September 2010
1 post
3 tags
Conference season is here
and so far I’m attending.
August 2010
7 posts
2 tags
“How will I know when people are ready to pay?
The easiest thing to do of...”
– The Minimum Viable Product Lifecycle - knowing when to jump from a minimum viable product to a business.
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Free by Chris Anderson
As expected from a book geared towards a mainstream audience, Free is not as practical as it could be. Most of the book are company stories and economy history. Although they were interesting, I was looking for more detailed data on free business models.
Nevertheless, there were some bits I loved to read like the “How can X be free?” sections (example: “How can everything in a...
3 tags
Hacking music: favorite post-rock bands
After reading some hackernews posts about hacking music, I decided to share some bands I recomend to everyone. They’re mainly around the post-rock genre a.k.a. instrumental rock. Non-distracting, but motivating. Give them a try or share your own.
4 tags
Startup metrics
One of the principles of lean startups is ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration. To validate assumptions, data must be collected from users interacting with the product, a fact frequently forgotten by opinionated developers.
Here are two good presentations about metrics, one about business metrics for startups, and other specifically about web applications design metrics.
2 tags
“SlideShare’s existing customers had needs that the company’s new product—along...”
– Slideshare case study @ Lessons Learned: finding the right revenue model.
2 tags
3 tags
The Art of Start
Finished reading The Art of Start and it’s really good. I’m lending it to my partner in crime, since it’s full of valuable pragmatic instructions.
Although some advices apply to large venture capital funding, most are universal to any startup. I specially liked the pitching tips (the 10/20/30 rule, take notes…) and the The Art of Schmoozing:
Get out
Ask good questions,...
2 tags
MongoMapper & Mongoid
I decided to give MongoDB a try on a brand new rails project. It was also a change to get a bit familiar with the upcoming Rails 3 (there’s a release candidate now \o/).
I found two MongoDB adapters for rails: MongoMapper and Mongoid. Here’s an article with a comparison (thanks Tomé Duarte). After trying out the two on a really simple use case, I preferred working with Mongoid for 3...
July 2010
10 posts
2 tags
Made to Stick
Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, is a book on how to promote your ideas so they “stick” on people’s heads. The authors analyse why some ideas are catchy while others quickly forgotten, and present the key features an idea must have to be “sticky”. Those features, coined under the acronym SUCCESs, are:
Simple Find the core of your message and focus...
4 tags
Coimbra Directory →
Companies innovating in Coimbra
2 tags
2 tags
Bringing Nothing To The Party
Read this book some months ago. Paul Carr, who is now blogs at TechCrunch, writes about his “not-entirely-successful” adventures as entrepreneur. You can download it for free.
More than anything, it’s an entertaining reading. The author hasn’t what you could call a perfect character, and that adds much to the plot. If after reading it, you get curious about...
3 tags
NoSQL, Rails and MongoDB
After some research on NoSQL databases, for a future rails project, the projects that caught my attention were:
Tokyo Cabinet
CouchDB
MongoDB
I’ve spent some more time MongoDB. Their list of prodution deployments is impressive. John Nunemaker developed an adapter for ruby, the MongoMapper, which already supports some neat features like validations and callbacks, much on the...
2 tags
life @ coimbra →
I’ve created another tumblr (the last, I promise), this time to share music, trips and more random thoughts. It will be in Portuguese though. Hope you enjoy it =)
“You can’t afford to be number two, or to have a “good enough”...”
– Hitting the High Notes by Joel Spolsky
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New website(s)
In order to increase the frequency of my posts, I’ve changed this blog to a Tumblr account. I hope the service’s simplicity helps.
Meanwhile, I’ve been accumulating project ideas, clearly too many for me. So I opened up another Tumblr where I can dump them, and where they might inspire others. It’s called Ideas Notebook. Go check it out.
June 2010
1 post
Notebooks
Notebooks is one of those items I love looking at. I usually carry my faithful reporter moleskine. Yesterday I saw a mention of the gorgeous About:Blank notebook, and I though to share with you some nice alternatives to the moleskine:
Field Notes
About:Blank
MUJI notebooks
If you still haven’t found your perfect notebook, your can always make your own.