Eric Sink

One of my favorite classic articles is this post from 2003 by Eric Sink, "The .NET Abstraction Pile", which lists 46 separate abstractions that are involved from clicking the "Check In" button in a networked version control system: https://ericsink.com/Abstraction_Pile.html

Eric Sink is a great developer and blogger. If you have a bit of time, do yourself a favor and go through his entire archive ;) -> https://ericsink.com/tocs/topics.html

It's worth mentioning that you can also read the book for free online: http://www.ericsink.com/vcbe/index.html Take a look and decide if it's something you like to have in paper form.

The launch of this product makes a lot of sense considering Eric Sink's earlier writings on the topic of DVCSs. For example, in one article, he talks about the diverging trends of Enterprise and Open Source, leading to Enterprise finding it hard to accept a DVCS. Well worth a read: http://www.ericsink.com/articles/vcs_trends.html

Eric Sink is writing an excellent series of articles on source control at http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html

Series of articles written by Eric Sink http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html He is also currently working a book on the same topic. A lot of his recent articles are about his experiments with various version control systems and are worth a look.

On Eric Sink's blog, the short story of the inventor of a security mechanism testing it on himself: http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Yours_Mine_Ours.html (in the section "The Best Dogfooding Story Ever"; but the whole article is a good read).

D is a niche language that didn't quite manage becoming mainstream. I came across an excellent article Why your F# evangelism isn't working (https://ericsink.com/entries/fsharp_chasm.html) that explains why this didn't happen for F#, but the insights generalise to other languages. Here's my summary: - Adoption of any technology is by a normal distribution. - The segments are early adopters, pragmatists, late adopters and laggards. - If you want a technology to become mainstream, you need to make the pragmatists adopt it. - This is rational behaviour and there's no use trying to convince the pragmatists otherwise. They will choose "predictably disappointing" over "excellent and unproven" every time. - Technology is merely a tool to them. They don't care if it's fun or not, as long as it gets the job done. - Mainstream success is impossible without getting the pragmatists on board. Until then you have a curiosity used only be early adopters. - How to cross the chasm? He recommends finding a pragmatist in pain and solving their problems. Gradually convert pragmatists one by one. I don't think D was ever able to articulate to the pragmatists why they should adopt D over C++ or other languages. Fixing a few warts with C++ wasn't enough. Meanwhile Rust managed to appeal to the pragmatists by saying "we know you use C and C++ because of the performance despite the issues with it. Why don't you try a language with the same performance, which also fixes some of the issues…

There are some really insidious errors in this comment. It's close enough to the truth that it runs the risk of being taken at face value, despite the errors. > Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic Not quite. They used Spyglass Mosaic, which shared only the name. Spyglass Mosaic was a from-scratch implementation. https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html > What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome. Not quite. Early Firefox development resembled Linux: multiple industry actors collaborating on a single codebase—pretty unlike the way it works today, where a single (bumbling) corporation is almost totally responsible for marketing, product direction, and development. Google was one of the biggest contributors to Firefox development. The Firefox lead was a Google employee being paid to do just that. When Google decided to do Chrome, they pulled their engineers off Firefox, with parallels to what later happened with the WebKit -> Blink fork: an initial cooperative effort, followed by their chafing at the overheads of collaboration and the lack of total control, followed by breaking away to do their own thing. If there was any amount of poaching/brain drain that should be mentioned but no one really talks about, it's how many ex-Mozilla Corp folks left for Facebook and is partially responsible for the engineering culture there.

We realized that our startup had two probems: A really long sales cycle (on the order of years for some clients), and a lack of the necessary sales skills on the founding team. We weren't able to address the former. But while trying to address the latter, I found the following articles useful. In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank has some great advice on hiring sales staff before product-market fit: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705 Basically, he says, "Don't do it," with the possible expection of a single "sales closer" who loves working in the field, and who has been avoiding promotions to VP of Sales. As I understand it, you're not looking to build a sales organization yet, but you may need some sales skills to close your first 3 deals and prove that the model works. But even then, he has a checklist of customer discovery tasks to do first. There's also some amusing advice from Eric Sink on hiring sales staff in a micro-ISV: http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Closing_the_Gap_Part_1.html http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Closing_the_Gap_Part_2.html

Eric Sink suggested pretty much this exact idea some years ago, but said he didn't think it would work because of the risk of people treating cars badly. http://www.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html I tend to agree; I'd not be at all keen to loan my car to some random stranger. I'm more attached to it than the average person, but there just seem to be too many things that could go wrong; what if they smoke in it? What if they drive it into something? What if they steal it? Maybe those things aren't likely, but they'd worry me too much. And yes, they're apparently insured, but the inconvenience of having your car off the road for a week or two goes far beyond just the cost of getting it fixed. But if other people want to rent their cars this way, great. Sounds pretty good from the rentor's point of view. Also, the existing car rental companies could do with a damn good shake-up and if this gives it to them, so much the better. I guess I'm not in their target audience - I'm not anyway since I don't live in the States, but I'm interested to know if enough people are keen on something like this to make it work. My gut feeling has been 'no', but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

People complaining about the quality of college graduates is nothing new. Most of the people in my computer science classes didn't care about programming at all. Only the people who were naturally very good at it seemed to care much. I recall complaining a lot about the quality of applicants from pretty much day one of my professional programming career. When I was younger I got a lot out of reading: http://www.ericsink.com/Career_Calculus.html. As someone who isn't naturally the best programmer this helped me put a lot of things to perspective. I'd imagine anyone starting out would be well served by following his advice. These days I try to spend at least some time every night trying to improve my skills in some tangible way (e.g. reading a book, writing code for a side project, etc.). If you're having trouble finding a job you like just spend as much time as possible learning and you'll do just fine.

