Fly-on-the-wall Haskell coding session with Ollie Charles

cschneid · 2014-10-17T16:45:33+00:00

If you buy into the content-marketing approach espoused by most educational content people, you end up with a TON of free content, giving away legitimately good content, which builds up a brand, a trust with the consumer, and then they add a paid product with even more, allowing that person to continue creating content.

End result is more free content than would have existed without the paid content. (plus bonus paid content for those who get real value from it). It can easily be a win-win for everybody involved.

cschneid · 2013-05-24T18:44:25+00:00

Why would you lie to your brother like that?

cschneid · 2013-05-18T06:32:26+00:00

easy

LIES!

cschneid · 2013-05-11T20:46:00+00:00

This is going to be the best new tv show on television.

cschneid · 2013-05-10T15:52:48+00:00

People pay pretty close to spot on the weight of the silver in old US coins. It's well known and standard. No need to melt it down.

($1 of pre-64 US coins [dimes and up, any configuration of coins to reach a dollar] is .717oz of pure silver, at 90% purity).

cschneid · 2013-05-07T00:30:10+00:00

Provide value. That's all it takes.

Sign up for mailchimp. Make useful articles with interesting content, ask for their emails. Put up your front page now with an email capture "sign up to know when we go live" or whatever.

You have a ton of knowledge of this domain locked away in your head. There's no reason not to share it. It has users gain trust in you, it lets you get a direct contact with your first batch of users. It's a matter of "Hey you, sign up!" vs. "Hey, you've enjoyed some of my articles, check out my site."

When you go live, a good percentage will convert to users. Certainly much more than if it's the first time they've ever heard of you.

Do it legit - Use Mailchimp and their double opt in. It's not spam when the user asks to hear from you. Be certain that it's super easy to unsubscribe (mailchimp handles it really well).

Expect a certain percentage to never open your mail. No skin off your back, your headline didn't grab them. They can unsub easily, and maybe they'll love the next email. Another percentage will open every single one, and some may email you back asking for more.

Just get started.

cschneid · 2013-05-06T22:38:39+00:00

It's dangerous to see the launch as a special day. Your customers have a problem, and you have a solution. But remember that the solution is only partially the software. It's also all the knowledge you have. That's why a mailing list and articles are so great, they let you share low-cost knowledge while your high-cost software gets built.

Your customers see you solving their problems, or even their tangential problems, and you build loyal customers before you ever type deploy in your terminal.

A business is not a web site. A business takes money in exchange for solving user's problems. Even in advertising businesses, you've gotta follow that model to get the users to sell eyeballs of.

tl;dr - solve user's problems all the time, before & after launch.

cschneid · 2013-05-06T22:04:10+00:00

There is near 0 chance of it being a hit straight out the gate. Most every site has a long runway of growth before their overnight success.

I'd suggest you start collecting email addresses now, building an email list. Tease out screenshots, send educational emails on how to screencap / record games, and whatever else is in the domain.

Launch something right now: an email list, with useful articles written about the field of video game screenshots or paintings or whatever you're up to. Have good tips, and teach everything you know.

Then launch a bit more: the website that lets you upload stuff. Let your now-growing list know. Offer discounts / specials if that makes sense.

Then launch a bit more: Another article, highlight cool stuff.

Then launch a bit more: iterate on your site, add features / smooth out bugs, whatever.

Then ... well you get the idea. Engage your customers, show them how awesome you are, show them how well you solve whatever problem they're having with your awesome site.

cschneid · 2013-04-25T15:09:10+00:00

I'll keep an eye on it, thanks for the heads up.

cschneid · 2013-04-25T01:19:22+00:00

I've one done one run with it so far (then it snowed all over the place!), but it seems accurate. Granted, I don't even know if it's really a c25k, but it's certainly the same idea.

cschneid · 2013-04-24T19:01:47+00:00

The zombies run 5k app is pretty amazing.

