4 ms·

Chris Wanstrath's Startup Riot keynote text

83 points by azsromej 18y ago

dotpavan 18y ago
good one. gist of keynote- dont be afraid to fail, there is lots to learn from it, follow what you genuinely love and use, and do what works for you best there is something so enchanting reading about github, 37signals, etc.. they are filled with passion, do not talk about money (as an objective) and most of all inspire others to follow their heart and pursue their love
- wallflower 18y ago
  I saw the GitHub guys talk at RailsConf '08. It struck me that they were all uber confident - they seemed that they knew what they were going to do and, as needed, they adjusted their course. I was walking out of this talk and mentioned this as smalltalk to guy next to me and he said he had known one of the GitHub guys for years - and in the several years that he has known him - he has always been calm confident and relaxed. They were very inspiring.
azsromej 18y ago
I'm still in the process of upgrading my ambition, but I've so far been happy to just get to the point where I can release something. If it makes > $10/mo on its own, consistently, I smile (which brings me back to needing to upgrade ambitions)
sqs 18y ago
Great speech. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions on the consequences of his conclusion, the "do what you want" bit. I know he meant it in a broader sense, but I see a lot of people (especially high school students and younger) wrongly interpreting that as "don't go into CS; just go straight to a startup," especially with the specific mention of that plan of action. I know that's a popular piece of advice given around here (though HN has an interesting mix of "stuffy" academia and "Wild West" hacker culture), and I felt the same way when I was younger. I thought I knew all the CS I needed to know to develop the stuff I'd want to develop. But I want to say that I am so overwhelmingly happy I have done CS at the college level. I knew so little back then (and still). It scares me that I almost neglected the path of inquiry that is /the/ single most interesting intellectual topic in my life. So, young hackers out there, keep an open mind and a long-term view when you are following his advice to "do whatever you want." That's exactly what he meant by that, I think.
- patio11 18y ago
  Personally, I find that about four classes provided enough value to excuse the rest of the CS degree (two of those were "technical writing" and "stats"), and that I would have never been able to do what I do today without a few years as a stuffy boring enterprise dev first.
  - msort 18y ago
    Computer Science Core = Algorithms + Compilers + Operating Systems After all, N. Wirth wrote a book titled: Data Structures + Algorithms = Programs
- awt 18y ago
  I would say that unless you're brilliant, learning to program takes way more practice than you will get in school. College is still a great way to meet hot chicks though.
anuraggoel 18y ago
When you compare this to a previous keynote here: http://gist.github.com/6443 http://gist.github.com/6443 you can see how he's getting better at this.
sho 18y ago
This is probably going to go against the grain a little, but I have some problems with GitHub. Firstly and probably most obviously, their business is based almost in its entirity around a single third party open source tool, without which they would have nothing at all, and yet their site is not open source. I know they have every right, legally, to do this, but to me it seems .. exploitative. I wouldn't even care, really - that's what it's all about, after all - but they're just so arrogant about it. Wanstrath especially. Just go look at the very latest post on his blog. The last sentence - "Welcome to distributed version control." is just so smug and really rubs me up the wrong way. Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that way, it's very probable, but something just feels wrong. Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed. Github is the antithesis of this! And it has real-world consequences, too - it's slow as hell. It's not Facebook for programmers, it's Geocities for programmers, and I for one can't wait until all those Github users learn how to set up their own repositories. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Github. It's nice looking and works fairly well, apart from the speed. They certain picked the right wave to jump on and it was very right place, right time. And I love git. But Github can't last that long, IMO. Trying to force a distributed version control system into a "hub" is not sustainable. Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. And the web interface is better than gitweb but hardly light years ahead of everyone else. I think it's just a matter of time before we see a proper distributed git community - a "git mesh", if you will. Obviously there are some pieces missing before that can occur, but I think it's inevitable. These "hubs" never last. Just try to name one that has.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  SourceForge has been around for a pretty long time; not that I think they are a model of speed and prettiness, but they've certainly had (and still have) the staying power...
- patio11 18y ago
  to me it seems .. exploitative. This is exploitative if you think that a) open source products are not helped by having a company to do their marketing for them and b) there is something vaguely dirty about making money within a 47 mile radius of one. Marketing is a core competency that most OSS products which lack corporate backing fail at, in spades. Whatever your criteria for success for git are (number of developers, number of users, increasing technological awesomeness), they're better off with a bigger community and they'll get a bigger community thanks to github. Look at how much, e.g., Rails the OSS project gains from being promoted by people who know what they're doing (who subsidize their involvement with Rails by using it to power a fleet of closed-source apps). I think Rails might well be the first OSS programming framework where people actually sat down and discussed really elementary things like a) a marketing plan and b) a visual identity and c) a site that was designed to sell the product, hard, rather than just containing a download and a few desultory links to documentation. Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed This is one of those funny engineer tunnel-vision moments. The whole point of git is that it is theoretically better than the alternatives, not that it upholds one holy grail on a bullet point list above all others. Persistence on a central server, management, backups, all that fun stuff is a great boon to folks who are too small scale to get the baked-in distribution backup effect (which would be about 90% of projects, at a bare minimum) and the collaboration ability doesn't hurt either. (If someone is working on a fork of your project halfway around the world and you are mutually ignorant of each other... sucks to be you, right?) Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. Yeah, and you're never going to buy a Hello Kitty backpack, either. That does not mean there is no market for Hello Kitty backpacks. (I apologize in advance if you are, in fact, a purchaser of Hello Kitty backpacks.) "I see no use for this, ergo it can't possibly be viable" is one of the categorical developer errors about business. 1,500 paying customers later I still get emails from developers saying "I saw your site, looks like it took a lot of work, but come on, nobody will ever buy it." This was once common enough that I wrote a form letter for it.

