はてなブックマーク

[A quick note for readers of Japanese who may be looking for a translation which was here previously: 残念ながら、以前リンクされていた本文の和訳が翻訳者のサイトの更新により、アクセスできなくなりました。ご了承ください。] I’ve been in Japan for ten years now and often get asked about how business works here, sometimes by folks in the industry wondering about the Japanese startup culture, sometimes by folks wishing to sell their software in Japan, and somet

January has been a very bad month for Ruby on Rails developers, with two high-severity security bugs permitting remote code execution found in the framework and a separate-but-related compromise on rubygems.org, a community resource which virtually all Ruby on Rails developers sit downstream of.  Many startups use Ruby on Rails.  Other startups don’t but, like the Rails community, may one day find

Most technical founders abominably misprice their SaaS offerings to start out.  I’m as guilty of this as anyone, so I wrote up my observations about un-borking this as The Black Arts of SaaS pricing a few months ago.  (It went out to my mailing list — sign up and you’ll get it tomorrow.)  A few companies implemented advice in there to positive effect, and one actually let me write about it, so her

I’ve run software businesses for the last six years, all premised on the simple notion that if I provide value to customers they should pay me money.  The actual implementation of translating their desire to pay into money in my bank account was less simple… until I found Stripe.  They’re now up there with Twilio and Heroku in terms of “infrastructure companies which will totally change the way sa

I moved my blog over to WPEngine recently. Why? Read on. I started blogging about 375,000 words ago (about three full-length novels… crikey). At first, I was on a subdomain of WordPress.com, mostly because a) it was free and b) I had no intention of ever writing anything more significant than a few observations I made while developing a summer project.  My posts about making and marketing software

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued [Editor’s note: At nearly 7,000 words, you probably don’t want to try reading this on an iDevice.  Bookmark it and come back later.] Imagine something a wee bit outside your comfort zone.  Nothing scandalous: just something you don’t do often, don’t particularly enjoy, and slightly more challenging than “totally trivial.”  Maybe reciting poetry w

Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal

I'm Patrick McKenzie. Your engineering team knows me as patio11. The broad through line of my work is systems thinking applied to businesses. I think the social organization of the Internet and its impact on the world are underestimated by almost everyone, including Silicon Valley. Everything important to you in the world sits atop several infrastructure layers. I have written words about those la

Software Businesses In 5 Hours A Week: Microconf 2011 Presentation (1 hour) Rob Walling (who wrote a book on starting software businesses that I enjoyed) and Mike Taber produced Microconf, a conference for small solo software entrepreneurs.  That sounded right up my alley, and I was extraordinarily happy when asked to speak at it.  The organizers have generously given me permission to post the sli

Some four years ago, I started Bingo Card Creator, a business which sells software to teachers.  At the time, my big goal for the future was eventually making perhaps $200 a month, so that I could buy more video games without feeling guilty about it.  The business has been successful beyond my wildest expectations and has made it possible to quit my day job at the end of this month.  The amount of

(This post recently got linked on Japanese blogs.  英語より日本語の方が楽な方：これを和訳しようとしています。日本語版はこちらです。) Every once in a while, somebody on the Business of Software forums asks whether there is any point to trying to compete with open source software (OSS — essentially, software anyone can use and modify without needing to pay money or receive permission).  This is very possible, as folks such as Joel Spolsky