Ian Landsman

Founder & Dev. HelpSpot / Larajobs

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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Over the past few months I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by twitter. It seemed my timeline was a never-ending stream of things I felt compelled to read.

Some of it truly was important (Well as important as a tweet can be). Much of it though was just chatter. Blocking me from reading more important things and honestly just plain demoralizing to read constantly.

So I decided to act. To take back my personal twitter steam.

I was following 299 accounts and my goal was to bring it down between 50–75. It ended up being easier than I thought to be honest, with minimal bloodshed. In the end I got it down to 90, a reduction of 67%.

The results were immediate and amazing. After being offline for hours I’m able to go into Tweetbot and have a handful of posts to read rather than hundreds. I can spend more time on replies and less feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume.

Tools

The only tool I used is called SocialBro. It’s free for up to 2 accounts. Really any of these social management tools will probably work. What won’t work very well is your normal twitter client or the website.

You’ll need access to some more data than they provide. In addition, you need a tool that makes it easy to quickly delete a lot of your following. SocialBro has both, though they’re a little wonky to get at. Here’s a few screenshots to show you where the important stuff is and how to set it up.

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

[This image was lost to time in my blog transition] The criteria drop down also has several other important options such as the ability to show you who you are following who’s not following you (dead meat!)

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

Getting in the right mindset

Now, you’re going to feel oddly sad about starting this process. You know these people, they’re your virtual friends.

Well, some of them are going to have to go :(

The good news though is that those who remain will get your complete focus. Also, you’ll be surprised how many accounts you follow aren’t people at all or are people that you have no idea who they are.

So let’s talk about the steps involved in purging your twitter account.

Step 1: Set a ridiculous goal

I literally thought it would be impossible to cut my following count anywhere near 100. Setting a goal beyond what you think is possible will help you click that unfollow button on those accounts that are borderline.

Step 2: Work through the list

Now, just start working your list. Here’s a few things you’ll want to sort by, look at and consider.

Celebrities

Pretty much all famous people and most internet famous people can go. You can catch up with them on TMZ or Hacker News (you don’t read that right? right?).

Link feeds

Top code tricks, inspiring advertisments, historical pictures, etc etc. All of these have to go. Replace them with RSS feeds if you can. Go read the actual sites if you have time.

These are some of the best ones to remove. They tweet often (always via automation) and usually contain links or other distracting things. Remove the accounts, remove the distractions, gain back 30 minutes a day.

Companies who added you on their own

If you use Twitter to authenticate with other systems or for those systems to tweet on your behalf they’ll often just add themselves to your following. Obviously those go.

People who don’t follow you

If they’re not following you they’re not going to be offended you ditched them! I realize this is a little bit harder for folks who don’t have a large-ish following, but if they’re not following you and you don’t regularly get value from their tweets let them go.

People who don’t tweet

We’re shooting for a goal here. There’s no point in following people who don’t tweet. They’re just clogging up your list.

Remove anything you can replace with RSS

A lot of companies and systems are just tweeting what they’re posting to a blog somewhere. Remove them from twitter and add them to your feed reader (I like Feedbin.me) and read it as you have time.

People you haven’t interacted with in forever

You know, the person you met at that conference 4 years ago. Those old coworkers you never talk to, etc. They have to go.

Move companies (only companies!) to a Twitter list

There’s some companies I need to follow. Perhaps they provide a critical system for one of our products for example. I want to stay up to date on what’s going on, but I don’t need it realtime in my timeline. For them, unfollow and add them to a Twitter list.

A lot of people recommend using lists to organize your twitter reading in general. To me, turning twitter into a 20 list Hydra sounds even worse than a single busy timeline. So 1 list for companies/services, that’s it.

Gut checks

People you kinda know, you sometimes interact with. Perhaps they’re part of a community you’re a member of. These are close, but most of them have to go.

Remember, they can still read you, they can still @ you, if you leave enough people from the community in your feed you’ll likely still catch important things they say/do via RT’s etc. You’re trying to up the value of your twitter world by subtracting noise.

Some of the noise is from nice people who you like and don’t want to offend. That’s why it’s better to rip the bandaid off! Get everyone removed all at once. Hey, you can always add them back if you need to.

The pause

Ok. You’ve worked through it all. Now let it rest for 20 minutes. Then go back in for another pass. You’ll see accounts you missed the first time. It also gives you time to think through any borderline ones you left in.

Step 3: Bask in the glory

Twitter is the fun useful tool you remember it being before you were following 800 accounts. You’ll be shocked at how much more time you have as well as the amount of focus you’re able to give what remains.

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