This fine article is from 2003 (oldie but goodie). So posting rules is just a way to insult the majority of the law-abiding citizens and it doesn't deter the morons who think their own poo smells delicious and nothing they post could possibly be against the rules. Here's a link to posted forum guidelines dated 2006: http://www.ericsink.com/entries/BOS_Guidelines.html No registration necessary in '03: But requiring registration does NOT improve the quality of the conversation or the average quality of the participants. Sifting through archive.org, even in late '07, users didn't have to register but were being gently nudged into creating accounts as anonymous posts would most likely be deleted. In 2009, you'll now find that you can no longer post/reply unless you register: This community works best when people use their real names. Please register for a free account. What changed? I'd really love to hear an updated take on this topic from Joel himself. Any differences in creating or nurturing an online community now compared to 6 years ago? Any new challenges?

It worked for me! Not having to answer to investors saved a ton of hassle (and having all the equity and control at the end is really spiffy) but (to echo some of the other comments here) there are a few pitfalls: - Don't be a tightwad. In my first year, I would avoid spending wherever possible and often made do with free tools rather than spend cash to buy a perfectly good commercial solution. I quickly learned that's almost always stupid: If you can make a problem disappear for good by buying the solution, reach into your wallet and pay the cash. - You should be marketing before you've even started development. Marketing isn't just advertising -- it's the social component of design. Where you're 'making something people want', marketing identifies both the 'people' and the 'something' (that is, the market for your product). If you don't have those, you'll end up with a spiffy 'make' that nobody wants. Erik Sink provides a great summary of the topic under his "Marketing for Geeks" articles (at http://www.ericsink.com/Marketing_for_Geeks.html ). I'd call it a 'must read' for any software entrepreneur.

Here is Eric Sink's recollection: https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html

Another LLVM-to-.NET project: https://ericsink.com/tocs/rust.html

Cool project. I remember someone else taking a crack at this a few years ago. https://ericsink.com/entries/dotnet_rust.html https://ericsink.com/entries/sg_rust_dotnet_preview.html https://ericsink.com/entries/lousygrep.html

There is also this online book by Eric Sink: https://ericsink.com/vcbe/index.html At one stage he was giving out free paper copies that I have on my shelf somewhere...

Well, this seems interesting. https://ericsink.com/entries/sourcegear_bridge.html

> SHA-1 will still work fine for the purpose of git. So why are they changing it? That's pretty strong evidence it's not fine. I found this Stackoverflow question, "Why does Git use a cryptographic hash function?" [1], which points to [2]. Note: pretty much every DVCS uses a cryptographic hash function. That doesn't seem like an accident. Reading through some of these old posts and threads it seems like performance was the main factor combined with the expectation that SHA1 collisions just wouldn't be an issue. The latter I find to be surprisingly naive. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28792784/why-does-git-use-a-crypto… [2]: https://ericsink.com/vcbe/html/cryptographic_hashes.html

In my experience, productivity apps have more in common with lifestyle brands than, say, email. In that way, there's no winning any more than one brand can effectively own a space. If I were CEO of one of these products, I'd quickly diversify into other areas in order to differentiate, add value to subscriptions, and better cater to a particular audience. How I'd do that would depend on the lifestyle brand I'm trying to establish. I've heard this called the law of division in marketing.[1] 1: https://ericsink.com/laws/Law_10.html

This reminds me of the 'Law of Line Extension'[0]. What I think they can successfully do, is rebrand as a new product (Accord is a name that might suit it, given the nature of office communications), disassociate any gamer connections, and link it to Discord by adding an account switcher. [0]: https://ericsink.com/laws/Law_12.html

Somebody is doing it as a side project: https://ericsink.com/entries/llama_rust_013.html

I don't agree with the conclusion of the article. This article borrows a lot from Joel Spolsky's "Hitting the High Notes" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ , and for a rebuttal I would look at https://ericsink.com/articles/Choir.html IMHO building teams that work together well is far more indicative of success than individual high performers, and as a result the economic impacts will not happen to individual "10X" performers but rather teams, organizations, and companies that can harness the network effects (i.e. what we see right now, where companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. are more dominant than individual people).

16 years ago, a man named Eric Sink decided to document the process of creating, marketing and selling a small piece of software he had always wanted to build, "Winnable Solitaire" which is, as you describe, always solvable. His series of articles coined the term "Micro-ISV" which was a once-common term for a small software company with approximately one employee. A category that is now covered under "Indie" developers. Here's the article that started it: https://ericsink.com/entries/Announcing_Winnable_Solit.html (He didn't end up selling many copies, but we all learned a lot on the journey, it was very interesting at the time.)

Long time ago* Eric Sink wrote this article named 'Small ISVs: You need developers, not programmers'. http://ericsink.com/No_Programmers.html I think Eric's article was able to articulate differences between a programmer and a developer. Reading this interview, I don't think Etsy's CTO is able to clarify what makes an engineer different from a developer.

Thanks. I am having trouble understanding how crypto would help (I did read [0]). The hash and the files are stored in the same repository. If an attacker edited a file, couldn't they update the hashes of that commit and everything related to it? [0] http://ericsink.com/vcbe/html/cryptographic_hashes.html

I was just looking into this today and I found GADDAG: (http://ericsink.com/downloads/faster-scrabble-gordon.pdf), which claims to be faster than DAWG.

Spyglass did not use any of the code from NCSA Mosaic¹. ① http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html

I would read this[1] article on F# if you want the realities of the situation [1] http://ericsink.com/entries/fsharp_chasm.html