Ian Landsman

Founder & Dev. HelpSpot / Larajobs

About 10 years ago while I was building out HelpSpot I started experiencing intermittent dizzy spells. Dizzy isn’t even the correct word, but it’s the best word I have for it. It’s somewhere between a ‘pang’ going through my eyes and feeling off balance. Not room spinning vertigo, but definitely uncomfortable.

I was working 12-16 hours a day at the time coding HelpSpot and just pushed through it. After that, there was always some reason to not deal with it. Babies, new releases, etc.

Over the past year I started to experience far more headaches than I ever had in the past, general anxiety and other physical symptoms. Driving became extremely difficult as feeling pangs of dizziness at high speed makes driving… uncomfortable :)

I have been seen by numerous doctors, ENTs, and optometrists over the years with nobody ever finding anything unusual. As I started to feel worse over the past year I became determined to figure out what was going on.

After seeing a bunch more doctors, I decided to try and find a more specialized optometrist who might be able to find something off with my eyes that all the others had missed.

It felt like a bit of a long shot, but I know I work my eyes really hard with all this close up computer work and as the more serious potential issues had been ruled out it seemed worthwhile. I ended up finding the Bernstein Center for Visual Performance in White Plains, NY about an hour from where I live.

The center specializes in weird eye stuff (my own words), unlike your local optometrist who is really only checking for your basic vision clarity (they do that also at Bernstein). In fact, even when I asked local optometrists if anything with my vision could cause these things I was always told my eyes were fine.

So, I went to the Bernstein Center somewhat desperate as I was basically out of ideas after them. After a thorough evaluation (when was the last time you spent an hour and a half with an optometrist?) it was determined I have Convergence Insufficiency along with a misalignment of my eyes.

Convergence Insufficiency is the inability of your eyes to converge together consistently. If one or both eyes move too far in/out they’re unable to focus properly on the correct place in space. This causes increased strain on your eyes, muscles, brain, etc.

Convergence Insufficiency is normally found in children as it often presents as learning disabilities. Sometimes even being misdiagnosed as ADHD or similar. But the child is not able to focus not because they have a chemical imbalance but because they literally aren’t seeing correctly.

My eyes are also about ¼ inch off from each other vertically. Nobody had ever noticed this. Not other optometrists, not my wife, not even me!

The eye level difference and the Convergence Insufficiency could cause many of the symptoms I was experiencing. That, along with an improper vision correction prescription (too strong) and bad glasses (the online store you all probably buy your glasses from) made things worse.

Having a convergence issue doesn’t mean you necessarily can’t see clearly. Optometrists who don’t detect the Convergence Insufficiency can often keep you seeing “clearly” by increasing your prescription strength, but that only further strains your eyes, brain, etc making other problems worse.

So, how to fix this? First, in the office during that first visit the doctor put me in contacts. I used to always wear contacts before starting the business at which point I went to glasses full time (the same time I started experiencing these visual issues suspiciously). Instantly, in the office that second I felt better. Not 100% better, but a noticeable difference immediately.

To actually fix the issue would require 24-44 in office visits to go through vision therapy as well as homework each night at home. I spent a lot of time looking at a pencil :)

[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]

Yesterday I finished my 24th session and am done for now. Each one requiring a 1 hour drive back and forth to White Plains along with the 40 minute session. It’s one of those times where having a bit of flexibility in your job and an amazing team to cover your absence pays off in far more than dollars.

Those early drives down were borderline terrifying as I mentioned above, driving was a bit scary. Now, I’m able to make the drive without even thinking about it. It’s one of the more pronounced differences for me. It’s also nice to be able to do my work without constant pangs of dizziness while on the screen.

I’m still not 100% done. I do get an occasional pang, but my eyes will continue to strengthen over time. We’ll be giving it 3 months to see how things go, it’s possible I could need another round of therapy but hopefully things continue to improve just through eye use with the proper prescriptions going forward.

It’s an amazing feeling when you find out something actually is wrong with you after you’ve always been told you’re fine. That’s one of the main reason I wanted to write this post.

