Category: General

As some of you may know we right now are http://www.setfive.com/careers">hiring a mid-level engineer for our team. We’ve noticed in the past few weeks quite the influx of recruiters calling us trying to fill the position. As a company we’ve never used a recruiter in the past, its not that we’ve been closed minded to it, it’s just that we never have had a good experience with one for multiple reasons.  We’re paying the recruiter part a fee for finding us these great people, so they should be doing a little work on their end too.

With a recruiter we expect that the applicant has been pre-screened so that they match what we’re looking for roughly.  Half the time we have anyone call us they don’t even know what type of company we are, come on at least visit our webpage.  I don’t want to have to explain that we are a PHP shop with a heavy Symfony influence, you should already know that.  Of course, once we mention PHP and that we’re looking for a mid level person, the recruiter always has someone that we need to talk to.  This is the best fit for us.

This brings me to my second pet peeve, non-technical recruiters doing technical recruiting.  Now the recruiter know’s we want PHP developers, so they filter their resumes by PHP.  Often the next question is oh are you using Apache? Tomcat? IIS? Node?  For the most part, what does this have to do with it, but no we aren’t primarily using java or a javascript web server.  Often it is clear the recruiter who insists they’ve personally screened the person has no clue what they are talking about, they just are trying to match keywords to a resume.

Third, stop pushing to get me to come to your office to interview candidates I have no idea who they are.  Often on these calls after they’ve learened who we are and what we want, they want me to jump on a call or come into their office to do interviews with their perfect match candidates.  Everyone is busy, I want to see some resumes before going into these first round interviews, otherwise they could be a total waste of both our time.

Lastly, we’re a consulting firm, this means we have clients.  I can’t tell you how many times a recruiter doesn’t look at our clients list and then proceeds to give us people who still work for our clients.  A heads up, most of our contracts do not allow us to hire directly from a client while we are engaged with them (some even for a period there after).  Nevertheless, if the client ever saw us and thought we’d were stealing or aggressively recruiting their employees we can kiss that relationship good bye.

What do I want from a recruiter?  First, I want you to have some technical knowledge, at least know what groups of technologies go together and that LAMP is not a word but an acronym.  Second, take 5-10 minutes, look at our website, projects, blog, and clients make sure whomever you are telling us is a great fit actually has a good chance of being a good fit.  Third, send me a resume, remove all the contact information if you’re worried about us going direct to them, before trying to push me to either jump on a phone interview or come to your office.

Finally, if I’ve said no thank you we’re fine for now, do not continue to email and call me saying that you do have a better candidate.

This may come off as a bit of a rant, but really I hope some recruiters read this and understand that we would be happy to look at your candidates if you’ve put a little effort into making sure they are actually a good fit.

 

Over the weekend, Fred Wilson posted an awesome video of the unboxing and flight of a Parrot AR drone along with a note that he was planning to grab one and develop some custom node.js code for it. After seeing the video, and with spring finally here I started brainstorming about what gadgets I’d want to play with over the summer.

Parrot AR Drone

Shown in the video linked above, the Parrot AR Drone is a remote controlled 4 rotor helicopter that is controlled via an iOS or Android device. What sets the Parrot apart from other similar devices is that it there is an <a href=“https://projects.ardrone.org/” target=“_blank>official SDK for developing applications on top of the AR Drone platform. Additionally, there’s a <a href=” https:=“” github.com=“” felixge=“” node-cross-compiler“=“” rel=“noopener”>node.js library for simplifying development of custom functionality on the Parrot platform.

Not exactly sure what we’d be looking to build with an AR drone but the Red Bull Air Race comes to mind.

Sphero Robotic Ball

Built by Boulder, CO based Orbotix the Sphero robotic ball is a gyroscopically stabilized ball that can be controlled using an iOS or Android device. The Sphero has a software development SDK and there’s also an active app store to download pre-built apps that work with your Sphereo.

