Paulitex ][

From http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Startups+pitch+their+visions+Demo/5889120/story.html

Interview on Lining Things Up

Chad, who was a student in one of our courses, asked me to be on his show recently and talk about startups, GrowLab, and Vancouver. I thought I bombed it right away after, but it actually turned out pretty good. :)

This was so much fun, thanks so much to everyone who came and listened.

Neat Scala null -> option idiom

Working with Java APIs in Scala? Things potentially being null when you wish they were None?

I had this problem working with servlets… request.getQueryString returns null if there is no query string in the url (as opposed to an empty string) and without explicating checking for nulls (a good 3-4 lines of clutter), the code throws an unhelpful null pointer exception. Turns out Option(value) does exactly the type of conversion I want: a Some[return type] or None if it’s null.

so checking for null conditional (4-5 lines) becomes a single line:

val queryString = Option(request.getQueryString).getOrElse(throw new NotLoggedInException)

nice.

Capitalizing on a General Education

Great article on the divide between generalist / non-technical degrees being studied by most University students and the economic/job prospects of their graduates.

But no fear, you army of BAs who wax eloquent (I am one of you). Keep your eye on Matygo. We are here to help. Get the concrete skills you need to get on the track to positions where you can actually exercise the abstract and holistic thing your big brains have been trained to do.

Jobs on organization core values and what marketing is really about. I actually saw this video a long time ago and have been wanting to find it many times since. It surfaced in the wake of the news so i’m logging it here.

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones” narrated by Steve Jobs himself. Never aired. By far the most touching of all Steve tributes I’ve seen tonight - fair warning.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

(via markbao)

The Matygo Blog: Network Effects (or, how to make it big on the internet)

Wrote this for the matygo blog, though it’s really a personal position.

matygo:

A network effect: when the value derived from a system increases with the number of people that use it.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with the idea of network effects lately, but for good reason: Every major internet success has been created by leveraging network effects: from email to Airbnb. A…