Why isn't anyone testing candidates' ability on reading and working with existing code? I do that all the time with interviewees.
Why I do that? The obvious being the potential hire is required to work within a large code base (often code not written by yourself) and having the ability to read and understand quickly what a piece of code does is a great skill that not many great coders have.
I call myself Marco and many others do as well. I like your attitude here and I'd love to hear from you when the next project calls for someone who can consult or develop an iOS application.
Being in the app business for more than 2 years, like any other business, there's a cycle. It's a definite trend that mobile ad spending increases towards the end of the year and so publishers will see higher CPM and more impressions. Come January, that bump in ad revenue might reverse and newbie developers could be in for a surprise drop in their ad revenue.
The key metric to measure is DAU, and checking that you are generating more impressions from more active users.
That is why ideas are many but execution is key to a success of a startup. There are many ways I can see Parse getting to a size that of Heroku.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
[Edit] Wow. OK, would a downvoter do me the favor of explaining why they find my position so repugnant, rather than just hitting the down arrow (as convenient as that may be?). Maybe I'll learn something.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information ...
Anyone with sufficient experience in developing large-scale mobile applications should have a pretty good idea of where this can go, and what to expect out of the potential customer base.
We're talking about a very familiar space of developer tooling, not rocket science.
... and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
[Edit] In retrospect, venturing a guess here is too silly to do. $200M seems insanely high, regardless.
Stay in school.. I can't imagine why you guys are dropping out of school to "start a dating website". That said, good luck and I'm sure will learn a lot.
I agree. I went to Yale and wouldn't trade those semesters for anything. You've got your whole life to start a company, but the opportunities you get to build yourself at a place like Yale don't often come up again.
And especially for another dating site -- this is a market that many smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about, and unless you have something truly revolutionary which is hard to replicate, the odds seem stacked against you.
But again, best of luck. And think about using Yale resources as well like YES, your summers, etc.
Agreed. I love your excitement and energy, but there's no reason you can't explore this idea while at Yale, or during a summer break. When you do a startup, you should look at the worst case scenario - you may regret falling behind in studies. The odds are you're going to fail, and things take much longer than planned - are you okay with that? Oh, and if you want to raise money any time soon, you may want to think about a different market. I don't want to be a downer, but I think it's important that the startup fantasy be balanced with reality. Good luck!
What's the point of these kind of announcement when there is no data to back it up? They could have just as well made this up and there's no third party measurement that can validate their numbers.
Rovio is just milking this cow to the max and until they announced or released another hit game, it's all a show.
"It’s a damn tragedy. I’m not an expert in JavaScript"
Hell yea, the valley's full of smart kids who don't know what the hell they're doing with JavaScript and thinks they're one hell of a hacker when they discovered that they can do shit with a few lines of JS and trumpeting on the how great NodeJS or whatever the greatest and newest shiny framework out there.
If you don't really understand scoping in JS, please don't use node and hit yourself on your foot and then blog the cool shit out of it.
I think "a damn tragedy" is a pretty apt description. Well-designed languages shouldn't require reams of experience. Just a little intelligence and a reference for any questions that arise should get you pretty far.
I'm sure this guy "really understand[s] scoping in JS", but he still got bitten. The blog post isn't frivolous, its point is that javascript is a minefield. Which is an important lesson. Use JSLint or "use strict" or pay the price.
There's the obvious allure of Silicon Valley given the investor/startup culture there. I suspect the question was probably more focussed around SF than the US in general.
Why I do that? The obvious being the potential hire is required to work within a large code base (often code not written by yourself) and having the ability to read and understand quickly what a piece of code does is a great skill that not many great coders have.