Book Review: Founders at Work

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 15:38:49 GMT

Founders at Work is a collection 32 interviews with the founders of, mostly, successful companies. If you work for a startup, want to, or want further proof that startups are not for you then I suggest reading this book. Wait, thats pretty much everyone you may say. Yes, I may say but its a good book and I'm not being paid by the publisher so no worries.

There is no need to read the book chronologically as the interviews for the most part do not relate to each other (Joel Spolsky does references ArsDigita heavily and the chapter on Spolsky's company Fogcreek Software comes after ArsDigita).

The must read interviews are those with Steve Wozniak of Apple, Phillip Greenspun of ArsDigita, Mark Levchin of PayPal and Paul Buchheit of Gmail. Unfortunately Jeremy Allaire, the founder of ColdFusion, is not featured but the founders of Adobe are. The company was really founded for desktop publishing but their model was always to be ahead of the market which makes me feel comfortable that it is the home of CF for the moment. Then there is the the last chapter of the book whch is a blank chapter waiting for the founders of InstantSpot!

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...

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Book Review: Founders at Work

The First Post