My daily readings 08/26/2010

• Why I Became an Entrepreneur (the Long Story) « The Metamorphosis <span class="“> – Annotated

  tags: Startup

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• Hacker News | MessageParty (YC S10): making the social anti-social since 2010

  tags: anti-social

• Using xAuth, an alternate OAuth from Twitter <span class="“> – Annotated

  tags: OAuth XAuth

  • In the last week Twitter did something interesting in order to quell the increasing noise from mobile and desktop app developers, that was – introducing xAuth to the wider web. Back in early February the Twitter API team announced the new xAuth authentication mechanism. Twitter hope it will fill the void of terrible user experiences mixed with web contexts into desktop and mobile apps experienced when using current authentication preference, OAuth.

• Hacker News | 8 things I wish I knew before starting a business

  tags: Startup business

• Hacker News | What To Look For In A Technical Co-Founder

  tags: Startup Cofounder people

• Hacker News | Paul Graham and his “no asshole” rule (Interview)

  tags: Startup

• Hacker News | Paul Graham on trends for the future

  tags: Startup trend

• Hacker News | How to retire at 30 on $1 million

  tags: Startup

• Wannabe angels: Watch the video of every speech from AngelConf | VentureBeat

  tags: investor video

• Hacker News | Apple’s attention to detail

  tags: design

• Hacker News | Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything <span class="“> – Annotated

  tags: personal development

  • Steps 1-3 and 5-6 are “easy”, but how do you step 4?

    4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses

    It would be great if my company did code reviews on everything a la Google, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I code in my spare time, but what expert is going to want to check out my spare time projects, project euler solutions, or what have you, and give feedback? So, how do I go about getting expert feedback?

  • Join an open source project? Find someone at work that’s willing to do reviews for you if you do them for him? (slow-motion pair programming, kind of). Read code written by your company’s best programmers and compare what they did with how you would have done it?

• Readme Driven Development <span class="“> – Annotated

  tags: development

  • A perfect implementation of the wrong specification is worthless. By the same principle a beautifully crafted library with no documentation is also damn near worthless. If your software solves the wrong problem or nobody can figure out how to use it, there’s something very bad going on.
  • Most importantly, you’re giving yourself a chance to think through the project without the overhead of having to change code every time you change your mind about how something should be organized or what should be included in the Public API. Remember that feeling when you first started writing automated code tests and realized that you caught all kinds of errors that would have otherwise snuck into your codebase? That’s the exact same feeling you’ll have if you write the Readme for your project before you write the actual code.
  • It’s a lot simpler to have a discussion based on something written down. It’s easy to talk endlessly and in circles about a problem if nothing is ever put to text. The simple act of writing down a proposed solution means everyone has a concrete idea that can be argued about and iterated upon.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.