I was recently invited to get an opening talk at Startup Weekend Houston specifically on customer validation. I enjoy developing interview questions and actually talking with potential customers, so it seemed like a great opportunity. As I got closer to the actual presentation, I realized that by jumping into the interview stage, I would be […]

Next week I’m headed down to sunny Atlanta to speak at the second CoderFaire. It’s a two day event giving people the opportunity to connect across technology communities to learn new stuff and create fun things. That’s the cool thing about CoderFaire. Unlike the PHP events or the .Net events or all the other language/technology-specific […]

Note: The following is not legal advice.. it is an explanation of legal advice. If you need legal advice, hire an attorney. Earlier this week, a student I’m mentoring asked about my “IP Agreements at Hackathons” post. He plans to attend the event in question and asked me specifically about the IP agreement and what […]

This blog post heavily quotes my occasional collaborator Cal Evans. The quotes are used with permission. The link to the original is at the bottom. Despite the problems with sexism in the tech community in general, the PHP community has had it pretty easy. While there are potentially a number of reasons, the founder of […]

When we start projects, we often follow the naming conventions of our frameworks without even thinking about the “Why?” It almost seems silly to ask until you run into a – hopefully, legacy – codebase that has an incomplete or inconsistent scheme. Unfortunately, web2project is one of those codebases. For those just joining us, we […]

Over the past decade, I’ve started, been employed by, and advised a flock of startups. More recently, I’ve been an advisor at events like Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine, and Techstars Austin. One of the big pushes in recent years – I suspect primarily due to Lean Startup – is customer interviews. At some point […]

Almost six years ago now (whoa!), I was a regular agitator in the Washington, DC PHP Developer’s Community (DCPHP). The community was probably a hundred people with skills ranging from total newbs who couldn’t spell PHP to contributors to major open source projects. At that point, we consisted solely of a monthly presentation-style meeting and a mailing […]

We’re at that time of year where everyone wants to start something new. We have a flood of articles and blog posts about “what I’m going to do differently this year” and everyone wants to [choose: lose weight, read more, get out of debt, get that new job, etc, etc]. If they’re lazy, this urge […]

Disclaimer: What I share here is personal opinion and analysis and does not necessarily reflect my employer’s position or opinion. I was not going to share any of this publicly.. until yesterday. Update 01 Sept 2012: If you’re interested in following this story further, please check out my site WhatIs3DayStartup.wordpress.com where I cover this situation […]

One of the most common configurations out there is related to allowing web2project users to have access to only specific companies. While it’s not as simple as saying “users should only see things from their own company,” it’s not as complicated as you might think. Here’s how I’ve done it for various groups. If you […]