nyc

We’ll be announcing our speakers very soon, but they’re a pretty solid bunch, as good as last month’s. If you are a programmer who’s thinking about making the move to being a founding member of a startup, or if you’re just interested in hanging out and talking about some really high-quality startup ideas, you need to be here.

Date: Thursday July 22, 2010
Time: 6:30- 8:30pm
Location: AOL, 770 Broadway (entrance on 9th St.), 6th Floor

RSVP here.

As one of the organizers of NYC.rb, I hear from a lot of people who are looking to start a tech company, and are looking for a Ruby programmer. Quite frankly, a lot of them don’t seem very good. But once in a while I do talk to somebody who I wish I could connect with a Ruby programmer—but in those cases, I usually come up blank.

This placement shit is hard, of course: You have to find somebody who’s qualified but not overqualified, and in this case you have to find somebody who’s willing to take a big chunk of compensation in equity, and is at the point in her/his career where this much work sounds like a good idea. Also, recruiters probably can’t help an early-stage company, because you might not have the cash to pay a recruiter.

So, starting on Tuesday June 15th, Jake Howerton and I are going to try to see if we can make these connections, with Tech Founders NYC.

The idea goes like this:

• We prescreen entrepreneurs, and pick 3-5 who are interesting enough that we think our techie friends will want to hear the idea. They have to be looking to fill the lead techie position, not just adding one more Rails dev to an existing team.
• They each pitch for five minutes, followed by a five-minute Q&A.
• During Q&A, only programmers can ask questions.
• At the end of the evening, the programmers vote on who gave the best presentation.

Will this work? Who’s to say, but in general we’re hoping that by being really picky about our entrepreneurs, and by not annoying our techie friends who come to the meetings, we might be able to spark some interesting conversations and maybe more.

If you are a programmer, we’d love for you to come by: Please sign up here. If you are an entrepreneur and would like to pitch to us in the near future, please sign up here.

(Oh, and though I’m clearly biased towards Ruby, this is not a Ruby-centric group. Programmers of all kinds are welcome. Even if you like static typing.)

Well, sometimes when you don’t blog for a while it’s cause you have nothing much to say. And other times it’s because your grand desire to say things is getting overwhelmed by your even grander desire to get shit done, and this has been one of those times. Anyway, for those who don’t know: I’ve left Diversion Media to be the co-founder at an early-stage startup. The company is Profitably, and basically Adam Neary, Chad Pugh, and I are going to be building a site that brings automated financial analytics to small businesses.

It’s still early days, and we’re taking on a genuinely hard problem, so unfortunately we’re not fully launched yet. In the meantime, I’m psyched to be helping small businesses. I’m enough of a capitalist to believe the hype about small businesses holding a special role in the American middle class, and maybe my immigrant background has more than a little to do with that. I’m also really excited to be working with accounting—as some people know, I’m actually a bit of an accounting nerd.

I met Adam through the NYC Founder Institute, which I didn’t attend, but a number of my friends did. And I’ll echo here what lots of people are saying: It’s a very interesting time in the NYC startup scene. Among the Rubyists I know, I’m hearing about a lot more job churn than I usually do, almost all of it in a hopeful direction. As to how many of these hit their mark, time will tell.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

So, yeah, in case there was any question: My dry cleaners are Korean.

Sorry about the glare in the second picture. The text on the bag says:

For the last 2,000 years, the body of water between Korea and Japan has been called the “East Sea”. Dokdo (two islands) located in the East Sea is a part of Korean territory. The Japanese government must acknowledge this fact.

The New York City Council just passed the “Bicycle Access Bill”, which requires office building managers to provide bicycle access to tenants who request it.

TA’s constant advocacy has mobilized efforts over the course of many years. This time around, all the other pieces fell into place: a persistent sponsor in David Yassky, a Council Speaker in Christine Quinn who represents a cyclist-heavy district, and perhaps most crucially, a mayor and DOT commissioner who came out strongly for the bill. Even with the stars seemingly aligned, it took one last push from more than a thousand cyclists to put the bill over the top.

I actually have minor qualms with legally compelling private companies to allow specific types of usage of their properties, but overall the direction of making NYC a more bike-friendly city is a pretty great one. There’s been a lot of this sort of news in the past year, and I keep thinking I should stat bike commuting. I’m not crazy about getting to work all sweaty, though.

Also, the Times reports on a new study which indicates that your chances of getting into a car crash are 23 times higher if you’re sending a text message.

In the moments before a crash or near crash, drivers typically spent nearly five seconds looking at their devices — enough time at typical highway speeds to cover more than the length of a football field.

This might be stupidly obvious to some people, but there are lots of Americans who spend hours per week behind the wheel, and end up convincing themselves they can safely do anything else at the same time. Because if you actually grappled with the reality that your car requires constant attention so you don’t kill anyone, well, that commute’s going to get even less fun.

And Caleb Crain discusses bike salmon, by which he means cyclists who ride in the opposite direction of traffic. He cites the recent book Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities, and the experience of the Netherlands, and posits that bike salmoning might be personally dangerous but good for everyone else:

The Dutch facts suggest that irregular cyclists, by making the streets less predictable, force motorists to pay more attention, and when motorists habitually pay more attention, the streets become safer—for motorists, as well as everybody else. Of course lawless bikers offer this (perhaps hypothetical) public benefit at enormous cost to themselves—at the potential cost of death, in fact, which I can’t recommend.

Makes sense to me. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s very useful to spend time tsk-tsking cyclists for doing things that might be risky to themselves—riding the wrong way, not wearing a helmet, whatever. Unless you also tsk-tsk people for smoking, doing drugs, getting so drunk they throw up, rock-climbing, skydiving, or having a stressful job. Your risks are your own.

As seen in a Brooklyn bar:

Photo by Alex, who doesn’t have his own blog.

Deflation’s not much of a problem—as long as you’re not the one who owns the asset in question. The Times is reporting that Manhattan rents are dropping, and I hope my corner of Brooklyn follows suit:

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people are negotiating rents as much as 20 percent lower than the original prices asked by landlords. These figures also leave out incentives, like a month of free rent or a landlord’s paying the broker fee, which can add up to real savings.