Interesting talk addressing the challenges of finding product market fit, in the form of a case study about Weebly . It’s worth the 1h you will spend listening, if you are into this kind of stuff.
The transcript and slides can be found on the Startup School’s website.
This video about Gitlab was posted recently and is a very interesting case-study on how a company can normally function while having all of its employees working remotely.
Yesterday I watched the above documentary on National Geography Channel, it is a good piece of work and it alerts to very pertinent issues, that have been in the agenda for many years/decades. Yet, we haven’t been able to overcome lobbies and established interests, that maintain the status quo and their “money machines” running with disregard for future consequences. Something we already know for sure is that there is no going back and we will pay the price. Now, the question that remains is “what will the price be?”.
You should watch it, I definitely recommend it. It reminded me of another great documentary called “Home” (You should watch it too), released in 2009 (dam, 7 years and we are still stuck) that is less focused on climate change and addresses mankind’s impact on the planet specially on the last 100 years.
I really hope that we can start seeing real progress soon.
Recently I’ve started “folding” again, to give a small contribution to science and research on important topics such as Alzeimer’s disease among others (as the above video shows). After 2 previous failed attempts (the old computer could not handle it), I’m currently on my longest streak and have just completed the first 100 work units. I know that many people would like to contribute to a project like this but simply don’t know of its existence. So sharing is important.
With almost 15 years, the project continues to thrive and the performance of the overall system continues to grow, mostly pushed by the advances of technology, because the participation, as Wikipedia shows, is far from its peak of 450k processors in 2011. During its existence the team responsible for the project was able to publish 118 scientific papers, based on the results obtained by the collaborative work done by all personal computers that joined the network. It is a visible amount of work that is certainly important in humanity’s continuous fight against these diseases.
The project maintains a leaderboard with stats of its users and teams, making it somewhat fun to see your performance and to compare with others (Portuguese fellows come on and join the team). Contributing is relatively easy and cheap, so i challenge you to start. If you have interest to know what kind of work is being done at the moment throughout the network, the project publishes that information in their website.
To make it easier to see your progress without having to open other programs or websites, I’ve made a simple plasmoid to give you that information.
So if you are a KDE4 user (one version for Plasma 5 is coming out of the oven soon) you can get it here. It isn’t complete yet, since I’ve done it quickly while learning about KDE development, but it is usable.
More info: http://www.theoceancleanup.com/
The 3 days passed so fast that i got the sensation that the event took place in only one day. The only regret I felt in this year’s event was related with the fact that our team was unable to get the project ready for the presentation in 48h.
We were developing a service that would pay developers (using MEO Wallet) who contribute to open source projects, with bounties associated to specific issues, as soon as their pull request is merged in Github.
The rest of the event was awesome as always and all the speakers of the talks i was able to attend (Christian Heilmann, Miguel Duarte, Miguel Mota Veiga, …) were up to the job.
So next year the organization can count with my application to the event again.