If you or someone you know has dizziness, headaches, trouble reading or remembering what you’ve read you may have a vision issue. Your local optometrist probably won’t find this, especially if you’re an adult. Try and find a specialist, an optometrist that offers vision therapy as a service is likely a good sign. The one at the mall isn’t going to cut it in most cases.

I also want to again point out the impact Convergence Insufficiency has on kids. By impacting their ability to read, to pay attention, even their balance systems, it can often be misdiagnosed.

In fact, the vast majority of the people I was going through vision therapy with were kids between 7-12. It was great being around them and I loved the occasional “what is that adult doing in here?” question.

I suspect this condition is under diagnosed in adults, especially knowledge workers who spend 8+ hours a day looking at a fixed distance.

If you’re seeing any of these symptoms yourself definitely find a proper optometrist and get checked out. Those of you in the NYC metro area I can’t recommend the Bernstein Center for Visual Performance enough. It’s been truly a life changing experience working with them.

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The Apple Watch is Apple’s purest (first?) money grab to date. If you step back and really think it through, there is no other viable conclusion. At least not for THIS version of the watch. Maybe in the future there will be a version that does amazing things, but this version is a money grab and little more.

Let’s first look at the devices usefulness. The device itself has no logic ability. It sounds like eventually you’ll be able to do programming logic on the watch, but at least in phase 1 no logic. So it’s just an external monitor for your iPhone.

How many people need to get notifications, but can’t pull out their phone when they to? Is being on your phone a social no no these days? I think not. Right now, just look up from your phone and you’ll see everyone else on their phone.

So now we’re down to some group of people who too are busy in meetings and have their phone with them (because you must) but don’t want to pull it out. That’s obviously not a core market for Apple.

Is the Apple Watch revolutionary? No way, not even close. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all clearly revolutionary products. Not that the categories were invented by Apple, but they were perfected by them.

The Apple Watch is not a huge evolutionary jump. It’s just like every Android watch out there that shows notifications and not much more.

It is prettier of course, though to my eye at least not the huge jump there either that iPhone/iPod/iPad were.

It has a few health functions. OK, but the ones it has are not that great and second most people don’t care about any of that. Maybe they’re trying to change that, but at Apple’s scale health nuts are not a core market. Also, what super health nut wants to carry and iPhone AND an iWatch while they’re running, lifting, playing soccer, etc. The watch doesn’t even have it’s own GPS!!

So what is the purpose of the Apple Watch?

First, I do think there’s a part of this which is to finance the future. Yes, this watch sucks but over the coming years electronics will get smaller, etc etc. So the watch 5 years from now will have a lot more stand alone capabilities and be potentially more impressive (though lack of screen size will always be very limiting without some new UI breakthrough).

Selling it now lets it finance itself. Though, this seems a very un-Apple like thing to do, it potentially makes some sense.

The main purpose of the watch though is pretty clear. It’s simply a money grab. Apple has a huge install base, an extremely loyal one. Apple focuses on the top of the market, so a good chunk of the install base has significant disposable income.

Apple already sold them a super computer for their desk, their pocket and the couch. There’s not a lot of room left there. So, the move to fashion. They’re simply going to use their huge popularity to make this watch fashionable and sell it based on that. A mostly useless chunk of metal that is a status symbol and little more.

There’s even a few oddities on the fashion front given some recent rumors that most of the bands won’t be available as add-on’s. That you’ll get once nice band with the watch and can only add-on a plastic one for when you work out (with your $20,000 rose gold watch?). To me, the band was the most interesting aspect of the entire watch.

The display will be crap in a year or maybe two, but the bands. Great bands that are easily switchable. That’s something I could perhaps be tempted to invest in while swapping out the watch body each year. It’s all so very confusing.

All this is not to say that I don’t think it will work for them. They do have a huge market, they do have many middle class to very rich folks looking to throw money at anything Apple. If even a few percent of their customers buy one it will add billions in revenue.

It’s just odd that Apple is releasing a product which is so much about them and so little about us. Nearly all Apple products are fashion symbols these days, but all are useful tools above all else. The form followed the function. With the Watch it feels like there is only the form and Apple desperately seeking a function for it.