Just brainstorming, but something awesome to build with a Sphero would be an app to draw out large drawings using the Sphero to actually draw the lines. Imagine drawing a 50’x50’ line art graphic by uploading some art and then letting the Sphero roll around the canvas.

Pebble watch

Born on Kickstarter, the Pebble watch is an indie entrant into the “smartwatch” space. Sporting iOS and Android integration via Bluetooth along with a scriptable watch face, the Pebble is shaping up to be an interesting player in a developing market.

As far as development, writing custom faces to visualize information differently or pull data off a smartphone seems to be pretty exciting. It still seems a bit early to get a sense of how the Pebble will fare long term as a platform though.

Jawbone UP

Although primarily known for their speaker systems and Bluetooth headsets, the Jawbowne UP is a personal activity monitor that helps users track their physical activity, sleep cycles, and eating habits. The UP fits into the trending theme of the quantified self, where users track KPIs about their daily life in an effort to iterate and improve. Pulling data off the UP is relatively easy and it also plugins in to RunKeeper.

The “quantified self” concept sounds like it would be interesting to experiment with and using the UP to try it out seems like an obvious choice. Leveraging the UP would also make it easy to “compete” with anyone else looking to jump into activity tracking.

Raspberry Pi

Released last year after intense anticipation, the Raspberry Pi is basically a six square inch board with a fully featured computer including video output and USB ports. Coming in at $25 or $35, the Raspberry Pi is cheap enough to experiment with, hack it, and if it happens break it. With full Linux support, the Raspberry Pi is also robust enough to handle “serious business”.

Looking at the list of Rasberry Pi Hacks, theres definetely some awesome inspiration to build something cool. Using a Pi to power a TV screen with real time interactive content seems like it might be an early winner though - we’ll see where that goes.

Anyway, that’s my list, unfortunately I’m not sure what I’ll actually get around to hacking on this summer. Would love to hear about any other cool gadgets or hacks.

Last week, I was putting together a Google Chrome extension for one of our clients to help debug Javascript events on a page and I started wondering why don’t we have mobile browser extensions? Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer but I think looking towards the desktop can help draw analogies to where we are on mobile now.

So this desktop thing?

Looking back to the desktop, arguably one of the strongest drivers of Firefox’s growth was its rich extension ecosystem. Compared to Internet Explorer, Firefox extensions were easier to develop, leveraged web technologies (XUL, JS, CSS), and offered powerful abstractions out of the box. Because of this, developers began building powerful extensions for Firefox which drove “power user” adoption and ultimately helped spur mainstream adoption. Developers built extensions like Firebug, Greasemonkey, and companies like Rapportive inside the Firefox extension ecosystem. Following Firefox, when Google Chrome launched it debuted its own even simpler extension infrastructure and eventually the Chrome Webstore to help distribute and monetize extensions.

Although largely positive, the extensions developed for Firefox and Chrome weren’t always user friendly. Between redirecting search traffic and surreptitiously injecting ads, “greyhat” extensions negatively impacted user experience while generating revenue without generating value. These “greyhat” extensions fueled what’s colloquially known as Israel’s download valley and ultimately millions of dollars in revenue.

Right so what about mobile?

Compared to the desktop, the landscape on mobile is notably different because of an Apple and Google duopoly with Apple primarily monetizing hardware and Google monetizing search advertising. Additionally, compared to the desktop, Apple and Google have an unprecedented level of control over user devices, all but ensuring that devices will arrive with either Safari or Chrome installed.

I think because of this control, Apple and Google have little incentive to open up Mobile Safari or Mobile Chrome to 3rd party extension developers since doing so would compromise the browser user experience for little gain over the competition. But what about Firefox?

Although Mozilla has released a Firefox build for Android, I think they’ve recognized that trying to win market share away from Chrome on Android is a losing battle and they’re starting to seriously pursue FirefoxOS. Because of this, I don’t think Mozilla will invest in Firefox mobile extensions since it’s clear that there’s more opportunity in powering the OS layer of a user’s phone.

