Comments for Travelling and not arriving

Comment on Is there such thing as a “Startup Technology Stack”? by fildiotalevi

fildiotalevi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:42:41 +0000

@nicolas
Interesting comment. Of course I was talking about web applications only; I don’t have direct experience with mobile or desktop apps. So that’s correct, such a stack can be used only when developing web applications.

On the other side, I’m not completely sure what “Innovation” we are talking about. Is it really technical innovation?
Looking around, I don’t see much technical innovation when I look at startups; there are certainly exceptions, but the vast majority of them is building the usual and glorified web application.

When I look at startups, I see marketing and business model innovation. I see them trying to figure out a way to market a service, a way to build a community around a topic, a way to make people pay for something that was previously free.

Comment on Is there such thing as a “Startup Technology Stack”? by fildiotalevi

fildiotalevi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:34:39 +0000

@Ran
>I’m interested in how schema-less DB would solve your issues. You still got
> customer data that you need to load one way, transform, then save in
> another way. Isn’t this the same as “migration”?

There a few cases in which, differently from a RDBMS, you might need no migration at all with document dbs.

If a migration involves only addition/removal of columns, you don’t need any migration at all in a schemaless database like MongoDB. You simply start adding more data in the stored document.

Similarly if what was previously a column becomes a separate entity, or a one-to-many relationship, you can still avoid migrations in a document db simply starting storing a different “type” of data in the document (usually a reference to an external entity rather than the data itself). It might require some more coding in the application side (and it is certainly less elegant), but it allows to to change your code more quickly.

Comment on Is there such thing as a “Startup Technology Stack”? by Nicolas

Nicolas — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:00:38 +0000

A startup is about innovation.

You shall not try to use a stack and then use it to solve problems.

You should try to solve problems that have business interrest and use the best possible tools available for this.

One exemple, your stack include databases and web technology. Is it the best technology for a mobile app ? Or a desktop video game ? Or a speach recognition program ?

First, see what your business is about, then choose the right tool.

Another thing about startup may be innovation. If we all agree on a startup stack to use, it will be more more difficult to innovate.

Paul Graham as an exemple used lisp for it’s eCommerce software. And it worked really well.

For him, using lisp what a competitive advantage and that why his product was so sucessful.

So for me, no standard startup stack.

Comment on Is there such thing as a “Startup Technology Stack”? by Ran Biron

Ran Biron — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:52:08 +0000

I’m interested in how schema-less DB would solve your issues. You still got customer data that you need to load one way, transform, then save in another way. Isn’t this the same as “migration”?

Comment on Is there such thing as a “Startup Technology Stack”? by Michiel Trimpe

Michiel Trimpe — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:09:17 +0000

Have you tried Liquibase for database migrations? For us, it works like a charm once you get used to it’s kinks (don’t autoformat plain SQL queries!;).

We just deploy the application and our Spring Liquibase bean automatically upgrades the database ….

Comment on Introducing Mindquilt by Marketing on a shoestring (aka Mindquilt is going to Boston) – Travelling and not arriving

Thu, 20 May 2010 15:08:19 +0000

[...] Blog We actually didn’t blog that much. The reason is I was the only one with a blog before joining Mindquilt, and a pretty abandoned one. Creating a blog just to promote a company (even a cool one ) doesn’t seem fair to me. I’d rather call it spam. So the only blog post we launched was in my blog. [...]

Comment on Introducing Mindquilt by Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 05 May 2010 10:56:24 +0000

Great post Filippo. You are a much better writer than I am

Comment on The OSGiLook, Linode and minor migrations by travelling and not arriving

travelling and not arriving — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:34:29 +0000

[...] experience, I decided to put (much) more effort on the OSGi Look. First of all I bought myself a Linode virtual server and migrated all the data over there. Secondly, I started to post on a regular schedule, and to [...]