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    Discussion forum

    Lessons from The Lean Startup: Part Two


    Post #: 150
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-09 23:27:41.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Book review

    Eric Ries is not very fond of what he calls "vanity metrics"-- numbers that show things going up or down (like hits on a website or number of new customers per month) because they don’t actually measure what was done to cause the change.

    This leads to people making the following conclusions:

    [quote]

    In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time. That’s why it’s common to have a meeting in which marketing thinks the numbers went up because of a new PR or marketing effort and engineering thinks the better numbers are the result of the new features it added.

    Unfortunately, when the numbers go down, it results in a very different reaction: now it’s somebody else’s fault. Thus, most team members or departments live in a world where their department is constantly making things better, only to have their hard work sabotaged by other departments that just don’t get it.
    [/quote]


    <p class='p2'>He suggests two solutions to this problem, both of which need to be implemented. First, people need to work in cross-functional teams, not traditional departments like marketing or engineering. Second, metrics need to actually give real information about what caused the change. Primarily, he suggests using A/B testing on the product (giving different versions with and without a new change to different groups of customers).

    For the entrepreneur working with a small team of a few (or even one!) the first solution is irrelevant, but the second could prove invaluable.

    In other news, I made a new comic. Go read it!



    Views: 6316


    Lessons from The Lean Startup: Part One


    Post #: 148
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-08 17:45:59.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Book review

    I’m reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and I’m surprised how many good lessons there are inside, not just for entrepreneurs, but for basically every company.

    Take this quote:

    [quote]

    A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers, it was in process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged by feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.

    [/quote]

    <p class='p2'>Does that sound like your company? It sounds exactly like my former company! That’s basically all we did for the five years I was there. Management always blamed the engineers and kept meddling and changing procedures, seemingly at random, when the problems lay elsewhere.

    Definitely something to think about.



    Views: 6353


    Don’t spend too much time on fun stuff...


    Post #: 147
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-07 23:54:36.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Daily update, Entrepreneur

    It’s much more important to spend your time building your actual product. Logos and color schemes and font choices and stuff are fun, but they shouldn’t take time away from actually, you know, making something.

    Still, it’s nice to have an image to focus around. I doodled something that looked like a flying building today when I was writing mockups and design diagrams for JetCondo.com. (Those who know me know that I always HATED planning and writing documents, but it turns out that it wasn’t that bad)

    Oh, I also updated the server from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 LTS, which was somewhat harrying (I always worry that the Internet will drop out halfway through and I won’t be able to SSH in again, but everything was fine). This was a big maintenance task that I had been putting off, so it’s nice to have finished it.

    Anyway, here’s the logo.



    Tomorrow the plan is to put some real rockets on that thing.



    Views: 6615


    Creating something every day


    Post #: 146
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-05 01:22:32.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Daily update, Entrepreneur

    This morning I was taking care of more administrative stuff, so I didn’t have time to work on my creative projects. But I’ve committed to doing a new comic strip on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I made one.

    Doing comic strips is really outside my area of expertise, but I’m enjoying slowly building up the universe and characters. The drawing part still feels like a chore, but I learned how to use the Line tool in photoshop to make backgrounds that at least have straight lines!

    While I was writing the comic I was watching the old BBC show Brideshead Revisited on the TV. It made quite a juxtaposition: aliens and spaceships with British historical costume drama in the background!

    I didn’t do any work on Jetcondo.com, but I’m doing a lot of thinking. I might actually have to do some (gasp) planning for this thing. I’m kind of excited about it.

    I'll blog again on Monday. Have a great weekend!



    Views: 6418


    The second day is always the hardest...


    Post #: 144
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-03 23:38:30.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Daily update, Entrepreneur

    The first day is exciting, as you make all your amazing plans for world domination and let imagination fuel your wildest fantasies.

    Then the second day comes, and you realize that in order to achieve any of it, you’re going to have to sit down and do work.

    A lot of work.

    Suddenly all the dreams seem like they are an infinite distance away, and you can’t possibly do everything you need to do to achieve them.

    My solution for getting out of this funk was just to do something, even if it wasn’t directly related to world domination. In my case, I did some personal financial administration stuff that I had been putting off for months because I was "too busy". Ha! Can’t use that excuse now! But after completing this task, I felt a bit better.

    So I enabled my new Rockets forums (the web development framework I built)

    Then I made a post on Google+ about it, just for fun.