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A bit on the very best programmers, but first read Paul Graham, then read Eric Sink.

OK. Now, my 2 cents.

In short, I mostly agree with Eric Sink and I suppose by association of sorts Paul Graham (though less so on the immigration aspect), but I’d like to take Sink’s argument to it’s next logical step.

Yes, programming is more like sports than accounting in a lot of ways. Perhaps that’s because it’s more like art than science.

But, here’s where it gets sticky for me. There ARE programmers who are far better than the average professional programmer (this is not me!). No, their output isn’t 10X more, but I like to think of them as more like Neo.

[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]

They’re more productive because the rules don’t apply to them. They don’t think like other programmers or even other people. In fact, most of them will do their most remarkable work in just a few lines of actual code.

They can SEE the code that makes up The Matrix if you will and they can alter it. They can thread together hundreds of disparate facts, ideas, code lines into one place in their head at one time and make a connection that 100 other devs looking at it would never make. That is what makes them like Neo. Heck, maybe some of them can even fly!

Here’s the rub though. Paul G seems to think that we need more of these great programmers. That giving us access to the entire world (which BTW we already have, let them work remote duh) would create more Neo’s and that is where I disagree.

Sure, there might be another 1 or 2 or 5 maybe in there. Maybe. The reality is these individuals are so incredibly rare that they have no bearing on your business. Policy should not be made based on them. They are unicorns.

Graham's article references a startup that would hire 30 tomorrow. 30!

If you believe your business depends on finding a unicorn because what you’re building requires 30 or 40 unicorns to build a solid product that has value, then I think you’re in very big trouble.

I also don’t believe that in small, startup size companies the only factors involve hiring the Mike Jordan’s of the programming world. Because unlike sports, where Jordan is the star, the startup world is the opposite. The owners and/or the VC’s are the stars.

Heck, can you name even one top level full time coder at Facebook, Apple, Google? Nope.

Why do you think the few unicorn programmers you do know by name work in open source or are hackers?

Most businesses fail because the ideas are bad, not because the programmers are bad. A great idea with professional execution will beat out a bad idea executed on by the very best programmer in the world.

In startups, I also think the emphasis on ‘coder quality’ overshadows so many other important factors. What about a coder who’s willing to do support? Willing to write docs? Willing to help with building the marketing website?

So, are there superstar devs? Yes. Will they make you money? Maybe, but no guarantee. Are they worth moving heaven and earth to get? Waiting for 18 months to find the right one? Lobbying congress so you can get one to move to San Francisco rather than just let them work remote? No.

Hire great people, give them meaningful work, choose the right ideas to work on, make a product people need.

An Aside

I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point out another element in this. That almost always when you hear these arguments about the best programmers being 50X better than an average one the person doing the touting has a serious bias.

For example, the first time I ever heard this case made in earnest was Joel Spolsky. He talked about it all the time. He also ran a job board for programmers, sold millions of dollars in software to programmers, and drove a huge amount of business via his blog which was for programmers.

Paul Graham is in pretty much the same spot. He’s invested in lots of companies that need programming talent. For some crazy reason all these startups insist on being in 1 physical location together. Getting enough people to want to make $100K/year but also be forced to share an apartment and live on Raman noodles is tricky. It’s also expensive for the companies. Flooding the market with people willing to live in the most expensive place on earth would be good for him and his investments.

Aside 2

:) this article isn’t a statement about if we should/shouldn’t allow more immigration. I’m generally for immigration of all types, but that’s not the aspect in this case I find particularly interesting.

Discussion the article here: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/hiring-the-mythical-10x-programmer/2492

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A meme going around PHP lately is that developers should stop building open source libraries that duplicate existing establish packages. I couldn’t be more against this line of thinking. A few points on why.

Duplication Is How Technology Moves Forward

no matter what tech you are talking about it always evolves by people building on what came before. Sometimes directly, other times by taking a slightly new angle on the issue.

We tend to think of technological advancement as huge leaps but of course it is the slow grind that pushes us forward year after year.

