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Founders at Work is one of those books that I keep finding myself re-reading over and over. There is so much good stuff there. For some reason, the descriptio

Founders at Work is one of those books that I keep finding myself re-reading over and over. There is so much good stuff there. For some reason, the description of this book just doesn't inspire me to read it. It's hard to articulate why that is, since it's in the same style as Founders, and it interviews a similar set of people. Maybe it's just that I've heard enough from that generation of programmers. Maybe I've just heard enough from all programmers. Maybe, talking about programming is simply not interesting at all. I don't know. Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.

mncaudill 17y ago
Different strokes for different folks, my man. The business-oriented people can read Founders, the technical-minded people can read can read Coders, and then the intersection of the two can read both! I personally find the idea of this book to be fascinating and pre-ordered it a couple of weeks ago.
- ionfish 17y ago
  > [T]he union of the two can read both! Don't you mean the intersection of the two?
  - mncaudill 17y ago
    Good catch--I edited it to correct the wrongness. Fingers going faster than the brain on a Friday morning...
axod 17y ago
Yeah I feel similar. Programming isn't that hard :/ Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc - They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.
- mncaudill 17y ago
  Programming isn't that hard? Writing code is easy, writing good code is hard, otherwise more people would do it, right?
  - axod 17y ago
    Alright. Sorry... Programming is about as hard as mathematics I'd say - you can just learn it, and if you have the talent and perseverance, you can be a good programmer. So yes, perhaps this book will be more interesting to non-programmers, or people who are just starting out programming. It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck - how do you get people to use your product? How do you make money? build a team? etc etc.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck [...] This is precisely why I don't find those other things very interesting: they seem like luck (to a degree larger than things that interest me more, at least). Gambling is also uninteresting, for the same reason: there's too much luck involved.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  " Programming isn't that hard" Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming" and which specific program you are trying to create ?
  - axod 17y ago
    Pick a webapp. Lets take twitter or facebook, or even youtube. I'm sure there's some really interesting problems when you drill down, and it'd take a fair while to conquer the problems, but it's just a large mountain - just takes longer to climb. I'm sure most of us could build a facebook/twitter/youtube clone if we decided to. The hard bit of course would be getting people to use it. The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs, that no one uses. This is why I think programming is far easier than convincing someone to use it and all that other non-programming stuff, and why I personally am far more interested in the non-technical side of the equation. In comparison, the technical side is trivial.
edw519 17y ago
Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest. Thank you. I thought I was the only one. 95% of the time I program. 5% I conduct business. But for learning, the ratio is reversed. Whether it's hacker news, the articles I read on the web, or the books on my shelves, my interest is mainly in business stories, especially start-up success stories. Not really sure why. Maybe because I think I have all the technology I need. If I need more, I'll find it and learn it. Always have, always will. It's nice to learn a new technique here and there, especially with data base and web technology, but that's rare. The business success stories, OTOH, almost always fascinate me. I love Founders at Work and for some odd reason, Marcus Frind of plentyoffish is like a mythic hero to me: If a regular guy like him can do it, then so can the rest of us.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  Maybe this is why you spend so much time programming and so little time doing business.
plinkplonk 17y ago
"Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest." Thankfully (for the authors and publishers), for some of us, that is reversed. The phrasing can be different. "Tell me how and why you created a new language, and I am interested. Tell me how hard work and determination is how you made your money and the key to success for the rest of us and I lose interest" EDIT: Ok I am reading the pdf version now and it is VERY enjoyable. from the first chapter/interview "Seibel: What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that? Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C. Seibel: Do you use some kind of IDE for that? Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C. Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards." ............................................ "Seibel: Six or seven being the whole Netscape development team or the Unix development team? Zawinski: That was the whole client team. There were also the server folks who were implementing their fork of Apache, basically. We didn’t talk to them much because we were busy. We had lunch with them, but that was it. So we figured out what we wanted to be in the thing and we divided up the work so that there were, I guess, no more than two people working on any part of the project. I was doing the Unix side and Lou Montulli did most of back-end network stuff. And Eric Bina was doing layout and Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Houck were doing the Windows front end and Aleks Toti and Mark Lanett were doing the Mac front end for the pre–version 1.0 team. Those teams grew a little bit after that. But we’d have our meetings and then go back to our cubicles and be heads-down for 16 hours trying to make something work. " ........................................... "They thought just by virtue of being here, they were bound for glory doing it their way. But when they were doing it their way, at their company, they failed. So when the people who had been successful said to them, “Look, really, don’t use C++; don’t use threads,” they said, “What are you talking about? You don’t know anything.” Well, it was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time. The other big thing was we always shipped all platforms simultaneously; that was another thing they thought was just stupid. “Oh, 90 percent of people are using Windows, so we’ll focus on the Windows side of things and then we’ll port it later.” Which is what many other failed companies have done. If you’re trying to ship a cross-platform product, history really shows that’s how you don’t do it. If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform. They didn’t start from scratch with a blank disk but they eventually replaced every line of code. And they used C++ from the beginning. Which I fought against so hard and, dammit, I was right. It bloated everything; " ........................................... there's lots of interesting anecdotes and insights about his work with Peter Norvig at Berkeley, with Lucid and at Netscape and how he learned lisp and how he hates perl but uses it anyway and the hardest bug he ever encountered ( real doozy but i won't spoil the surprise for you) and so on .. And that's just Chapter 1. I must be weird but I really enjoy reading stuff like that.
jalammar 17y ago
There's certainly something to learn about entrepreneurship from some of these guys. I'm really looking forward to reading about Brad Fitzpatrick. He founded Live Journal, and made or started a lot of the software that powers many giant web startups (Memchached, MogileFS, OpenID...etc).

mncaudill 17y ago

Different strokes for different folks, my man. The business-oriented people can read Founders, the technical-minded people can read can read Coders, and then the intersection of the two can read both! I personally find the idea of this book to be fascinating and pre-ordered it a couple of weeks ago.

ionfish 17y ago
> [T]he union of the two can read both! Don't you mean the intersection of the two?
- mncaudill 17y ago
  Good catch--I edited it to correct the wrongness. Fingers going faster than the brain on a Friday morning...

axod 17y ago

Yeah I feel similar. Programming isn't that hard :/ Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc - They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.

mncaudill 17y ago
Programming isn't that hard? Writing code is easy, writing good code is hard, otherwise more people would do it, right?
- axod 17y ago
  Alright. Sorry... Programming is about as hard as mathematics I'd say - you can just learn it, and if you have the talent and perseverance, you can be a good programmer. So yes, perhaps this book will be more interesting to non-programmers, or people who are just starting out programming. It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck - how do you get people to use your product? How do you make money? build a team? etc etc.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck [...] This is precisely why I don't find those other things very interesting: they seem like luck (to a degree larger than things that interest me more, at least). Gambling is also uninteresting, for the same reason: there's too much luck involved.
plinkplonk 17y ago
" Programming isn't that hard" Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming" and which specific program you are trying to create ?
- axod 17y ago
  Pick a webapp. Lets take twitter or facebook, or even youtube. I'm sure there's some really interesting problems when you drill down, and it'd take a fair while to conquer the problems, but it's just a large mountain - just takes longer to climb. I'm sure most of us could build a facebook/twitter/youtube clone if we decided to. The hard bit of course would be getting people to use it. The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs, that no one uses. This is why I think programming is far easier than convincing someone to use it and all that other non-programming stuff, and why I personally am far more interested in the non-technical side of the equation. In comparison, the technical side is trivial.

edw519 17y ago

Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest. Thank you. I thought I was the only one. 95% of the time I program. 5% I conduct business. But for learning, the ratio is reversed. Whether it's hacker news, the articles I read on the web, or the books on my shelves, my interest is mainly in business stories, especially start-up success stories. Not really sure why. Maybe because I think I have all the technology I need. If I need more, I'll find it and learn it. Always have, always will. It's nice to learn a new technique here and there, especially with data base and web technology, but that's rare. The business success stories, OTOH, almost always fascinate me. I love Founders at Work and for some odd reason, Marcus Frind of plentyoffish is like a mythic hero to me: If a regular guy like him can do it, then so can the rest of us.

DannoHung 17y ago
Maybe this is why you spend so much time programming and so little time doing business.

plinkplonk 17y ago

"Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest." Thankfully (for the authors and publishers), for some of us, that is reversed. The phrasing can be different. "Tell me how and why you created a new language, and I am interested. Tell me how hard work and determination is how you made your money and the key to success for the rest of us and I lose interest" EDIT: Ok I am reading the pdf version now and it is VERY enjoyable. from the first chapter/interview "Seibel: What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that? Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C. Seibel: Do you use some kind of IDE for that? Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C. Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards." ............................................ "Seibel: Six or seven being the whole Netscape development team or the Unix development team? Zawinski: That was the whole client team. There were also the server folks who were implementing their fork of Apache, basically. We didn’t talk to them much because we were busy. We had lunch with them, but that was it. So we figured out what we wanted to be in the thing and we divided up the work so that there were, I guess, no more than two people working on any part of the project. I was doing the Unix side and Lou Montulli did most of back-end network stuff. And Eric Bina was doing layout and Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Houck were doing the Windows front end and Aleks Toti and Mark Lanett were doing the Mac front end for the pre–version 1.0 team. Those teams grew a little bit after that. But we’d have our meetings and then go back to our cubicles and be heads-down for 16 hours trying to make something work. " ........................................... "They thought just by virtue of being here, they were bound for glory doing it their way. But when they were doing it their way, at their company, they failed. So when the people who had been successful said to them, “Look, really, don’t use C++; don’t use threads,” they said, “What are you talking about? You don’t know anything.” Well, it was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time. The other big thing was we always shipped all platforms simultaneously; that was another thing they thought was just stupid. “Oh, 90 percent of people are using Windows, so we’ll focus on the Windows side of things and then we’ll port it later.” Which is what many other failed companies have done. If you’re trying to ship a cross-platform product, history really shows that’s how you don’t do it. If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform. They didn’t start from scratch with a blank disk but they eventually replaced every line of code. And they used C++ from the beginning. Which I fought against so hard and, dammit, I was right. It bloated everything; " ........................................... there's lots of interesting anecdotes and insights about his work with Peter Norvig at Berkeley, with Lucid and at Netscape and how he learned lisp and how he hates perl but uses it anyway and the hardest bug he ever encountered ( real doozy but i won't spoil the surprise for you) and so on .. And that's just Chapter 1. I must be weird but I really enjoy reading stuff like that.

jalammar 17y ago

There's certainly something to learn about entrepreneurship from some of these guys. I'm really looking forward to reading about Brad Fitzpatrick. He founded Live Journal, and made or started a lot of the software that powers many giant web startups (Memchached, MogileFS, OpenID...etc).