a t e v a n s . c o m

HTTP auth FTW - let’s keep it simple, folks

Easily convert your MySQL tables to utf-8 with a reversible migration if, say, you forgot to change the default character encoding for MySQL when you first installed it.

Not that that would ever happen to anyone.

Neat css for doing sparkline-like meters

I love developer communities. I love the spirit, the comradery and energy. But in the last couple of years or so, Hackthons have spread through the community like a plague. There are Hackathons around technologies, ideologies and everything in between. And I feel there is an urgent need to eradicate them.

Here is my main beef with Hackathon. They’re encouraging and spreading a perverse culture of unhealthy lifestyle and unsustainable workflow which has been made popular by sensational media and film.

In Kansas City, I did two 24hr hackathons and one Startup Weekend over the course of a month. I have to say, after that experience I was not ready for anything that looked like a hackathon for weeks. It was a ton of work, and after each one I needed a day or more to recover. Hackathons are very draining.

I did, however, get to try out a bunch of ideas that had been sitting in my head becoming brain crack. Getting those ideas into the wild to see what people thought of them after even a little building out was really cool. Doing that kind of short-term building was what helped me to arrive at my current vision for a startup.

So there’s plusses and minuses. Like everything, use hackathons responsibly, in moderation.

With some regularity I read articles about some amiable, accomplished and brilliant young kid that decides to end their life in the start-up scene. Invariably they’ve managed to come a very long way along some perceived curve of success and then there is a snag. Either they plateau in their growth, the start-up tanks or there is some other hiccup that causes trouble.

The author states that his article comes from the position of seeing friends commit suicide, which must be really tough. But watching someone shut down is very different from experiencing clinical depression / suicidality yourself. So take this with a grain of salt; it’s an outsider’s perspective.

From my personal experience, depression is largely unrelated to outside stimulus. That’s kind of the definition; feeling sad and anxious all the time after a family member has died is natural. When there’s no reason for it, it’s depression.

I have been depressed at crappy jobs at BigCorp where I didn’t get to do anything cool and my skills were being wasted, and I have felt the same way at kick-ass startups where I loved my job. So taking a job at a big company is certainly no defence against a lack of serotonin in the brain. You may avoid the big loss of failure only to experience the mounting frustration of unrealized dreams.

Startups involve a ton of effort, but there are advantages. You can design your lifestyle - work from home, work from a coffee shop, get a Zen-like quiet office or a Keggerator-equipped party floor; whatever you need to keep a support network and manage the stress. Take an hour or two off to go to therapy, doctor’s appointments, whatever you need. It’s your ship, find the currents flowing in the direction you want to go.

The most important thing is therapy. Get meds, see someone, meditate, keep your friends close. Take your mental health as seriously as you do your physical health. And if you feel suicidal, call someone. Do whatever you have to do to survive.

Unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you

A while back, I got an invite from a friend to join Weasyl, an art site like DeviantArt. Here’s my experience:

1. get an invite email. Yay! Now I can sign up.
2. Click through to a signup page. They made me enter a username, password, email (?) and DOB (?) and annoying CAPTCHA
3. Fill out the form info and hit enter. Oh no! My username was taken. Try again with a different username
4. password must have a number. There must have been some small text I didn’t read
5. password must have an uppercase letter. :/ Seriously? What is this, a bank website?
6. The email I entered wasn’t invited. Yeah, I used a different email; one I use for social networks. Why was I asked for an email when I just clicked through from being invited via email and there was only one right answer?!

I stopped there. On my site, GaymerConnect, it’s one form, on the very first page you hit: email, password, confirm. Everything else you can change / setup later. Once you enter that stuff, you’re IN. Also, Rails has pretty decent antispam built in, with auth tokens and utf8 protection, that are invisible to the user. On non-rails sites, I do the same thing with javascript. Just setting a form parameter on pageload with JS and checking for it server-side will eliminate >90% of spam submissions.

Today the site went into open beta. I figured I’d give it a shot. The process:

1. Go to the site, click signup
2. Enter username, annoying CAPTCHA, password, confirm (checked all the little-text this time), email, confirm (really?), DOB with annoying javascript thingy (is it 1 / Jan / January? no way to tell when tabbing into it)
3. username taken - did my username register after all? no “forgot password” button here - only links back to the main page :/
4. forgot password page: username, email (?), DOB (?) - why enter all this? I should be able to enter my email, get an email with my username and / or a password reset link. Whatever, enter all the info.
5. email incorrect - did I use the other email?
6. Nope - somebody else is using my name on the site (happens now & then, no biggie) No link to registration page, plus I’d have to re-enter all my info.

Welp, that’s all the effort I’ve got for it today.

Signing in should not be this hard. And especially not for a social network thingy. I don’t need to two-factor auth or impossible-to-remember passwords for an art sharing site. In Rails, signin is a solved problem thanks to Devise. I’m not sure what they’re building the site with, but I would think any serious framework at this point could make signin a lot less complicated.

Maybe I’ll still sign up at some point; but my initial experience with the signin process makes me worry that the site is crufty (pages that only display a confirmation message, without links to where I need to go), hard-to-use (am I going to have to CAPTCHA on every upload? every favorite?), and frustrating. So maybe not.

Short writeup on how Google is bringing the awesome to KC. I got to look pretty in the picture. The article also makes an off-hand reference; I was the only one at the Fiber Space hackathon wearing a Hawaiian shirt (‘cause I roll like that).

Great story. Good going, FC.

A PowerPoint plan (“deck”) is less important than an elevator pitch, and an elevator pitch is less important than an introduction. Read What should I send investors? Part 1: Elevator Pitch for tips on crafting an elevator pitch. Many investors will just skim a deck and take a meeting if the introduction and elevator pitch are good.

But you can still send a deck. A deck lets investors learn more about your company. It demonstrates that you’ve thought about the company in detail. It’s an industry norm. And you need one for presentations anyway.