It was almost 15 years ago when I started iBuildMVPs. I built the basic website in a weekend and soon started building minimum viable products for aspiring startup founders. After doing this for a few years, I started a career as a software engineer. I worked for large publicly traded companies, three-person startups, and everything…
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Always Be Improving
You should always improving, but should you strengthen a strength or improve a weakness? Getting better is difficult. You need to make time to improve. I’m pretty good at that. What I’m not good at is picking an area to work on. On any given evening, I’ll think to myself, “Should I strengthen a strength…
The Nuances of Well Named Boolean Methods
/Good naming is important. It helps developers read code faster. Hard to read code is the biggest impediment to moving fast. Developers spend 10x more time reading code than writing code. Well named methods are the easiest way to increase developer velocity. Good code should read like a story. One important part of this is…
The Magic Number Antipattern
One antipattern I see often is the magic number. The magic number antipattern is a direct usage of a number in a function. Here is an example that comes from Refactoring by Martin Fowler. function potentialEnergy(mass, height) { return mass * 9.81 * height; } What the hell is 9.81? Yeah, I don’t know either.…
Learning About Browserify and Babel while Contributing To Open Source
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to build out the test suite for an open source project called Tributejs. I had to learn about karma, browserify, babel and babelify. It took an entire day to figure out how front end build tooling works. Here are some lessons I learned. You can see my pull request here.…
Why I’m Blogging Again
I write down about a dozen notes or ideas every day in a moleskin notebook. It’s about the size of a passport and I keep it in my back pocket. Today, I lost that notebook. Days, weeks, and months worth of notes and ideas – gone. If you write something on paper, it only lives…
What I Remember Learning from the Books on my Shelf part 1
While home for the holidays, I wandered upon the bookshelf I used from high school until my second to last year of college. It’s full of software and small business related books. Some I read, some I skimmed, some were completely useless. I’m going to share my thoughts on the books on the shelf in…
The Easiest Marketing Preparation for Your Minimum Viable Product
For the sake of this post, please make sure you read minimum viable test vs minimum viable product post. You must plan marketing before you launch your minimum viable product. If you don’t have a blog and other inbound channels while you are planning to launch your product, you will probably depend on a techcrunch…
What The Lean Startup Movement Is Missing – Golden Nugget Anecdotes
What often gets lost in lean startups and customer development is the talking to customers part. After reading “The Lean Startup”, one often remembers certain anecdotes about the startups. What they most often remember is the minimum viable products or minimum viable tests that sucessful entrepreneurs created. They often don’t remember the intensive customer development…
Complete Honesty – I’m not proofreading these first 20 posts
After my last post, I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to proofread these first twenty posts. It’s my firm belief that no one is going to ever read them. If they do, I will hire my girlfriend to proofread and let me know how often I misspell “the” as “teh”. As a…