How did he create those demos, did he actually write a windows manager that wraps existing OS functions into his format? The amount of code that would take to give all of the functionality would be stupendous. Also how did he implement eye tracking with such robustness? Could he be kernel hacking and remapping the video memory buffer so that his shim code can take the output of working programs and then rearrange it for the purposes of his demo? Could a designer shed some light for this programmer on how exactly that video was generated. What type of tools would he have used so that I can google them on my own time?
not sure why the downvotes unless you assumed I was sarcastic? I assure you I honestly want to know. As a programmer I only really understand one way to create screen output. Any other mechanism to create demos as slick as that one I would be very interested to learn about. Given that everyone in this thread is completely ignoring how it was accomplished and only talking about the design skill, I feel I am missing a critical piece of information about the process of creating demos such as that. While such techniques may be common to your industry, to those of us outside they appear as magic.
Real computers are finite precision. There are very real issues with numerical stability where you are running along fine for many many cases, and then there is a catastrophic cancellation that wipes out all of your accuracy. There is a huge difference between writing a paper on bounds of matrix multiplication, and delivering performance in a finite precision world.
I am a little lost, I am able to add things to the bar by clicking, and I can change the node growth rules by selecting the menu of shapes on the side, but what is the use case? What am supposed to be able to do with this project? Even a one sentence modal would be greatly appreciated, or a help div, or something.
I wouldn't say it has a use case per se, it's more of a toy. I hear you, though - I've added an info link down the bottom right that leads to https://github.com/sgentle/scrawl, where there is some more information.
I can think of a bunch, mostly all revolving around replacing Visio and OmniGraffle. Exposing an API service shouldn't be too difficult considering the fluent style you modeled your own internal API. Make that and/or allowing people to upload their own stylesheets a premium feature. Having two panes like this[1] where I can declaratively chart things out, and have you take care of the styling and I'd be a paying customer. and/or having some aesthetically pleasing UI right out of the box would make this my go-to tool.
Use cases -
--this could be a fantastic tool for diagramming components, whether you want to Mindmap something to make concrete what only a concept in your mind.
--Modelling out infrastructure (maybe dynamically querying whatever status service you have to generate a dashboard ...again a premium feature)
--Modelling out entities
--Integrate it with Jupyter (formerly Python Notebook) as a premium feature.
--(This is admittedly a wanky feature that someone in marketing would come up with, but if you want user adoption what I'd do is leverage the existing 'standard env' and build around it) i.e. Have it hook into Github or Slack and on a build failure (likely in your AWS Docker instance!) ping the person who broke the build and have a bot that announces in the startup's Slack-room to shame him/her along with some wanky dependency graph (just diff the last known build and walk up the prototype chain).
I'm speaking maybe 20% in jest, 80% in 'you can really cobble together a product like that and tie Stripe into it'. Visio needs to die. I was working on something similar myself (a little more limited in scope) but got distracted.
Just a feature suggestion - localize the hot-keys for shapes into something one can reach with solely their left hand, so as to free up their right hand for mouse actions. Between use the keys 'asdfgwerv' as main menu items (e.g. triangles, squares, etc), then associate each of those components with one of those keys, which when pressed will open up a sub-menu (regular triangles, isosceles, etc) accessible by the same keys.
Its not idea farming, it karma farming, and theaktu is not a real person, just a deep neural net that will get some lucky undergrad an A this semester.
edit: see how it is improving the title and getting more upvotes?
IDEs really are much better at this than grep or ack. My experience has always need something that can perform symbol resolution, and something more powerful than grep or ack wins here. You may be ack-guru and and do that on the fly, but the rest of us mortals are not willing to put in the effort when some other dev has given us a command line tool, an editor plugin, or an IDE to do that for us. Its all about how much time you want to spend feeling cool and how much time you want to spend getting things done.
This is absolutely the way to go. Another great feature of getting a new hire on your time is that the goals of your team were already allocated with the old bucket of developer hours. Because the new hire was not planned for, they are relatively free to work on any of the nice to have but not critical parts of the codebase.
We always have new developers start by writing unit tests and documentation for the most used components of our codebase as determined by profiling. This way we are always improving our most important code, and at the same time teaching the largest percentage of our code to the new dev at the same time. With core components that are used everywhere, the new dev can literally ask anyone else on the team for help. This can help the new dev by allowing him/her to spread out what he/she thinks are dumb questions without feeling as embarrassed. Then by the time the next planning session has accounted for the larger bucket of dev capability, we have some great bugfixes, and the new dev is more confident and ready to specialize more.
You have to speak up, although it is a chorus of voices that is the will of the community, each voice is necessary. Do not be afraid of speaking your opinion for fear of loosing a button on the internet that you can press.
The mods have already made it perfectly clear[0] that paywalled articles are acceptable, though. This isn't a subject which is apparently up for debate - flagging paywalled articles is an abuse of flagging, abuse of flagging will lead to loss of flagging rights, and complaining about paywalled articles is off topic, and off topic discussion gets pruned and voted down.
If you don't like that an article is paywalled, provide a workaround link (which many such sites have, so they can still get SEO from the article) or just don't comment on that article.
You are missing the point about advocating for change. Of course I am aware that mods allow pay-walled articles, I believe I saw the discussion was on the front page a month or so back. What I am talking about is civil disobedience, Rosa Parks did not move to the back of the bus even though it was the law at the time. Just because something is the rules does not mean one should not act. As I directly addressed in my comment, if you have a personal belief that certain rules are incorrect, then you should act, and not wait for someone else to go first.
Eh, in my mind the value of professional managers is to provide a bullshit buffer between the stars. Managing is not as much about steering the vessel as choosing when and where to set your sail before the wind. Individual contributors are the profit centers of any organization. They create the actual product that the customers purchase. While the concept of everyone growing as a person is in vogue right now, that is not the purpose of a company. It is expensive to get the individual contributor to work around their ego, so we use professionals to provide the same result and timeshare them over many employees to lower the unit costs. A manager's primary reason for existence is to remove obstacles from the individual contributors in whatever shape or form that may be. If the manager needs to handle all communication between two prima donna developers, then that is removing an obstacle to generating value for the customer. A manager is like an personal assistant and a parent rolled into one. The manager keeps stars focus on efforts that directly benefit the customer rather than letting them wander off into intellectual rabbit holes of turing tarpits, while also making sure that there is paper in the printer, and pens on the desk. There is a lot more complexity that I am glossing over, but really great managers are the ones that ask the question, "what is preventing my guys from delivering value to the customer?" and then directly and systematically addressing the answers to that question. The really good ones have solved all the big problems and are then worried about the little things like having pens.
Additionally, there is really no need to use force of will to bind together a group of people behind a common vision with the current population and ease of communication offered by the internet. Either everyone is already capable of contributing value to the organization, or they are fired. There are 7 billion people alive now and that number is growing. If you cannot find hordes of people willing to work on challenges in your sector, what does that tell you about the demand for that product?
Usually because I continue googling until I find something that is helpful. Its a tautology, however if you could demonstrate/tell more about how your system is faster than googling I would be interested.
Correction: 80 hrs/wk available for the unpaid CTO. You are thinking like an employee would by speaking of a 40 hour work week.
To the OP: choose the startup if it is your life, your mission, and you can directly build value. If you do not believe in the value-proposition, then find something else. There are plenty of startups, plenty of growing companies all over the planet. Find one solving a problem you personally care about that also has a requisite amount of upside for your personal risk preference.
