Author Archives: Kevin

What is the best way to structure a revenue share with programmers or developers for application development?

Here’s the question: “Developing social and mobile applications can be expensive and risky. Some programmers are willing to reduce or eliminate their fees in exchange for revenue share on the application. What is the best way to structure a deal? … Continue reading

Posted in leanstartup, programming, ruby on rails | Leave a comment

What are the possible career paths for an interface developer?

This depends a great deal on your personality and what you want to do. As a UX developer, you get deeply involved in how users will use the application — which lends itself well to a Product Management role. Product … Continue reading

Posted in leanstartup, management, programming | Leave a comment

What’s the difference between a Lead Software Engineer and a Technical Architect?

Having done both jobs, I’d say that the difference depends on the company. From a fundamental perspective, the role of Architect has to do with overall application design – or at minimum review of designs. Some responsibilities would include: * … Continue reading

Posted in agile, management, programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

CourseAdvisor – Capturing the Long Tail of Online Education

I’m famous! Well, not really. But there was a nice write-up in BostInnovation on CourseAdvisor and the start-up days when I worked there. I guess I started as somewhere near employee number 10. CourseAdvisor was ahead of its time in … Continue reading

Posted in leanstartup | Tagged | Leave a comment

Heroku | The Next Level

What if enterprise apps were built the way you’d build an agile Ruby app? What if they were a pleasure to work with, deploy, and manage? Original Post: Heroku | The Next Level. Yesterday’s acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com looks … Continue reading

Posted in agile, leanstartup, ruby on rails | Leave a comment

TextMate shortcuts you should be using.

Here’s a nifty post on getting more productive with Textmate, a popular tool of choice among Ruby developers. It looks like it’ll save me some time — and it may save you some time as well. This is my list … Continue reading

Posted in mac, ruby on rails | Leave a comment

A simple example of automating the creation of named_scopes in rails

Here’s a common scenario: You have an attribute that can be a set of specific values, like the status of a transaction that can be ‘processing’, ‘succeeded’ or ‘failed’.  You now want to make it easy to check these values … Continue reading

Posted in ruby on rails | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Yoav Shapira of HubSpot on how HubSpot Implements Agile Development using Java.

I had a chance to sit down with Yoav Shapira of HubSpot recently to ask him about how HubSpot uses Scrum and how they organize their Agile development process. It was valuable and interesting — and he was kind enough … Continue reading

Posted in agile, leanstartup, scrum, sprint | 1 Comment

What’s the Little Idea?

I was reading Max Levchin‘s insightful post On Ambition (along with Bijan Sabet‘s response Does a small amount of capital lead to small companies?) and I wanted to add to the conversation. The central thesis I believe distills to this: … Continue reading

Posted in agile, leanstartup | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Agile Development and Sprints: Feature-boxed or Time-boxed?

When organizing a sprint, there are two ways to ‘scope’ the work for each Sprint: Time-boxed or Feature-boxed. In a ‘feature-boxed’ approach, a set of features, defects and chores are defined to ‘scope’ the work to be done during the … Continue reading

Posted in agile, management, ruby on rails, scrum, sprint | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment