sriramk

41 ms·

361.
by sriramk 16y ago
Microsoft learned this lesson a long time ago. In the old days of MSFT, the saying was that BillG believed that everyone's manager needed to be a better coder than him/her. The company learned eventually that the best engineers do not neces
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by sriramk 16y ago
VS Express is free - you can download it right now - no subscription required.
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by sriramk 16y ago
Again very dependent on the team. I've been in teams which specifically carved out time for this and also been in teams where prototyping/building crazy stuff was something you did all the time.
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by sriramk 16y ago
5-year Microsoftie here (mostly PM, some dev) Sorry - I don't think that's true. When I was a dev I had a laptop. It is highly dependent on the team you work for. I know a lot of devs who have laptops. In fact, most things hardware related
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by sriramk 16y ago
Thanks Brandon - we appreciate all the support from you guys :). To be clear, Aarthi (arithmetic on HN) did more than half the work, both in terms of code and in PR. It turns out that being married to someone who can code circles around you
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by sriramk 16y ago
Thanks for posting this :). Earlier thread when my wife and I created the app here -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173298 This entire PR exercise has been fun. It went something like this - Pitch TC with a very standard email.
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by sriramk 16y ago
I use Hautelook a lot (don't ask :) ). They are a pretty useful site and they have good inventory. They've also done a good job of competing with Gilt (which is the 800-pound gorilla). Good exit for them
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by sriramk 16y ago
Yup. He also wrote a compiler book in the 80s. He once gave me a mini-lecture on old architectures from the 70s and how 'we kids had it easy these days'. It was awesome, even if I didn't catch any of the content until he started talking abo
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by sriramk 16y ago
Dave Cutler. It's a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see his code in NT. It is by far the most gorgeous C code I've seen. In fact, in the beginning, there have been times when I used to look up his code just to feel ins
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by sriramk 16y ago
You are speaking of the one and only Jon Skeet. I think this had something to do with the NDA Microsoft MVPs sign (MVPs get confidential access to future plans, early looks, etc)
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by sriramk 16y ago
That really depends on what your application is, what your constraints and priorities are and what your appetite for risk is. The discussion I have with a large NY financial services company is very different from the one I have with a 2 pe
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by sriramk 16y ago
I've been responding to most of the crash reports from my WP7 app. So many users are just stunned that a) There is a human being on the other end b) That human being actually responded. I've switched a lot of users from "Your app sucks - it
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by sriramk 16y ago
It is impossible to be good at any technical niche if you don't know the nitty gritties of every other option out there. I just happen to talk about Windows Azure a lot because that's what I work on :).
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by sriramk 16y ago
Writing a book (my O'Reilly book) was the hardest thing I've ever done. It took me a year and I can't count the number of days I just sat in front of a blank screen just willing myself to write something (and usually failing). All that was
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by sriramk 16y ago
Hard to tell how many downloads because of the article (since our analytics can't reach into the Zune client) but it definitely sparked off some press. As for advice, we picked up just great overall tips on SEO and generally running a small
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by sriramk 16y ago
Right now, we do look a bit like a mini-clone of these other photo-sharing apps but we hope to branch out and have our own identity. I used this analogy when talking to a reporter - it's like how Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo are all
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by sriramk 16y ago
Good feedback! Never really thought of that :)
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by sriramk 16y ago
And I just want to say - huge thanks to the HN community and to folks like patio11. I got to use a lot of things which I learnt here when it came to launching the app. Need to do a post about it when things settle down.
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by sriramk 16y ago
Download link for WP7 (you need the Zune client) -> http://bit.ly/bubblegumwp7 My wife and I worked on this together - it's been a fun day dealing with launch and getting on TC. Still fighting launch fires :)
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Tell HN:My app 'bubblegum' just hit TechCrunch(techcrunch.com)
30 points by sriramk 16y ago|15 comments
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by sriramk 16y ago
I somehow doubt the likes of Thiel, Levchin and the other early Paypal folks were 'stupid'. But then, they really didn't have to run it for a long period of time at eBay so maybe one has to question what eBay was thinking.
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by sriramk 16y ago
This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very critical i
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by sriramk 16y ago
Actually, apart from the issue with Marla Wood, the article says that everyone else left in the mid-80s or 90s, ranging from 5-10/15 years after the photo was taken. That's a very decent stint in any company.
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The deterioration of Mint.com(omar.shahine.com)
6 points by sriramk 16y ago|0 comments
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by sriramk 16y ago
This analysis is pretty accurate. That Techflash article was after the first week or so - it gives you a sense of how many app downloads I got per day back then. Another thing to factor in was that this was in the first 2 weeks of WP7 launc
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by sriramk 16y ago
Disclaimer - I work for MSFT but my day job isn't related to WP7 in any way. I had a bit of a minor hit with an app I wrote (see http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/windows-phone-micro... ). For a couple of weeks, that app was #1 in t
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by sriramk 16y ago
Kinect was on the top of my list. When I used Kinect, it seemed quite magical (and I'm jaded enough that few pieces of tech makes me go that way). I really suspect a Kinect from Apple would have been handled differently.
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by sriramk 16y ago
Microsoft fails constantly and people accept it? :) I would argue the exact opposite - Microsoft succeeds consistently in a lot of very measurable ways but isn't given enough credit for it (that a Google/Apple would get for doing the very s
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by sriramk 16y ago
Not really but given the terrible hardware/network connectivity , wouldnt have made much sense now. Because of this thread, I looked through my old backups and I actually still have the code. Should get it working again sometime
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by sriramk 16y ago
Thanks but mine was definitely a toy. I think I got it to around 100K pages or so but that's about it (seemed like a big deal back then). You can see some of those posts here ( http://web.archive.org/web/20041206230457/www.dotnetjunkies....

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