You Can’t Know the Future

3 years ago if I told you an .NET/COBOL developer would build a hugely popular PHP framework that would be a big part of the revitalization of PHP you would call be bat shit crazy. But we can’t know the future. We don’t know who will come up with the breakthrough at the exact right place and time.

3 years ago people said we had plenty of PHP frameworks. Codeigniter might have been somewhat neglected but it was still being moved forward by users and was easy to use. If you wanted a “real” framework we had Zend and Symfony. Beyond that all the others like Cake, Yii, etc.

Lucky for us at the time nobody gave a hoot about PHP and so nobody bothered to tell Taylor that Laravel was stupid and pointless duplication.

Duplication as Learning

Often those objecting to duplication are very accomplished developers. Yes, for these people building Yet Another Cache Package may be a waste of time. However for a less seasoned developer, the process of building a package that duplicates high quality existing packages can be a great learning experience.

This is especially true in open source where the dev may often be working in isolation from other more experienced engineers.

This also leads to the obvious other issue of what should they build instead? People often bring up more complicated problems that people should be working on. In my experience in open source though telling others what they should build doesn’t work very well.

It’s also very often the case that the developer is not ready to take on that more complicated project yet. There’s nothing wrong with them taking in more established problems before moving on to bigger fish.

Let’s Not Discourage Future Greatness

I get really concerned that when we talk down about these projects that seem duplicative we’re pushing out developers who may bring PHP great innovations in the future.

Keeping the community a positive welcoming place is really hard, but so important.

Why Do You Give a Fuck?

Finally :) there’s 800,000 packages nobody uses on Github. Is one more really a problem? Is it actually causing confusion? Seems very unlikely to me.

The downside is so minimal and the upside so great. Let’s keep encouraging people to develop new code in PHP and the rest will work itself out just fine.

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I was pretty down on Apple Watch yesterday. I was really expecting something far more revolutionary.

It had no real surprises in terms of tech other than perhaps not having any connection capability of it’s own at all, making it a simple accessory for the iPhone rather than a freestanding device.

The more I’ve kicked it around though, I think the long term play for the Watch becomes apparent. It’s the successor (in a business sense) to the iPad.

It’s widely known that iPad sales have gone flat and are likely to decline. People keep iPads longer than phones because they’re not subsidized and are simply less critical/useful for most people than a phone.

Now, enter the era of the 5.5” phone. Many folks will say there’s no good reason to have a 5.5” phone in addition to a 7” or even 9” tablet. The phone does everything the tablet does with only slightly less screen room. Why buy a $700 phone (before subsidies) and a $500 tablet?

So what is Apple to do? iPads are already on the slide and now they’re introducing 4.7” and 5.5” iPhones that are only likely to further cannibalize iPad sales.

Apple did sell about $100 billion in iPhones last year so they’re not hurting, but to maintain that $500 billion dollar valuation you have to sell a lot of everything. iPhones on their own aren’t enough, the iPhone needs a +1.

In this sense the watch, at least on paper, is a great fit. It’s dependent on the phone (for now), but even better it can have an entirely different marketing angle.

The problem with the iPad is it really is just a big iPhone. Yes, it’s nicer to sit in bed with your iPad than your 4” iPhone, but it’s not THAT much better. And when you’re phone is 5.5” many people won’t think the iPad is different at all.

The watch is nothing like the phone/tablet so there’s already a nice marketing angle as an accessory. Better yet, it’s primarily a fashion item. It’s apparent they’ve put a lot of thought into the metals used and the band system. Really the fashion end of the Apple Watch is more fleshed out than the actual technology end.

The huge iPhones are also just less nimble to carry and take out. The iPhone now becomes your base station with the watch as the (first?) satellite accessory.

Instead of selling you an iPhone and a big iPhone (iPad), they can focus on the “it does everything” iPhone and the handy and fashionable watch as a nice add on sale.

This is actually a pretty interesting strategy. Beyond that, it’s very short sighted to think about it as being about this year. This year means very little. The Apple Watch is all about version 2 and version 3. 

