Startup Mullings

Be a Generalist - A Week in the Startup Life (Week 8)

Edit: This is written in the present tense but taking place around 2 months ago. I’m working on catching up with these updates this week.

Things started to accelerate two months into the startup life. There are two of us working on Glossi full time now and we’ve been meeting nearly every day to work together. Amazing how much more you get done when you’re working with someone compared to working alone. I’m starting to appreciate the need to have generalists within a startup, both on the tech and business side. It’s impossible to predict what you’ll need to get done each day and being ready for as much as possible is the best you can do. Luckily for us, there are so many resources available right now that all you need is curiosity and a willingness to learn to quickly ramp up. I can’t imagine doing what I’m doing now without Wikipedia or StackOverflow.

Here’s week eight:

• 5/7 - Caught up on a bunch of items after returning from Austin. Luckily there were no emergencies that had to be resolved while I was away. Went back to work and started working on the new Glossi profile view by hooking up a bunch of UX things that Marc created to the backend.
• ⅝ - Nearly done with the “contact me” feature for Glossi but as usual, the devil is in the details. Made sure edge cases worked and also spent some time making sure the the usability was there. For example, focusing on the proper fields by default as well as animating the popup when it’s opened and closed. Improved logic around when we should repull photo albums from Facebook. Quiet day on the meeting/business side.
• 5/9 - Added a few metric tracking features for our premium clients and spent the day working out minor kinks by looking at user profiles. We also started working on some admin tools to help us monitor and fix issues with broken layouts.
• 5/10 - Sys admin day of the week - spent the day working on various caching and compression issues. This was driven by our transition to Cloudfront as a CDN as well as our goal to get rid of the various CSS/JS caching issues that prevented us from quickly releasing code. We also ended up running a small instance of memcached to improve performance.
• 5/11 - Another solid day of feature work. We polished up the actions people could take on moments (Like, Repost, Delete) and are getting it ready for release. I also went back to our old Javascript code and ended up improving it a ton based on what I know now. Big improvements were refactoring a bunch of old methods to use JQuery’s delegate function and the various event handlers.
• 5/12 - We had the final round interview with ERA in the early afternoon that went well. We grabbed a quick team beer after in Bryant Park and then I headed home to celebrate my mom’s birthday.
• 5/13 - Didn’t do a bunch of work but ended up catching up on email and read a bunch of saved articles throughout the week.