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1. The most interesting thing I created was one of the best college debate teams in the country. At Mizzou we didn't have a team, I started one, raised tens of

by cgshaw 16y ago

1. The most interesting thing I created was one of the best college debate teams in the country. At Mizzou we didn't have a team, I started one, raised tens of thousands of dollars and my partner and I made it to a final four. The squad placed 12th in the nation despite not having a coach and being underfunded. We beat ivies and all sorts of super well funded and coached schools. We were mostly farm boys. After graduation, I was hired as the youngest coach in the country at Colorado College, one of my teams that year made it to a final four. I'm one of a hand full of people to debate in a final four and coach a team to a final four. Code-wise, nothing that interesting, like I've mentioned elsewhere, I've never really taken a class. I've created websites, blogs and stuff, but never with a team. 2. Maker's Mark is my drink of choice. 3. Front page is 1. Threshold of 100 points, 2. Gawker Hacked, 3. HN Reading Level, 4. No evidence of time b4 big bang, 5. Building Generaion in Unreal 3, 6. Atlantic Turns a profit, 7. NY Struggles to find enough tech people. How much more detail would prefer?

stanleydrew 16y ago
#1 is impressive. With #3 I was hoping to gauge your understanding of "how the internet works," but I clearly asked it the wrong way. I assume you have some notion of computers talking to each other in a network. But I thought it would be useful to see how much you've thought about it or read about it or fooled with getting stuff up and running on the internet.
- cgshaw 16y ago
  Jesus that was dense, I'm sorry. You type an address in, the browser locates the data via an IP addy. The information requested from a database is recalled, packeted, transmitted, formatted and displayed in the way the front end code requests it. In my case it went to my cable modem with piece of shit comcast and then through my router and it's 192.168.1.1 IP addy. I'm sure I could make that answer better with a simple google search, but I don't cheat. If you're trying to gauge me, it'd be disingenuous. I hope I didn't flunk miserably, maybe just a C?
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    I appreciate your integrity. I suppose it would have been fairly easy to cheat on that question. It's pretty much impossible to flunk miserably at this question unless you say something horribly wrong. It's meant to figure out whether you're familiar with DNS, HTTP, client/server stuff, etc, and how deeply. It's relevant since the product you want to build is entirely an HTTP-based application, and there are a lot of layers to understand to even be able to make credibly intelligent suggestions about what that product might do or look like.
    - cgshaw 16y ago
      Sweet. Thanks for the interaction this evening. Truth be told, I had no expectation what so ever for people on HN to even really comment / consider what I'm putting out there (that's why I put it on posterous and not as an Ask HN). I had no karma and I'm not a programmer. I live 1,836 miles from Palo Alto. This post served two purposes, 1. hail mary that I found someone kick ass who was interested in getting involved for a random reason (they liked sports or bbq maybe) 2. help me figure out how get buy in from developers. By looking at the feedback, "over the top," "not enough information," etc., I can get a sense of how I have to change my pitch to an engineer. It's not that I think all engineers are the same, but that I don't know many engineers, so I wanted to hypo-test. I'd love nothing more than to learn Python, Ruby, erlang, etc., and crank it out myself, but if I've learned anything in life it's that I should concentrate what I'm best at and learn new things incrementally along the way. Thanks for not just making fun of me and moving along.
      - stanleydrew 16y ago
        I'm not one to make fun of someone who puts himself out there like you have. I've been there before. I think you'll find that engineers are a critical and skeptical bunch. You're right that you should get in front of as many of them as you can. You need to learn as much from them as possible, even the ones who aren't working with you. Listen to them. They will help you in subtle ways that you might not notice at first. At this point your most important goal must be to gain credibility. I don't think you should learn Python or anything like that. We both agree that's probably not a great use of your time. What you do need to do is understand enough about how web-based products are built and how they work to talk competently about specifics. That's going to be hard. One way to do it is to try to build something yourself, which we've kind of ruled out. One way to do it is to read a lot. One way to do it is to find someone you know who's an engineer and watch what he/she does while asking questions. Credibility is everything. And you can't substitute it with passion. I wish you the best of luck. Keep us updated.

by cgshaw 16y ago

stanleydrew 16y ago

#1 is impressive. With #3 I was hoping to gauge your understanding of "how the internet works," but I clearly asked it the wrong way. I assume you have some notion of computers talking to each other in a network. But I thought it would be useful to see how much you've thought about it or read about it or fooled with getting stuff up and running on the internet.

cgshaw 16y ago
Jesus that was dense, I'm sorry. You type an address in, the browser locates the data via an IP addy. The information requested from a database is recalled, packeted, transmitted, formatted and displayed in the way the front end code requests it. In my case it went to my cable modem with piece of shit comcast and then through my router and it's 192.168.1.1 IP addy. I'm sure I could make that answer better with a simple google search, but I don't cheat. If you're trying to gauge me, it'd be disingenuous. I hope I didn't flunk miserably, maybe just a C?
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  I appreciate your integrity. I suppose it would have been fairly easy to cheat on that question. It's pretty much impossible to flunk miserably at this question unless you say something horribly wrong. It's meant to figure out whether you're familiar with DNS, HTTP, client/server stuff, etc, and how deeply. It's relevant since the product you want to build is entirely an HTTP-based application, and there are a lot of layers to understand to even be able to make credibly intelligent suggestions about what that product might do or look like.
  - cgshaw 16y ago
    Sweet. Thanks for the interaction this evening. Truth be told, I had no expectation what so ever for people on HN to even really comment / consider what I'm putting out there (that's why I put it on posterous and not as an Ask HN). I had no karma and I'm not a programmer. I live 1,836 miles from Palo Alto. This post served two purposes, 1. hail mary that I found someone kick ass who was interested in getting involved for a random reason (they liked sports or bbq maybe) 2. help me figure out how get buy in from developers. By looking at the feedback, "over the top," "not enough information," etc., I can get a sense of how I have to change my pitch to an engineer. It's not that I think all engineers are the same, but that I don't know many engineers, so I wanted to hypo-test. I'd love nothing more than to learn Python, Ruby, erlang, etc., and crank it out myself, but if I've learned anything in life it's that I should concentrate what I'm best at and learn new things incrementally along the way. Thanks for not just making fun of me and moving along.
    - stanleydrew 16y ago
      I'm not one to make fun of someone who puts himself out there like you have. I've been there before. I think you'll find that engineers are a critical and skeptical bunch. You're right that you should get in front of as many of them as you can. You need to learn as much from them as possible, even the ones who aren't working with you. Listen to them. They will help you in subtle ways that you might not notice at first. At this point your most important goal must be to gain credibility. I don't think you should learn Python or anything like that. We both agree that's probably not a great use of your time. What you do need to do is understand enough about how web-based products are built and how they work to talk competently about specifics. That's going to be hard. One way to do it is to try to build something yourself, which we've kind of ruled out. One way to do it is to read a lot. One way to do it is to find someone you know who's an engineer and watch what he/she does while asking questions. Credibility is everything. And you can't substitute it with passion. I wish you the best of luck. Keep us updated.