Visit tom.preston-werner.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2008 – Apr 2014
Startups 5Career & Management 4Software Engineering 2Tech Industry & Business 2Open Source 1
When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were…
Today is my last day at GitHub. Recent events have given me a lot of time to reflect on what’s important to me, and I’ve decided to switch gears and focus on building something from scratch again. Since visiting the Oculus VR team at their office three months ago, I’ve come to believe that immersive computing (aka…
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
I hear a lot of talk these days about TDD and BDD and Extreme Programming and SCRUM and stand up meetings and all kinds of methodologies and techniques for developing better software, but it’s all irrelevant unless the software we’re building meets the needs of those that are using it. Let me put that another way. A…
The end of the year is a great time to sit down with a glass of your favorite beverage, dim the lights, snuggle up next to the fire and think about what you’ve learned over the past twelve months.
Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical…
For an entrepreneur, the line between horrible mistake and runaway success can be so thin that even Kate Moss would be envious. I lived with Gravatar for nearly four years before that line even became thick enough to measure.
Over the last few months I’ve seen a number of people looking for cofounders on Hacker News or via their own personal blogs. I think this is, at best, a highly inefficient way to find a cofounder and, at worst, a way to fool yourself into finding the wrong cofounder. In any case, it’s a naive approach to finding the…