83 points by azsromej 18y ago

good one. gist of keynote- dont be afraid to fail, there is lots to learn from it, follow what you genuinely love and use, and do what works for you best there is something so enchanting reading about github, 37signals, etc.. they are filled with passion, do not talk about money (as an objective) and most of all inspire others to follow their heart and pursue their love

wallflower 18y ago
I saw the GitHub guys talk at RailsConf '08. It struck me that they were all uber confident - they seemed that they knew what they were going to do and, as needed, they adjusted their course. I was walking out of this talk and mentioned this as smalltalk to guy next to me and he said he had known one of the GitHub guys for years - and in the several years that he has known him - he has always been calm confident and relaxed. They were very inspiring.

azsromej 18y ago

I'm still in the process of upgrading my ambition, but I've so far been happy to just get to the point where I can release something. If it makes > $10/mo on its own, consistently, I smile (which brings me back to needing to upgrade ambitions)

sqs 18y ago

Great speech. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions on the consequences of his conclusion, the "do what you want" bit. I know he meant it in a broader sense, but I see a lot of people (especially high school students and younger) wrongly interpreting that as "don't go into CS; just go straight to a startup," especially with the specific mention of that plan of action. I know that's a popular piece of advice given around here (though HN has an interesting mix of "stuffy" academia and "Wild West" hacker culture), and I felt the same way when I was younger. I thought I knew all the CS I needed to know to develop the stuff I'd want to develop. But I want to say that I am so overwhelmingly happy I have done CS at the college level. I knew so little back then (and still). It scares me that I almost neglected the path of inquiry that is /the/ single most interesting intellectual topic in my life. So, young hackers out there, keep an open mind and a long-term view when you are following his advice to "do whatever you want." That's exactly what he meant by that, I think.

patio11 18y ago
Personally, I find that about four classes provided enough value to excuse the rest of the CS degree (two of those were "technical writing" and "stats"), and that I would have never been able to do what I do today without a few years as a stuffy boring enterprise dev first.
- msort 18y ago
  Computer Science Core = Algorithms + Compilers + Operating Systems After all, N. Wirth wrote a book titled: Data Structures + Algorithms = Programs
awt 18y ago
I would say that unless you're brilliant, learning to program takes way more practice than you will get in school. College is still a great way to meet hot chicks though.

anuraggoel 18y ago

When you compare this to a previous keynote here: http://gist.github.com/6443 http://gist.github.com/6443 you can see how he's getting better at this.

sho 18y ago

This is probably going to go against the grain a little, but I have some problems with GitHub. Firstly and probably most obviously, their business is based almost in its entirity around a single third party open source tool, without which they would have nothing at all, and yet their site is not open source. I know they have every right, legally, to do this, but to me it seems .. exploitative. I wouldn't even care, really - that's what it's all about, after all - but they're just so arrogant about it. Wanstrath especially. Just go look at the very latest post on his blog. The last sentence - "Welcome to distributed version control." is just so smug and really rubs me up the wrong way. Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that way, it's very probable, but something just feels wrong. Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed. Github is the antithesis of this! And it has real-world consequences, too - it's slow as hell. It's not Facebook for programmers, it's Geocities for programmers, and I for one can't wait until all those Github users learn how to set up their own repositories. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Github. It's nice looking and works fairly well, apart from the speed. They certain picked the right wave to jump on and it was very right place, right time. And I love git. But Github can't last that long, IMO. Trying to force a distributed version control system into a "hub" is not sustainable. Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. And the web interface is better than gitweb but hardly light years ahead of everyone else. I think it's just a matter of time before we see a proper distributed git community - a "git mesh", if you will. Obviously there are some pieces missing before that can occur, but I think it's inevitable. These "hubs" never last. Just try to name one that has.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
SourceForge has been around for a pretty long time; not that I think they are a model of speed and prettiness, but they've certainly had (and still have) the staying power...
patio11 18y ago
to me it seems .. exploitative. This is exploitative if you think that a) open source products are not helped by having a company to do their marketing for them and b) there is something vaguely dirty about making money within a 47 mile radius of one. Marketing is a core competency that most OSS products which lack corporate backing fail at, in spades. Whatever your criteria for success for git are (number of developers, number of users, increasing technological awesomeness), they're better off with a bigger community and they'll get a bigger community thanks to github. Look at how much, e.g., Rails the OSS project gains from being promoted by people who know what they're doing (who subsidize their involvement with Rails by using it to power a fleet of closed-source apps). I think Rails might well be the first OSS programming framework where people actually sat down and discussed really elementary things like a) a marketing plan and b) a visual identity and c) a site that was designed to sell the product, hard, rather than just containing a download and a few desultory links to documentation. Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed This is one of those funny engineer tunnel-vision moments. The whole point of git is that it is theoretically better than the alternatives, not that it upholds one holy grail on a bullet point list above all others. Persistence on a central server, management, backups, all that fun stuff is a great boon to folks who are too small scale to get the baked-in distribution backup effect (which would be about 90% of projects, at a bare minimum) and the collaboration ability doesn't hurt either. (If someone is working on a fork of your project halfway around the world and you are mutually ignorant of each other... sucks to be you, right?) Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. Yeah, and you're never going to buy a Hello Kitty backpack, either. That does not mean there is no market for Hello Kitty backpacks. (I apologize in advance if you are, in fact, a purchaser of Hello Kitty backpacks.) "I see no use for this, ergo it can't possibly be viable" is one of the categorical developer errors about business. 1,500 paying customers later I still get emails from developers saying "I saw your site, looks like it took a lot of work, but come on, nobody will ever buy it." This was once common enough that I wrote a form letter for it.