That’s when it’s really going to shake loose. It will get thinner of course, but also add in those bits it needs to be truly useful such as GPS and probably wifi. The ability to let you untether from the phone at times like when you’re working out or hiking or just running your day around the house.

That’s the part I was most disappointed in. V1 needs the phone at all times. A huge 5.5” phone, but by V2 and V3 I’d expect that need to be gone. Sure, you’ll probably need your phone to make calls, but it will be able to work on it’s own for long stretches to map your run, make edits to your calendar and so on.

I suspect we’ll also see a lot of outside the box uses. The  clip system for the bands looks ingenious. They’ll be clips to hang it off your bike, lock it to your fridge, place it anywhere you might want a phone satellite.

Yesterday I wasn’t that excited about the Watch, but today I’ve started to get more interested in the possibilities. Especially for what it may transform into over the next few years, just like the iPhone transformed between version 1 and 2.


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Some of the books, blogs, podcasts and resources I’ve found useful while bootstrapping UserScape for the past 9 years.

Books

Forums

  • Bootstrapped - I tried to find another to list, but really this is it!

Link Sharing Things

Blogs

Newsletters

Courses

Conferences

Podcasts

Movies

I consider these critical for anyone starting a business. Yes, these are in order of importance.

Designers

It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money on design early on, but if you have the means these are the designers I’ve worked with over the years. All are top notch.

Professional Services

Apps & Services

These could go on forever. I’m limiting this to ones I personally find very useful.

  • HelpSpot - What good is a product without great customer support!
  • Forge - Spin up servers without a fuss.
  • Convert Kit - Really nice email list management.
  • Customer.io - Email automation without a bunch of other junk.
  • Dribbble - The best place on the internet for inspiration.
  • Feedbin - RSS isn’t dead yet
  • Scribbleton - The personal wiki.
  • Laracasts - Primarily aimed at PHP developers, but really anyone who works in code should be checking this out.
  • Laravel Jobs / Laravel Gurus - Business person and not a coder? Don’t want to learn to code? Hire one.

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http://www.facebook.com/dave.winer.12/posts/274417819432297

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

.....

This is also why I love it. It's art.

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I made a CMS out of Wufoo.

It’s pretty cool actually. I wanted to put together a quick little site for Laravel consultants that would be my go to place to send people when they ask me where they can find Laravel consultants (genius!). 

I wanted to spend as little time as possible on this. In reality we’re talking about building a list here. This would only take 1 table in a database, but I don’t want to run another database. We have databases everywhere.

I could have manually built the list, but then I’d have to type all the info in. Plus, I still need a way to get the info in the first place. This is where Wufoo comes in.

You probably already know that Wufoo is a form building tool. It’s pretty good at collecting basic info, but for my purposes what’s even better is it has a decent API. It can handle the things you’d expect like getting a list of your data, but it can also do more advanced stuff such as send you back a filtered list.

So what I did was build my Wufoo form and via Twitter got people submitting their entries. Next, I built out a simple site in Laravel that has exactly 2 application routes. One that queries the Wufoo api, caches the results and lists the entries and a second for me to manually clear the cache when we get new accepted submissions. 5 minutes of work!

They have a pretty good editing interface, so nothing to build there. To mange the listings I made a few hidden fields. One of which shows if I’ve accepted a company for listing and another where I can store any special tags/notes that need to be show. These are used for highlighting companies that have sponsored Laracon’s or use LaraJobs to hire developers.

[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]


I manually edit these fields as needed, hit the route to clear the cached version of the homepage and whamo, the listing is live.

Of course, I could have built all this, but it was fun to do it a different way and it still took less time than building out my own forms with validation, file uploading for the images and all that mess.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/health/low-carb-vs-low-fat-diet.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.
We’ve eaten Paleo/low carb for the past 4 years or so. I’ve probably been less physically active than ever in that time (this will be changing soon!) and still lost about 30 lbs (60lbs off my all time high) and have my other health numbers all in good shape. It’s remarkable.


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http://blog.besnappy.com/2014/04/5-tips-hiring-first-employee/

I did a post over on the Snappy blog about how to hire your first employee. Check it out!

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