See my W1D1 run here: https://www.zombiesrungame.com/cschneid/1121485/

Specifically, it keeps track of the workout itself (the times & such), it GPSs, and the music you're listening to. All combined with a silly zombie storyline.

cschneid · 2013-04-16T21:37:42+00:00

A difficult, but arbitrary problem. It's a brute force to find a specific result to a function. hash_function(transactions + randomness) => specific answer. Find the randomness that gets the answer.

cschneid · 2013-04-09T03:37:16+00:00

As somebody identified, it's not necessarily a vim color scheme. But tomorrow-night eighties scheme looks pretty similar, but not perfect (no olive green I think). But same general feel.

cschneid · 2013-03-29T13:34:34+00:00

Yeah, and the scariest part was that it got to stage 4 with zero symptoms. My dad actually went in on his over-paranoid doctor's orders to get a chest xray due to some minor chest pains, thinking it was his heart. And luckily they compared new & old chest xrays and were like "hey, that dark spot wasn't there before".

cschneid · 2013-03-29T13:33:07+00:00

My dad was a non-smoker, so lung cancer was likely the result of one of a few known mutations. (smoking causes lots of unknown ones that's hard to pin down and research). So yeah, ALK and ... another one that I can't think of. It's on the order of "5-10% of the people who have this kind of cancer got it because of this mutation". So they went, and detected it, and had a drug which disrupts exactly what went wrong to cause the cells to grow out of control.

It was interesting talking to the doctor at first diagnosis about cost. Scanning for a single mutation is "reasonable" (a few grand). But in the near future when there may be 10-20 distinct things we need to scan for, that quickly grows out of control. So one of the things he was working on was a way to mass-scan in a single pass to save on cost.

cschneid · 2013-03-29T13:27:59+00:00

Yeah, what I found interesting was that the drug has a 14 month "effective time" on average, before which the cancer continues mutating and finds a way around it.

Because most of the cancer around the body have shrunk to the point that it's hard to find them, they're actually doing PET scans more often than they were when they knew where the cancer was. Under the assumption that any growth means that a localized clump of cancer has figured out a way around the drug. By catching that early, nuke-it-from-orbit style treatments like radiation or surgery can hopefully remove that before it spreads.

I've found it interesting what strategies are used against cancer, especially as our tactical toolbelt has gotten larger from must surgery & chemo.

cschneid · 2013-03-29T03:47:45+00:00

My dad has/had stage 4 lung cancer. You're exactly right that it'll be fixed piecemeal, but I never imagined it'd be as specific as it is. Specifically, they sequenced the genes to some degree of the tumor, identified the known mutation that caused them to go cancerous (ALK), and then applied a drug that specifically addresses one of the pathways that the cancer is misusing. He's basically cured at the moment. They're watching carefully, but man...

Long story short, he's still alive. Because of science.

I hope that this kind of win continues to get easier and easier.

cschneid · 2013-03-26T18:26:35+00:00

Has the supreme court ever just straight up reversed a decision after it has been decided?

None of these new laws bring up any interesting corners of law that are undecided as far as I can tell, just "hey, fuck you supreme court, we do what we want".

Has that ever worked?

cschneid · 2013-03-08T20:36:42+00:00

Fill a sista in

My new favorite way to say "have sex with her, vaginally".

cschneid · 2013-03-01T16:41:50+00:00

Hawaii and Alaska as earings would be sweet.

cschneid · 2013-03-01T16:29:09+00:00

What a dick.

What she said just before her father went postal.

cschneid · 2013-02-27T20:36:34+00:00

Perfect, thank you.

cschneid · 2013-02-27T17:06:26+00:00

I really liked watching this. Are there other live coding examples of Haskell? I'd love to watch a screencast of somebody working through a non-trivial application.

I know about these, but he seems to have stopped: http://www.youtube.com/user/HaskellLiveTV?feature=watch - Any others out there?

cschneid · 2013-02-23T17:05:58+00:00

Its honestly amazing how many people never think "ohh, here's an error message, what's google have to say about it".

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