Hello World … Services-to-Product Transition: A profitable services company begins adding products to reduce manual work, create leverage, or standardize delivery. Early products automate known workflows and are led directly by an executive with deep customer knowledge. Initial success masks the need to separate product leadership as scope and complexity increase. hello sidenote text goes here … Founder-Led Startup After Initial Product Success: A founder-led startup ships its first product successfully through tight intuition and fast feedback.

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simplest d3 + meteor example I could make v2 steve/simple-d3-with-meteor · GitHub. Learning meteor & d3 together – I wanted a simple example to build on. Since I didn’t find one, I’m sharing this. The minimal (for me) was that it took advantage of the reactive data synced between client & server to affect something I drew with d3. Now, individual circles are drawn by d3 (via a template), each one as a result of individual record changes managed by Meteor.

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Learning meteor & d3 together - I wanted a simple example to build on. Since I didn’t find one, I’m sharing this. The minimal (for me) was that it took advantage of the reactive data synced between client & server to affect something I drew with d3. steve/simple-d3-with-meteor · GitHub. Thanks to the following sources for their help http://d3js.org http://meteor.com http://christopheviau.com/d3_tutorial/ http://mbostock.github.io/d3/tutorial/circle.html http://blog.benmcmahen.com/post/41124327100/using-d3-and-meteor-to-generate-scalable-vector

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SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks). We’ve had great fun, and results, teaching kids to program with Scratch. Now, Berkeley has “an extended reimplementation of Scratch … that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. It also features first class lists, first class procedures, and continuations. These added capabilities make it suitable for a serious introduction to computer science for high school or college students.” I’ve only played with it a little - but getting started with Snap!

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At Food on the Table, feedback from real users is the life-blood of how they do lean startup. When we needed qualatiative feedback from new users, one way was to hire people off of craigslist - a form of ad-hoc usability testing. This question has come up so often, I promised to share the answer here: Hi Steve: I’ve got a question for you on doing usability testing via random folks on Craigslist.

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It’s been a great 3 ½ years at Food on the Table, however it’s time for me to move on. As you’d expect with a team and investors of this caliber, everyone has been very supportive of my decision. While this next phase will be without me, I remain confident that the work at Food on the Table will lead to great results. Working closely with Manuel Rosso and our team for the last 3 ½ years has been a tremendous experience.

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One of the joys of having a sailboat is (in all seriousness) restoring a boat to better than new. With my Precision 18, there’s plenty of opportunties for this. Today, I realized I wasn’t sure how to go about restoring the hull (the gelcoat is chalky, but there’s not many scratches) - what do I do, how do I do it and in what order? Fortunately, I found a good article that gave what is essentially a hierarchy of steps for recovering / restoring the shine in the hull (after cleaning): try waxing, and if that isn’t sufficient then try polish, and if that isn’t sufficient then try compound and if that isn’t sufficient then try sandpaper Fortunately, I tried waxing last year - and the results looked good.

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How would you benchmark the productivity of a product-development team in lean-startup? Why? In my experience at Food on the Table, we’ve been much more productive than any of the other early-stage startups I’ve been involved with. I believe that one of the causes is our pervasive use of lean-startup & feel as if we’re on to something important here. So, how can I (dis)prove this? Uh, really? I recognize the some of the inherent issues in my question: no accepted standard to compare productivity small sample size what’s the impact of environment & how can it be separated what does lean-startup have to do with this at all etc.

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Food on the Table is hiring - I’m looking for a great developer to work with us. Read more at We Are Growing! | Food on the Table Blog.

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On the 28th, I’ll be MC’ing the Austin On Rails meeting - (Meeting: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 @ 7-9 PM). There’ll be four talks: Technical Feedback Loops - Marcus Irven Product Feedback Loops - Ash Maurya Process Feedback Loop - (me) How My Community Saved My Life - Mando Escamilla My talk will be a short version of my recent Lone Star Ruby Conf. talk “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” or why I love continuous learning with continuous deployment.

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