    So I did something, which was better than nothing. Still a long way to go, but at least I’m moving!



    Views: 6441


    I've started on an adventure...


    Post #: 143
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-02 22:44:53.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Daily update, Entrepreneur

    Well, I said that I would be doing daily updates for a while, so here we go. These probably aren't going to be very long.

    I registered a new domain today. Jetcondo.com. Don't go there, it doesn't do anything yet (just redirects to jeremyreimer.com). The name doesn't have anything to do with jets or condos, but hey, Amazon doesn't have anything to do with the river or the rainforest either.

    It's a working title for a new piece of software I am developing that hopefully will become something interesting. I'll talk more about it as I create it.

    I'm also trying to mix in some other projects that I haven't had time to do, so I made a new comic strip for Star Gamer. The art is still pretty bad but hopefully it will get better if I keep at it a bit.

    See you tomorrow!



    Views: 6416


    Starfarer, a free short story set in my science-fiction universe


    Post #: 141
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-01-02 01:29:50.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Science Fiction, Writing



    Happy New Year! I’ve decided to celebrate the end of 2012 by releasing my short story, Starfarer, for free! You can get it here. It’s available in every format imaginable (e-books, PDF, text, etc), all of them DRM-free!

    Starfarer is a short story about an unusual first contact between Angie Coura, a woman from Earth who is on a long-range deep space sleeper ship heading towards a new colony, and an alien vessel.

    Partway through the journey, Angie’s ship has a catastrophic encounter with the alien ship, which changes her life forever.

    Starfarer is set in the same universe as my Masters Trilogy of novels: Edge of Infinity, Heart of the Maelstrom, and the upcoming (and I just now came up with the title for it) Beyond the Expanse.



    Views: 6307


    Heart of the Maelstrom, my second novel, now available on Amazon!


    Post #: 138
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2012-12-17 14:05:58.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Science Fiction, Novels

    <a href=http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00APEVMUS>

    I’m excited to announce that my second novel is now available for purchase on Amazon!



    Continuing the story from Edge of Infinity, Heart of the Maelstrom follows the adventures of the crew of the space carrier Pegasus, as they come face to face with the enigmatic and ancient Masters. The Masters are far more advanced technologically than the humans or their allies, and the moment of first contact does not go well.

    The story also follows a new (and my new favorite) character, Christopher Hunter, an English pastor whose simple life becomes a lot more complicated when he comes in direct contact with the Masters.

    I’ve had a tremendous amount of fun writing the book, and I feel in the second novel I’m really starting to hit my stride as a fiction author. I am planning on starting to write the third (and final) installment in the Masters Trilogy early in 2013.

    Comments (1)

    Views: 6508


    Total Share: Personal Computer Market Share 1975-2010


    Post #: 137
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2012-12-07 11:06:14.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Computers, Market Share

    This is a recreation of the original article that was published at: http://jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329

    I have written two articles based on this data at Ars Technica:

    Total Share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures - December 2005

    From Altair to iPad: 35 years of personal computer market share - August 2012

    (The second article also includes smartphone and tablet market share and compares them to the growth of the personal computer)

    The first personal computer, the MITS Altair 8080, was released in 1975 and changed the world forever. A handful of geeks (Bill Gates included) saw this humble $395 kit as the beginning of something big... but nobody knew how big!

    The Altair sold a few thousand units in 1975. Today, more than 300 million personal computers are sold each year! How did we get here, and which computer platforms were around for the journey? A lot of people who have come into personal computing recently do not know that there were once many different platforms-- a glance at a 1980 issue of Popular Computing revealed over 100 different manufacturers of incompatible brands!

    The following graphs reveal some of the story, and show the incredible growth of the industry. They should also spark some memories of platforms gone by.

    All figures in 1,000’s of units

    Download the data in Excel format













    Notes on sources



    Views: 94037


    We are live on a new server!


    Post #: 136
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2012-12-05 17:07:53.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Blog, Servers

    A bunch of stuff from the old jeremyreimer.com still hasn't been transferred over yet, but the main blog is (hopefully) working!

    This new server is actually an Amazon EC2 instance I'm trying out. Yes, jeremyreimer.com is going into the cloud. Will we ever escape it? Who knows?

    Further exciting updates as they come in!

    Comments (5)

    Views: 8699