My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Everybody codes— a year later

tech
by Antonio on

The super smart robots over at Thoughtbot recently asked me to do a video on the main idea from my Pycon 2010 keynote that everyone in a small startup should learn to code. Given that this is the the one year anniversary of the talk, and that loads of people have email/talked/tweeted me about it, I figured I'd recap how the idea has worn over the last 365 days.

(PyCon for those that don't know is the annual developer conference for the Python programming language)

Originally the talk started as a thought experiment around removing unnecessary inefficiency from startups trying to act too much like "real" businesses by functionalizing too early. To that end, I took a pretty liberal definition of what "coding" was. The gist though— to get everyone involved in the mechanics of how the product/service is built— has graduated to almost conventional wisdom at least among the most capital efficient consumer Internet/SaaS businesses that I've seen over the last year. It's funny to me one year after mentioning Y Combinator as an interesting "experiment" that its become a legitimate source of some really high quality startups with relatively low inefficiencies in the maker loop between users and product. You could see this even back a year ago— but 2010 really proved to be YC's coming out year.

It's a good read (or watch) and I'm still quite grateful to the Pycon organizers for giving me the opportunity to get my thoughts together on this.


Bonus track for those just getting started with the technology selection process— my favorite bit from the talk: "A side note to all of the people pushing Erlang, Clojure, Scala, F#, Haskell the Rascal or any of what I like to call the Ewok languages (Ewoks are cute and cuddly and all have tremendously adorable names— so much so that you want to hug them. But spend a few days in Ewok village and you will quickly discover that they are as disposable as hamsters)— Get Real People. The science fair attitude around all of these is great right up until you have to a) hire people b) use external libraries or b) be able to read and understand the code that was written by folks coming up to speed on whatever the new paradigm your fringe language was trying to introduce when they first learned in 12 months ago.