

Chris Wanstrath's Startup Riot keynote text - azsromej
http://gist.github.com/67060

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sqs
Great speech. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions on the
consequences of his conclusion, the "do what you want" bit. I know he meant it
in a broader sense, but I see a lot of people (especially high school students
and younger) wrongly interpreting that as "don't go into CS; just go straight
to a startup," especially with the specific mention of that plan of action.

I know that's a popular piece of advice given around here (though HN has an
interesting mix of "stuffy" academia and "Wild West" hacker culture), and I
felt the same way when I was younger. I thought I knew all the CS I needed to
know to develop the stuff I'd want to develop. But I want to say that I am so
overwhelmingly happy I have done CS at the college level. I knew so little
back then (and still). It scares me that I almost neglected the path of
inquiry that is /the/ single most interesting intellectual topic in my life.

So, young hackers out there, keep an open mind and a long-term view when you
are following his advice to "do whatever you want." That's exactly what he
meant by that, I think.

~~~
patio11
Personally, I find that about four classes provided enough value to excuse the
rest of the CS degree (two of those were "technical writing" and "stats"), and
that I would have never been able to do what I do today without a few years as
a stuffy boring enterprise dev first.

~~~
msort
Computer Science Core = Algorithms + Compilers + Operating Systems

After all, N. Wirth wrote a book titled: Data Structures + Algorithms =
Programs

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dotpavan
good one. gist of keynote- dont be afraid to fail, there is lots to learn from
it, follow what you genuinely love and use, and do what works for you best

there is something so enchanting reading about github, 37signals, etc.. they
are filled with passion, do not talk about money (as an objective) and most of
all inspire others to follow their heart and pursue their love

~~~
wallflower
I saw the GitHub guys talk at RailsConf '08.

It struck me that they were all uber confident - they seemed that they knew
what they were going to do and, as needed, they adjusted their course. I was
walking out of this talk and mentioned this as smalltalk to guy next to me and
he said he had known one of the GitHub guys for years - and in the several
years that he has known him - he has always been calm confident and relaxed.

They were very inspiring.

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azsromej
I'm still in the process of upgrading my ambition, but I've so far been happy
to just get to the point where I can release something. If it makes > $10/mo
on its own, consistently, I smile (which brings me back to needing to upgrade
ambitions)

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anuraggoel
When you compare this to a previous keynote here:
<http://gist.github.com/6443> you can see how he's getting better at this.

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sho
This is probably going to go against the grain a little, but I have some
problems with GitHub.

Firstly and probably most obviously, their business is based almost in its
entirity around a single third party open source tool, without which they
would have nothing at all, and yet their site is not open source. I know they
have every right, legally, to do this, but to me it seems .. exploitative.

I wouldn't even care, really - that's what it's all about, after all - but
they're just so arrogant about it. Wanstrath especially. Just go look at the
very latest post on his blog. The last sentence - "Welcome to distributed
version control." is just so smug and really rubs me up the wrong way.

Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that way, it's very probable, but something
just feels wrong.

Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is
_distributed_. Github is the antithesis of this! And it has real-world
consequences, too - it's slow as hell. It's not Facebook for programmers, it's
Geocities for programmers, and I for one can't wait until all those Github
users learn how to set up their own repositories.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Github. It's nice looking and works fairly
well, apart from the speed. They certain picked the right wave to jump on and
it was very right place, right time. And I love git.

But Github can't last that long, IMO. Trying to force a distributed version
control system into a "hub" is not sustainable. Many people, including myself,
would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. And
the web interface is better than gitweb but hardly light years ahead of
everyone else.

I think it's just a matter of time before we see a proper distributed git
community - a "git mesh", if you will. Obviously there are some pieces missing
before that can occur, but I think it's inevitable. These "hubs" never last.
Just try to name one that has.

~~~
old-gregg
Every web-based startup is like that: 99.999% of their code base is someone
else's outsourced work yet they keep their own code closed. Why such high
percentage of other people's code? Because nobody can afford to:

* Implement their own SQL server

* Implement their own programming language

* Implement their own web framework

* Implement their own 234 libraries for parsing, fetching, I/O, threading, etc etc etc.

However, I feel exactly the same way you do. But not regarding Github. They're
what YouTube is for flash, they're basically Rackspace - a hosting company.

The company that pisses me off the most is Scribbd. Their entire product is an
evil flashizator of OpenOffice's file converter. And an closed-source
flashizator at that. Not only they're destroying the web with their laptop-
burning binary browser crasher, but they're parasitizing on one of the most
successful, most needed (and struggling) open source projects without
contributing anything back.

~~~
blasdel
Scribd doesn't even have the source to their own Flashizer! It's FlashPaper,
which was Macromedia's somewhat lame attempt at competing with PDF pre-buyout.

~~~
natrius
If I remember correctly, Scribd started out using FlashPaper, but they
developed their own supposedly superior iPaper to replace it.

