Ninjas and Robots

Nathan is me! :) I put out a lot about who I am here: http://ninjasandrobots.com/ Basically just a guy trying to make businesses. Some work out, some don't. Lately I've been working on Draft (http://draftin.com) which has been going pretty well. I'd also if you have a chance, I'd love to receive any feedback you have about Highrise ([email protected])

Makes me think about the post I read from Nathan Kontny http://ninjasandrobots.com/what-people-really-want Its really hard to do this if you are not completely immersed in the problem yourself. The legacy players who have this strong position have the years of understanding the problem and that is why they command the market and at times dont even have to innovate to protect their position. If you yourself are not your customer, it is very hard to execute, prioritize etc. For enterprise businesses this is extremely critical. Also when I say Problem I just dont mean the actual product. It also includes decision makers, sales cycles, budget cycles etc etc. The whole decision matrix around a enterprise product needs to be understood. Actually I dont think Rakasheets has failed. You just have an expensive Prototype. If you want to continue, spend the next month in customer offices selling this. Forget adwords or any other such mechanism. Your best customer acquisition channel will be Word of Mouth. Small Business owners know many other SMBs and they share such stuff. If you can crack a few they will share that positive experience with their friends and colleagues. Good luck!

Write drunk, edit sober. http://ninjasandrobots.com/write-drunk-edit-sober

Kejia Zhu (http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html) helped me to get through the delusional obsession for quick success. I gave it to read to all my friends and it's definitely a must for all HN folks. The good ol' Raymond's How to Become a Hacker (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) will teach you the Hacker attitude, which you can apply to anything. It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer or not, either way you'll benefit from it. "1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. 3. Boredom and drudgery are evil. 4. Freedom is good. 5. Attitude is no substitute for competence." A Handyman’s Toolbox (http://ninjasandrobots.com/a-handymans-toolbox) taught me not to always chase the hot new tech and be confident in my skills. It may be common sense, but it's also well written and straight to the point. Lastly, the following posts are all about traveling and/or alternative lifestyles. They show different POVs, but are all equally inspirational. - http://alexwarren.co.uk/2013/06/27/how-i-live-and-how-i-work/ - http://jake-jorgovan.com/blog/remote - https://medium.com/better-humans/6620882dde89 - http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-to-travel-around-the-world-for-a-year/

> this article is about technology Not, it is not. Here are some articles about technology: http://www.brython.info/ http://dehora.net/journal/2013/06/01/on-go/ http://ninjasandrobots.com/three-mistakes-i-see-web-designers-make-ove… http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/51904590190/processing-and-racket The article this discussion is about is entirely about politics and economics, as is the resultant discussion. You will note that there is no discussion of "oh, if only there were technology to fix that problem". There is, and it was not employed in this case. Why it wasn't, and the consequences, are what the article is about. > But I have to agree, that sadly there is a correlation between the low level of discussion and how political a topic is. Anyone can comment on political articles, whereas it actually takes some interest and experience to discuss the relative merits of Ruby and Python, or Akka and Erlang.

Here's a list of all my current subscriptions, hope this helps you get started: * brack3t: http://brack3t.com/feeds/all.atom.xml * CasJam: http://casjam.com/feed * Coding Horror: http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror * dan shipper: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danshipper * Dave Winer: http://scripting.com/rss.xml * Doug Hellmann: http://feeds.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW * Eric Florenzano's Blog: http://eflorenzano.com/atom.xml * fuzzy notepad: http://me.veekun.com/atom.xml * Hack Things: http://www.hackthings.com/feed/ * Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss * Liam Kaufman: http://feeds.feedburner.com/liamkaufman/uHFr * MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - All Stories: http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All * Nate's Tumble Log: http://natekontny.com/rss * Nathan Kontny: http://ninjasandrobots.com/feed * Nettuts+: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nettuts-summary * observation deck: http://observationdeck.net/feed/ * PaulStamatiou.com - Tech News, Reviews and Guides: http://paulstamatiou.com/posts.xml * Python Zone - Everything for the Python & Django developer: http://feeds.dzone.com/zones/python * Signal vs. Noise: http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals/beMH * Steve Corona: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevecorona?format=xml * The Changelog » Python: http://thechangelog.com/tagged/python/feed/ * The Gates Notes: http://www.thegatesnotes.com/RSS * the_codist(): …