Disqus - Latest Comments for afternoon

Re: Learning to Read x86 Assembly Language

Ben Godfrey — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 13:37:42 -0000

I've been playing with LLVM a little bit recently and found this very useful.

I compiled a C version of Hello World to assembler using Clang and got this output:

https://gist.github.com/aft...

I'm intrigued to know what all this means!

Re: Ben Godfrey — Don Reinertsen and others propose Cost of Delay as...

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 04 May 2016 12:51:33 -0000

I would say that's one type of opportunity cost - a team not servicing technical debt would be more efficient and could build more product features. However, there are lots of indirect costs that I haven't modelled, including the impact on people.

A more detailed model might include the cost of time spent recovering from failures that would be saved if the root cause were addressed. The calculation of the cost of an hour of failure could easily be extended to include the staff costs of recovering from the failure.

Staff churn cost due to poor quality is also a factor. Sometimes people quit because they're getting called out to support flakey software too much and not getting the time to fix stuff or indeed because they're not proud of the work they're doing. If we lose a member of staff, we lose their experience which impacts cycle time and quality, we have to recruit a new team member, which has direct recruiting costs and the indirect cost of bringing them up to speed, not to mention the negative impact on the morale of their team, which reduces motivation, furthering impacting cycle time.

Re: Vim Auto-closers Compared

Ben Godfrey — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 11:30:29 -0000

Surround is a really awesome plugin for adding and editing pairs of surrounding characters, but doesn't do quite the same thing as the auto-closers. I use both.

Re: Thoughts on quant approaches to early stage investing

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 06:53:34 -0000

Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is a must read for discussion of decision making in conditions of extreme uncertainty. He outlines a simple scoring system that he used for officer training selection. In that example, he found combining quantative approaches and intuition produced the best results. His simple technique is applicable to a wide range of problems, although it's only a foundation.

Re: The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:58:27 -0000

For me, the key point in Ikai's response is that bad development processes are more often to blame for bad software than poorly skilled developers.

Re: Likely riding a massive speculation wave, Bitcoin prices exceed $200

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:01:44 -0000

Media coverage is a predictor of price at the moment and the amount of coverage is growing.

What will happen when the coverage dies down? Collapse, plateau or slow decline?

Re: European startups need to be valued higher – in more ways than one

Ben Godfrey — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:55:17 -0000

Isn't the short answer that US companies are much more likely to achieve those valuations at exit?

Re: http://joshuamarch.com/post/32387903581

Ben Godfrey — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 08:00:43 -0000

Congratulations on delivering iPlatform to the next level and thanks for writing up the history. A nice concise story which I suspect hides a lot of late nights and painful decisions but has a brilliant ending!

Re: http://eatmychart.tumblr.com/post/12325931206

Ben Godfrey — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 14:02:00 -0000

This is my favourite so far.

Digging the flowcharts, but they're leaving me in the dark about the flow of time a little bit. Doesn't matter so much for this recipe, but was thinking something like a sequence diagram might be interesting in that there's a linear flow of time from top to bottom.

Like the decision-fork on this one.

Re: Puppet: Server Configuration Made Easy

Ben Godfrey — Sun, 15 May 2011 17:29:15 -0000

I didn't like running the puppet client because of the memory and CPU overhead either. As a workaround I wrote a Fabric script which runs puppet agent on each slave host. Puppet is still essential for discovering and modifying the configuration of each machine. Fabric provides a single command to kick off an update when I'm ready.

Re: http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/why-your-startup-needs-a-visual-dashboard

Ben Godfrey — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:18:45 -0000

Munin is a good tool for getting a quick fix of ops metrics. It's plugin protocol is incredibly simple which makes it easy to collect and regularly graph data series from systems throughout your business.

Re: The London startup scene: Too much funding, boozing and not enough collaboration and execution

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:21:55 -0000

GrowthTank would be a really welcome addition to the Tank events roster!

Re: Protected: Part 1: Introducing riak_core

Ben Godfrey — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:38:30 -0000

riak_core sounds like an extremely useful framework. You guys are doing a great job of pushing out useful tools and knowledge. I look forward to the graph DB posts.

Re: Is Flattr the new Facebook Like, but this time with real money?

Ben Godfrey — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:20:42 -0000

I like it. It's a space that really needs some innovation.

+1 for an invite. Thanks Mike!

Re: Vodafone’s femtocell pricing is wrong

Ben Godfrey — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:58:41 -0000

Perfect example of the culture of greed which still prevails at the operators. You pay them to use your own broadband!

Re: My new Blackberry and email on the iPhone

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:08:54 -0000

YMMV, but I gave up on filing emails when I switched to Gmail. I just use search now.

Re: TouchOSC + laptop + music software + iPhone/iTouch = Siiiickness

Ben Godfrey — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:21:30 -0000

Really really nice. Thanks for the link!

Re: Should UK based startups vote LibDem? Probably not.

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:24:18 -0000

There is no specific mention of Entrepreneur's Relief in the Lib Dem manifesto, so it's difficult to verify or invalidate this claim. Contrast that with Labour's specific pledge to raise the Entrepreneur's Relief limit to £2M.

I don't particularly love this policy, but I think it's important to see it in a broader context. CGT is indeed abused as a tax evasion technique by many. Right now the biggest threat to entrepreneurs is a severely beaten economy. Labour plans to spend on expensive boondoggles (Trident, biometric passports), while the Tories will slash public spending. The Lib Dems represent a third, more pragmatic approach which reduces spending by rationalising a lot of the public sector.

Re: Cycling in London - the Fix

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:38:01 -0000

Nice one for making this happen. Perhaps we should have a customer discovery session, i.e. get a few people together and discuss how the product could solve the problems you've identified.

Re: A note on first mover advantage – there is none

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:53:15 -0000

It's amazing that this myth has persisted with so many high-profile counter-examples. Great to see some hard data.

Re: Update on Go Test It

Ben Godfrey — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:39:46 -0000

Great to hear you're taking the plunge. I'm sure Go Test It will be iterating fast with your full time attention. Enjoy the customer development cycle!

Re: Embrace your startup failure – the faster you fail, the better

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:45:04 -0000

Absolutely. Entrepreneurial inspiration is a great service that individuals and small organisations offer in the marketplace. Investors can't come up with enough of it so they crowd-source. For an entrepreneur to be successful, the trick is to try something similar: iterating. The best iterating process we have at the moment follows Eric Ries' lean startup methodology, which is very scientific in it's inspiration, if a little more scrappy in it's execution.

Re: Speaking My Mind

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:18:41 -0000

Reading blogs is always about taking the rough with the smooth (*cough* TechCrunch), but then so is buying ice cream.

You have a right to free speech, as do your readers, but public speech will always bring the haters. Your choice is to press on and take (or ignore) the criticism or stick to less contentious topics.

Re: Kelly Brook Promotes Skyride

Ben Godfrey — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:34:00 -0000

I'm going to take a bunch of cycling newbies out to Skyride. It's about letting people who don't ride get their first taste of the city. The route is closed to traffic so it's a super-safe, fun day for kids, the chronically unstable and everyone else.

If Kelly Brook can ride in those heels, she gets respect :-).

Re: Good Morning Ocotillo! (VIDEO) – Sunrise Cycling in the Desert

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:09:31 -0000

Love it! Makes me want to ride my bike so bad.

Did you mount the camera on the top or the seat tube? The shot is actually really stable.

There's a short film in the Bike Film Fest this year that does the same thing around London. Which reminds me, if you fancy a trip to LA, the BFF is showing August 26 - 30.