Monday was a horrific day in Boston and its been an uneasy day after. I don’t have anything to add to the discourse but I would like to urge you to join us, along with the technology community in supporting the victims.

TUGG has setup a fundraise.com page here - https://www.fundraise.com/technology-supports-victims-of-boston-marathon-bombing and over $100,000 has already been raised.

In 2009, an engineer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto introduced a new digital, open source, currency to the world called “Bitcoin”. Since then, the buzz, excitement, and adoption of bitcoins has grown at a phenomenal rate, with the total value of bitcoins in circulation hitting $1 billion as of April 2013. Talk of a bubble has coincided with the buzz, but both have also served to highlight the tremendous potential in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Great, so what is it really?

Paraphrasing from Wikipedia:

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. […] Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. […]

Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.

I’m going to butcher any explanation I try to provide but Quora has several good writeups on what Bitcoins are and how they work. A reasonable analogy though, is think about “Bitcoins” as a type of precious metal that has no intrinsic value but is able to store value, transfer value between parties, and be mined to find new pieces.

The key takeaways about how Bitcoins work are:

• Unlike traditional currencies, no central bank controls the amount of currency in circulation. Instead, the total amount of possible Bitcoins is algorithmically limited by the protocol itself.
• Transactions between parties are relatively anonymous and done in real time. Contrast this with other digital payments like credit cards or wire transfers where there is little anonymity and a settling period.
• As of now, there's absolutely no regulation as far as reporting, security, or anything else you'd associate with traditional financial institutions.
• Currently, it's all digital - there's no practical way to "print" a Bitcoin and use it like a dollar bill

So what's going to be disruptive?

There are dozens if not hundreds of startups playing in the Bitcoin space and several “large” companies have also started adopting Bitcoins as an alternative form of payment. Several high profile investors including YCombinator and Union Square Ventures have also made significant Bitcoin related invetments, signalling that savvy investors believe a potential market exists. Personally, I’m excited about companies attacking the following:

Hassle free, instant, and international money transfer. Paypal was supposed to allow us to do this, but even in 2013 its difficult and expensive to transfer people money - let alone internationally. If someone can address the current concerns of fraud and money laundering using Bitcoin they’ll have an instant winner on their hands.

Catapult in legalized online gambling. In the last few years, there’s been an ongoing discussion about if America should legalize online gambling and if so, how it should be done. Because of the decentralized, anonymous nature of Bitcoin, it’s conceivable that the emergence of a large enough Bitcoin powered gambling market would force the US government to legalize online gambling in order to get access to the additional tax revenues. This would obviously be a boon for struggling social game companies like Zynga, but also provide an enormous opportunity for new startups.

Provide a viable alternative to credit cards. Recently, there’s been a lot of action in the payments space including innovative companies like Square and Roam which are aiming to alter how consumers pay at the point of sale. Unfortunately, almost all of these new payment solutions still rely on existing credit card infrastructure to complete the payment which leaves them at the whim of interchange fees. Boston based LevelUp is tackling this issue but at the end of the day they’re still getting hit by the fees somewhere. An innovative Bitcoin company which provides a viable alternative to this existing credit card infrastructure would open the door to radical innovation in the payments space by eliminating hard interchange fees.

What might go wrong?

There’s a huge amount of opportunity in the Bitcoin space and the ecosystem is just starting to build out. With the Bitcoin boom of 2012 already inked on the Wikipedia entry, the next few months are going to be a critical time for the nascent currency. The single largest to Bitcoin is ultimately going to be regulation from sovereign governments. The US Department of Treasury has already issued several statements regarding Bitcoin and its clear the government isn’t happy with the situation as it stands now.

Regardless of what regulation is passed, Bitcoins are technologically different from previous virtual currency and the ecosystem has already demonstrated its resilience and innovation.