tech

I guess I’ll let VentureBeat tell it:

New York startup Profitably recently closed a $300,000 round of funding with a group of New York investors. The company offers an online software application that analyzes data from Quickbooks, a small business accounting package sold by Intuit.

We’re psyched.

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.

Alex Ross:

Hannah Lash, a gifted young New York composer with an ear for bracing dissonances, recently suffered a misfortune: her laptop was swiped from her car, resulting in the loss of hundreds of scores, sketches, and personal files.

Dear non-techie friends: I do not nag you about much, but I will nag you about this ‘til the day I die. Backup your files. Hard drives are cheap, and if you have a Mac, Time Machine makes it easier than it has ever been in the history of computing. Please, please, please backup your files, unless you don’t care about losing your family photos, your screenplay, or your dissertation.

More than once I’ve had a friend ask me how they can get files off of a corrupt hard drive, but here’s a dirty little secret: Just because I work in computers doesn’t make me Neo. Once your hard drive dies—and every hard drive dies if you use it long enough—the odds of getting a file back off of it can be quite low, and it’s going to cost you real money to find that out regardless. It’s no fun to be in that situation, where my friend needs help, and I can’t help them, just like I can’t dodge bullets. And the worst thing about it is that it’s completely and totally preventable.

So, unless you are the rare über-luddite who doesn’t have anything he cares about on a hard drive, please, back it up.

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.)

GoRuCo 2010 was this past Saturday, and it seemed to go well. Obviously I’m a little biased on the subject, but if the Twitter traffic is any indication, people enjoyed themselves.

This year, I was just one more organizer, and I was the Master of Ceremonies too. With Josh Knowles doing all the hard work as lead organizer, I was free to keep one eye on the backchannel we had running in #nyc.rb, and I was reminded of what I do and don’t like about the backchannel:

In general, I think the backchannel’s a good thing. I know that some conference speakers dislike having to compete with all that online chatter (or with laptops and wireless in general), but when I get a speaking gig I always tell myself it’s my job to be way more engaging than whatever else people could be doing with their laptops. If somebody spends money on conference registration, hotel, and transportation, it’s my job to be as interesting and entertaining as I can manage. Otherwise I could just write it down on my blog and everybody else could stay home, right?

(And yes, I know that some people are just naturally worse than others at public speaking. For some freakish reason I have little to no fear about talking in front of crowds—might have something to do with that healthy ego of mine. What can I say? Life isn’t always fair. If you have something important to say at conferences and you’re really bad at public speaking, you might be well served by joining Toastmasters or an improv class or something.)

But I do have one big gripe with backchannels: People aren’t on their best behavior. At pretty much every tech conference I’ve been to, the backchannel blurs the line between healthy dissent and excessive meanness. I’m not going to name names or quote what I read this weekend, but too often I felt that the online comments weren’t so much about constructively criticizing an opinion as much as dismissively trying to prove intellectual superiority.

One of the strange things about the backchannel is that the person who is under discussion is the one person who’s least able to participate in the discussion. So it all feels a bit … I don’t know, gossipy? The closest analogy I can think of is if you come to a party, and before you get there the other 20 people in the party are all talking shit about you, and then when you get there people act as if nobody said anything.

It’s also worth noting that not every conference speaker is some empty shirt who’s trying to build a career as a tech guru. Lots of people who speak at conferences are genuinely passionate about their craft, and genuinely animated by a desire to share that passion and to talk about interesting ideas. Yes, there are snake oil salesmen in the world of tech. But if a conference is any good, then the vast majority of people at that conference—including the speakers—are there to share a common excitement about their craft. It would be nice if everyone’s backchannel comments reflected that commonality.

Now, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t criticize what’s being said: Dissent is important, and one of the great things about tech communities is our frankness. But I do think it’s substantively different to say something to someone’s face (during the Q&A, or over a drink) than to say it behind someone else’s back.

And I’m not such an idealist to believe that nobody would ever talk shit about anybody else. But doing it in the backchannel, which isn’t just a few trusted friends but is in fact a bunch of friends & strangers blended together, just doesn’t seem right. Some people seem to act is if those words aren’t going to get back to the speaker or her/his friends, but they often do.

For the record, I don’t this is a GoRuCo problem: I think this is a tech conference problem. If I had to rank, I’d say that GoRuCo is probably a little better in this respect than many of the other tech conferences I’ve been to. I dare say that we still bring together techies who are smart and nice, but that’s no reason for us to get complacent about it.

I’m not really sure what there is to do about it, but it seems worth bringing up. My first thought would be a request: When you’re talking on a conference backchannel, imagine you’re talking directly to the speaker, or to a friend of the speaker. Would you say it in exactly the same way? If not, maybe you should take the time and energy to speak with a bit more empathy and consideration.

Because, when all is said and done, people almost never look back on the things they said and think to themselves “I wish I had spent less time trying to understand where that person was coming from.”

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.

Or maybe in Guantanamo:

At ITP, Adam Harvey is working on methods to defeat facial recognition software:

If this is any indication, the cyberpunk future will be a lot more new wave than previously expected.

On Wednesday at the 2009 Intelligence Warfighting Summit in Tucson, Raytheon, the military contractor, announced an iPhone application that tracks friends and foes, shows their positions on live, real time maps and provides secure communications.

—The New York Times, The iPhone Goes to War

More troublesome tech conference talk, this time by RMS. David Schlesinger posts an email exchange with him about a recent talk he gave:

The more significant problem was your comments regarding “EMAC virgins”, which you defined as being specifically “_women_ who had never used EMACS”, and for whom being “relieved” of this “virginity” was a “holy duty”. My reaction, and the reaction of a large number of members of the audience with whom I’ve spoken was one of great dismay.

Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you view women as being in particular need of technical assistance (presumably by men, since there’s apparently no such thing as a _male_ “EMACS virgin”); additionally, women are quite capable of making their own decisions about who might relieve them of whatever sort of “virginity”. I (and many others) viewed these remarks as denigrating and demeaning to women, as well as completely out of place at what is, in essence, a technical conference.

Stallman responds, but in this off-kilter, evasive way that doesn’t really address or attempt to refute the issue David is raising:

Continue reading “RMS, and nerd sensitivities” »