Paul Biggar

Blog Post: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ Jim Rose, ceo of CircleCI, responded by pointing out on social media that “Paul does not speak on behalf of” the San Francisco-based company, which he declared was “committed to our customers in Israel and around the world”. Soon afterwards, however, Rose posted: “Effective December 22, Paul Biggar is no longer a director at CircleCI. We thank him for his contributions on the board and wish him the best for what’s next.”

Totally agree about flaming out hard. I wrote [1] after my last startup failed. It was actually two months between when it failed and when I could face actually writing it. However, it's professionally one of the best things I ever did. [1] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/

Founders new to coding write horrible code. And that is ok! At the beginning the biggest risk is not writting terrible code you will regreat having written, let alone give maintance. The biggest risk is making something nobody wants. From my experience, the biggest issue comes after you get enough traction/money/funding to hire a team. This is where things can get really bad, when the founder thinks he actually knows how to solve CS problems, and says things like: "This Machine Learning thing is not that hard: I wrote the landing page for the startup in 3 hours without any programming knowledge". Hubris is one dangerous trait that will get anyone in trouble. Founders, due to their natural Reality Distortion Field[1], can be a victim of it[2]. Kent Beck, creator the agile methodology XP, discussed some of this in his The Flight of a Startup[3] [1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/09/visionarys-lament.html [2] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/ [3] http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=251

Somehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops: It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says I’m going back to Heroku and in 2025, I think people still want that

This darklang project has been going on 5 years now. From my memory everyone quit or was laid off except the founder, who has been working on it as a one man band. But since the Israeli conflict he has publicly called out the VC industry and has become a sort of political warrior: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ Overall I would stick to a normal language like Python over what this project is. It’s too ambitious for one person and it has all this other hair on it.

I think they are. Read this article, that the banner links to: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/

What he's doing now: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/tech-for-palestine/ > Tech For Palestine (Twitter, Github) is a collection of over 40 tech founders, engineers, marketers, community builders, and investors, working towards ending tech's support for Israel's war on the Palestinian people across Gaza and the West Bank, and working towards a free Palestine.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but was he really fired just for writing that blog post? (https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/) That seems pretty crazy, although I suppose to play devil's advocate the ongoing, erm, 'conflict', was clearly interfering with his ability to output work ("I can't work. I code for 5 minutes before their bodies come back")

For those missing context, Paul Biggar released a blog (https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/) decrying what he saw as a massacre of Palestinians conducted by Israel, and supported by what he considered the overwhelmingly pro-zionist tech VC industry. He called out some of his own investors by name. Paul Graham has tweeted similarly, and also called out collusion in the tech/VC industry to silence Palestinian voices.

I assume this is the post in question: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645523 [flagged] - 124 points, 81 comments It reads like he knew what he was getting into. He chose to have a clear conscience and damn the consequences. That shows strength of character, which is a commendable quality.

Another person punished for expressing solidarity for Palestinians. See https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/

By the way, there is an alternative to HipHop that is actually easier to implement because it makes php extensions. It's called PHC http://phpcompiler.org and it's open source. It was Paul Biggar's PhD thesis http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/a-rant-about-php-compilers-in-gener… It just needs some community contributions to catch up.

I agree with the first paragraph of your comment. Another YC-backed startup called NewsTilt was trying to tackle this problem more directly, but failed soon after launching. http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/

NewsTilt (formerly NewsLabs) was shut down fairly quickly. Here's the deets: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/

> certainly better than, say, MRI Ruby Care to give some proof? Say, performance-wise, MRI is not any worse than PHP[1]. And as far as I understand, PHP implementation is just plain horrible[2]. [1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang… [2] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/introducing-malicious-code-reviews/