I’m on twitter now. Follow me at http://twitter.com/tklein
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
I’m sort of lazy, so I really like the idea of code that continually checks itself by using assertions. I even like running production services with assertions turned on. To be clear, I’m talking about assertions that check for actual bugs in your code – not assertions that socket() didn’t fail. Still, crashing production servers is a contentious issue, but sometimes (hopefully rarely) it is the best thing to do. For something like FolderShare, crashing a server as soon as there is any hint of an error is vastly safer than possibly deleting someone’s files due to a bug. Of course, this introduces the risk that you could have multiple servers fail in a short amount of time, but you need to design for that case anyway.
I don’t plan on having many non-technical posts here, but I’m breaking my rule today for a good reason. I’ve got a kid now! My first child, Margot Lee Kleinpeter, was born about 10 days ago. Between a long, drawn out labor, a few nights on a hospital couch, and fatherhood in general, I’ve fallen a bit behind on publishing. Much to my surprise, Margot prefers clean diapers and songs to essays on startups and programming. But, I’ve got a new post for today and I’ll hopefully be back on a more normal schedule soon. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of her sleeping:
I went to a meeting run by the Seattle Tech Startup folks a few weeks ago. Even though I’m not thinking about doing another startup right now, I was glad to see the enthusiasm of all the other people who are. Because I love seeing the new ideas that come out of startups, I really hate seeing them fail as a result of them making the same silly mistakes. So, the collaboration that the STS meetings and the associated mailing list promote really put a smile on my face.
I’ve played a big part in two successful startups, and my two had very different flavors. Audiogalaxy was a rocket-ship ride that didn’t let up for three years until it all came crashing down due to a lawsuit. We had traffic from the minute we turned on the Satellite, and all we had to do was scale it up as quickly as we possibly could. FolderShare, on the other hand, sometimes felt like a continuous series of failures until we had massive success all at once–a glowing review from Walt Mossberg while we’re negotiating our acquisition by Microsoft! The wow starts now, all right.
Now that I’ve got some free time, one of the goals for this blog is to reflect a little bit on my experiences and what I might change next time. Stay tuned.
