for any subject,
there can be hundreds or thousands of secondary source links. We also
avoid subjectivity and conflict. It's difficult to decide
collaboratively which of the thousands of English-language newspapers,
magazines, and Web sites has done the very best travel article about New York City, but it's quite easy for everyone to agree that http://www.nycvisit.com/ is the official city visitor's guide."

Also:

"We should avoid links to other travel guides, to ensure we have travel information in Wikivoyage, not linked
from Wikivoyage. This is an incentive issue; if we have lots of links
to other travel guides, we lose the impetus to create our own. In
addition, one of our goals is to produce a guide useful for printing or offline use, and therefore we need information to be within the article rather than linked to at another site."

I think there's probably a place for a collaboratively-edited travel link directory, but it's not Wikivoyage.

Re: Wikipedia’s travel site’s official launch coming soon; what to expect and not expect

Evan Prodromou — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:15:22 -0000

My name's Evan; I'm one of the two founders of Wikitravel and I wrote the original copy of the "goals and non-goals" document.

When we started Wikitravel and it didn't have a lot of information yet, I needed a way to gently guide people's contributions. A lot of people were taking the idea "wiki + travel" and just going all over the place with it, based on what they knew about travel sites.

There were a lot of different kinds of travel sites on the web, like personal journals, chatboards and directories.

So, that's where the "non-goals" came from. They seem strange to you, but not to me; that's either due to my experience with the community, or just the fact that I wrote them.

Re: What's like RSS?

Evan Prodromou — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 11:44:58 -0000

Dave,

I'm confused by the criteria. Do they have to be interfaces that don't have a formal standards body behind them?

JSON is specified by the IETF (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc... and PNG is specified by RFC and the W3C (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wik....

Is it more of a governance issue? I don't think if the IETF announced a new version of the RFC would change JSON that everyone uses a tiny bit, for example.

Some people like having formal governance for standards because the IP agreements give them some comfort that it's not a honeypot standard -- nobody's going to come back in a couple of years and demand royalties from implementers.

Re: New Documentary Aims to Shed Light on Canadian Entrepreneurs and Their Startups

Evan Prodromou — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 02:11:53 -0000

Oh, ye of little faith.

The Notman House fundraising campaign passed $100,000 this morning, about 36 hours before the deadline.

The Montreal startup community pulled together; we got some good press and good big donations at key points in the campaign.

Re: Why every single one of you should learn a little code

Evan Prodromou — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:36:15 -0000

I think it's probably worthwhile for investors to understand code just so they know how frickin' hard it is. It's a lot harder to produce a working program than it is to produce a working PowerPoint presentation. I don't think it's clear to anyone why that is the case.

Re: Why every single one of you should learn a little code

Evan Prodromou — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:57:01 -0000

I've been a software developer for 25 years, and I think the idea that everyone should learn to write code is ridiculous.

Of all the interfaces that have changed over the last 60 years of computer science and the tech industry, the one that has changed the least is writing code. We still make software just like Grandpa did: composing text files with weird structured half-comprehensible languages and feeding them into cryptic unforgiving processors that make our machines go.

With the possible exception of server config files and/or database dumps we don't expect *anyone* to put up with that kind of horrendous interface in 2012. Why do we think it makes sense for something as important as software development?

If you buy into the thesis that everyone should be able to make software, then you should be working to make that horrendous interface better. Experiments like 4GL's and visual programming -- successful and not so successful -- should guide further development of the UI. Let's improve the software development experience -- not browbeat people into learning our ancient ways.

Re: Dave McClure is ripping VCs again: They’re f*ing arrogant and stupid aholes

Evan Prodromou — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 19:07:24 -0000

http://www.slideshare.net/d...

This might be the least-crazy slide deck from Dave McClure that I've ever seen.

Re: Why Hinterlands Startups Can’t Get Silicon Valley Funding

Evan Prodromou — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 13:35:47 -0000

My name's Evan; I'm the founder of StatusNet Inc., a startup in Montreal. We make Open Source social networking software. http://www.crunchbase.com/c...

I've raised money from Canadian, New York and European investors, but not from the SF Bay Area.

I think there is a clear signal that founders give when they tell investors they want to stay put in their home town instead of moving to the Bay Area.

Simply put, they're not willing to do what it takes to make the company a success.

We all know that startup hubs work, and that Silicon Valley is the world's biggest startup hub by an order of magnitude. http://paulgraham.com/hubs....

Moving isn't that hard. Most startups have only a few employees, and if you're US citizens, then load up the Civic and drive.

If you're going to put personal issues (keep my kids in school, better real estate prices, spouse's career) ahead of the company on this issue, what are you going to do on other issues? How much do you really want it?

When Google or Facebook acquires your company and all its engineers, how many are going to move where the company tells them to? If the answer isn't 100% that might scotch a prospective deal.

I think that there are a few things that out-of-the-Valley companies can do to mitigate this problem.

1. Show value in your hometown. Are you doing a logging startup? Maybe being close to the wood pulp producers of the Pacific Northwest is really important for your company. Working on fashion? You really should be in New York or Paris. Make the case for your city.

2. Move your headquarters to the Valley. I think investors are really looking to have founders and management benefiting from Valley networking, and they care much less whether the tech support staff is in Mountain View or on a mountaintop.

3. Raise elsewhere. I've never had an out-of-Valley VC or angel ask me to move to Paris or New York. You lose out on a lot of the networking value from Valley VCs, but you also get financing with fewer strings attached.

4. Be awesome. If you're really killing it, investors are going to beat a path to your door, no matter where your office is.

Re: Open source won

Evan Prodromou — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:46:14 -0000

Don't get me wrong -- I'm happy to see other Open Source players concede the space around Web applications. More fun for me!

Disqus - Latest Comments for evanp

Re: Transaction 0x13ef98f1121ca7e870a1158f1262004fc21f15f774fc13f7f0771a1ed46c8032

Re: Transaction 0xa09516009bc9df06b006abc261a6035da4a06449dcef88fc3aa10c62780d0c05

Re: 0x001be02a4742767000cc54a820686a3087e4d472

Re: TWG and HIGHLINE just launched a summer camp for designers. Here’s why.

Re: Why age in software is bullshit

Re: Why age in software is bullshit

Re: Happy 60th Birthday, Richard Stallman, Free Software God! - by Dan Lyons

Re: Why you should learn to code

Re: Why you should learn to code

Re: Venture Math 101

Re: Venture Math 101

Re: Venture Math 101

Re: Joining FreshBooks

Re: We expect too much of geeks

Re: 2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz

Re: RIP, Aaron Swartz

Re: Wikipedia’s travel site’s official launch coming soon; what to expect and not expect

Re: Wikipedia’s travel site’s official launch coming soon; what to expect and not expect

Re: What's like RSS?

Re: New Documentary Aims to Shed Light on Canadian Entrepreneurs and Their Startups

Re: Why every single one of you should learn a little code

Re: Why every single one of you should learn a little code

Re: Dave McClure is ripping VCs again: They’re f***ing arrogant and stupid a**holes

Re: Why Hinterlands Startups Can’t Get Silicon Valley Funding

Re: Open source won

Re: Dave McClure is ripping VCs again: They’re f*ing arrogant and stupid aholes