nathan_marz_storm nathan_marz_storm-2013 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 nathan marz storm-2013-04-12-Break into Silicon Valley with a blog
Introduction: I know a lot of non-technical people who would love to work in the venture-funded startup world, from consultants to finance people to other business types for which I'm not really sure exactly what it is they do. They hit obstacles trying to get into the startup world, finding that their skills are either irrelevant or hard to explain. My advice to all these people is the same: Write a blog. A blog can improve your life in enormous ways. Or to put it in business-speak: a blog has one of the highest ROI's of anything you can do. Put yourself in the shoes of startups looking for talent. First off – startups are desperate for talent. The problem is that it's very difficult to identify great people – startups search through loads and loads of candidates. Resumes and interviews only tell you so much about a person. It's really hard to stand out in a resume – you're not the only one putting over-inflated impressive-looking numbers and bullet points on your resume. And interviews
2 nathan marz storm-2013-04-02-Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1
Introduction: This is the first in a series of posts on the principles of software engineering. There's far more to software engineering than just "making computers do stuff" – while that phrase is accurate, it does not come close to describing what's involved in making robust, reliable software. I will use my experience building large scale systems to inform a first principles approach to defining what it is we do – or should be doing – as software engineers. I'm not interested in tired debates like dynamic vs. static languages – instead, I intend to explore the really core aspects of software engineering. The first order of business is to define what software engineering even is in the first place. Software engineering is the construction of software that produces some desired output for some range of inputs. The inputs to software are more than just method parameters: they include the hardware on which it's running, the rate at which it receives data, and anything else that influences the oper
3 nathan marz storm-2013-04-01-My new startup
Introduction: There's been a lot of speculation about what my new startup is doing, so I've decided to set the record straight and reveal all. We are working on one of the biggest problems on Earth, a problem that affects nearly every person on this planet. Our products will significantly improve the quality of life for billions of people. We are going to revolutionize the bedsheet industry. Think about it. There's been almost no innovation in bedsheets in thousands of years. There's nothing worse than waking up to discover one of the corners of your Egyptian cotton fitted sheets has slipped off the mattress. How is this not a solved problem yet? Why are we still using sheets with that annoying elastic in it to secure them to our mattresses? They slip all the time – and if you have a deep mattress, good luck finding sheets that even fit. You're just screwed. Consider the impact of solving this problem, of a bedsheet product that never slips, that always stays secure on the mattre
4 nathan marz storm-2013-03-16-Leaving Twitter
Introduction: Yesterday was my last day at Twitter. I left to start my own company. What I'll be working on is very exciting (though I'm keeping it secret for now). Leaving Twitter was a tough decision. I worked with a whole bunch of great people on fascinating problems with some of the most interesting data in the world. Ultimately though, I felt that if I didn't make this move, I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I put in my papers about a month ago and then spent a month transitioning my team for my departure. This ends an eventful three years that started with me joining BackType in January of 2010. So much has happened in these past three years. I open-sourced Cascalog , ElephantDB , and Storm , started writing a book , gave a lot of talks , and in July of 2011 experienced the thrill of being acquired . My projects spread beyond BackType and Twitter to be relied on by dozens and dozens of companies . Through all this, I learned an enormous amount about entrepreneurship, p