Useful advice is right ahead! This cheat sheet gives some very interesting thoughts and advices for your own or others business.
I particularly liked:
“21) Should I ever focus on SEO? No.
22) Should I do social media marketing? No.”
Source: http://jamesaltucher.quora.com/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-For-Starting-And-Running-A-Business
“A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day” is one of the statements this great blog article makes on the matter of interruption of professionals while they do their hard work.
It’s an important thing to understand how that idea to code conversion thing happens. For anyone without that experience: Think of it like being very very concentrated and juggling things. When you get abstracted it’s very likely that you drop something. In the worst case you never even get something to juggle…
Source 1: http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/
I plan to speak at a couple of conferences this year – first in the line will be the Open Source Data Center conference in Nuremberg.
“The Open Source Data Center Conference, with a changing focus from year to year, offers you the unique possibility to meet international OS-experts, to benefit from their comprehensive experience and to gain the latest know-how for the daily practice. The conference is especially adapted to experienced administrators and architects.”
The topic I will be talking about (in german though) is our fully virtualized data center testing environment at Rakuten Germany.
When you want to change things from “testing in production” to “testing in a test environment” it’s usually a very hard way to go. In this case we chose the way to virtualize whatever service was in the datacenter, with all the same configurations and even network settings. We called that “Ignition” and it allows us to test almost any aspect of our production environment without interfereing with it. My talk will cover the thoughts and technologies behind that.
I also want to stress the fact that there are a lot more interesting talks than mine. Go to the OSDC 2013 homepage and find out for yourself.
Source 1: http://www.netways.de/osdc
This October I had the pleasure to fly to Tokyo for the second time in 2012.
The development unit of Rakuten Japan was hosting the 7th Rakuten Technology Conference in Rakuten Tower 1 in Tokyo.
The schedule was packed with up to 6 tracks in parallel. From research to grass-roots-development a lot of interesting topics.
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Source 1: http://tech.rakuten.co.jp/rtc2012/
Source 2: Recorded Lectures
Oh dear. I just thought about the fact that I never really announced or talked about the fact that I changed my employee and moved to a (old) new place.
Yes that’s right, I am not with sones anymore. I am since January 1st the CTO of Rakuten Germany. When I signed the contract the company was called Tradoria – one of the first big projects I had the opportunity to work on was the so called brandchange.
A humongeous japanese based company called Rakuten bought Tradoria in the middle of 2011 and after half a year it was time to switch the brand.
As you can imagine these were busy weeks since January 1st. I had to digest a lot of existing technology and products. I met and got to know a lot of interesting people – first and foremost a great team of developers that went through almost all imagineable pains and parties to come up with a marketplace and shop system that is a perfect base for take-off.
A short word on the business-model of Rakuten – If you’re a merchant you gotta love it: Think of Rakuten as a full service provider for a merchant and customer. You as a Rakuten merchant get all the frontend and backend bliss to present and manage your products and orders. Rakuten takes care of all the nasty bits and pieces like hosting, development, telephone orders, invoicing, payment. The only thing that you as a Rakuten merchant need to do is to put in great products, gather orders and send out packages. Since Rakuten isn’t selling products on it’s own it won’t be competing with the merchants like other marketplace providers do these days.
On top of that Rakuten cares for the merchant and the customer. Just a week after that successful brandchange I attended (and spoke) at the Tradoria Live! 2012. That’s basically the merchant get-together. This year over 500 people attended this one-day conference. Think of it as a hands-on conference with features, plans, summaries of the last year and the upcoming one – every merchant is invited to come and talk to the people in person that work hard everyday to make the marketplace and shop system better.
Just 24 hours later standing on that stage I found myself here:
Yep. That’s Tokyo (東京). After a very long flight we had the chance to attend a all-embracing tokyo tour before the meetings and talks would start for our team. It was an awesome and exhausting week – just about 120 hours later I was back in Germany – I must have slept for two days :-)
Back in germany I had a lot of stuff to learn and work through. We had already moved to a wonderful house near Bamberg – it was pretty much big luck to find it. It’s actually ridiculously huge for a couple and two cats but we love it. Imagine the contrast: moving from an apartment next to a four-lane city street to the countryside just a 15 minute drive away from work with philosophical quietness all around.
Now after about half a year I am well into the process. I met a lot of high profile techies and things seem to take up speed in regards of teamplay in germany and with all the other countries. It’s a bliss to work for a group of companies that actually go through a lot of transitions while transforming from start-ups to an enterprise.
Ready for a family picture? Ready. Steady. Go!
That’s all Rakuten – that’s all on one mission: Shopping is entertainment! Empower the merchants!
Beside all that I even started to learn japanese. ただいま :-)
Configuring your favourite Editor on OSX (or Linux, or anywhere else) is important – since nano is my editor of choice I wanted to use it’s syntax highlighting capabilities. Easy as pie as it turned out:
I started with a .nanorc file from this guy and modified it to recognize some of my frequent file-types (like .cs files).
You can download my nanorc.tar – just extract it and put it into your user home directory.
Source 1: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=68421
Source 2: http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano.html#Nanorc-Files
Source 3: nanorc.tar
click on it to see it big
東京