September 2009
4 posts
A Chance to Be Good
In his essay on being good, Paul Graham first introduces two Y-Combinator principles of “Make Something People Want” and “don’t worry about the business model”, and considers at length the similarities (and differences) between why these principles, seemingly descriptive of a charity, also describe a successful startup.
The passage below is one that I find to be...
There's No Shame in Chopping Suey
Last week, I wrote about what I loved about Fwix:
Fwix doesn’t even bother with the pretense of asking its users for original content. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any places within the Fwix.com site where you can post stories.
There’s a good chance that Fwix actually will introduce tools to post original content, but why should they bother? Right now, you’re expected to post them on...
Why Your 'App Engine Sucks' Post Sucks
After reading another misinformed criticism of Google’s App Engine platform, I feel compelled to make a suggestion.
Try your performance tests again, but with a simple change.
Add a @conditionalCache decorator that will always serve a cached response unless the request is from a background task or cron job, in which case it forces a refresh.
You could use the memoize decorator I posted...
3 tags
How Fwix Sets an Example For the Future of...
Amidst all the exciting news related to the reboot of journalism - everything from the latest Medill projects to the Y-Combinator Request For Submissions on ‘The Future of Journalism’ to the GrowthSpur project being helmed by Mark Potts and helped by Jeff Jarvis, there’s one particular project that I think deserves some extra attention.
It’s Fwix. While the site has...