Sunday Seven #1 -- GitHub, VC, Twitter, and more

Every week at the end of my Laravel newsletter I would include seven interesting links. Typically they would be totally unrelated to web development and to keep the newsletter focused I decided I’m going to move those over here as a weekly blog post.

Here are seven links for you to check out this weekend: 

The full inside story on GitHub →

This covers a lot of the issues we’ve known about but it’s interesting seeing the shift to enterprise and hiring more sales people.

With so much push for enterprise and more profit I think it’s going to create a division within the company and the developers using it for their open source projects are going to be the ones that lose.

I also find this second sentence hard to believe unless the leadership doesn’t use the product or listen to customers:

A bunch of active and influential users sent a letter in January called “Dear GitHub” in which they asked for a bunch of product features, too. At least one person told us that this letter alarmed some of the leadership team.

Related: The GitHub Silo

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What it’s like to take on venture capital investment →

Pretty good demonstration of the different mindset between bootstrappers and VC’s.

You’re not trying to build a little profitable lifestyle business. You’re trying to build a huge-scale media business. That means you’re likely to lose money for a long time. [..] You’ve said that instead of taking some money out of savings, and build a little podcast show, and hiring a sales guy to go sell some ads, instead you have definitely signed up for the huge media empire building quest here. You’re Rupert Murdoch now. You’re gonna need a 187 foot yacht before you’re satisfied.

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Here’s how Twitter’s new algorithmic timeline will work →

The algorithm [..] is based on the one that ranks tweets for the “while you were away” feature

I have no idea how an algorithmic feed would work but I do know I hate Facebooks. Maybe it’s because FB has a lot of friends from school and life that I have nothing in common with, or maybe it’s because of this feed.

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I won the Super Bowl in a McLaren 570S →

You will have conversations with people, and not always truthful ones. Coming out of the hotel, a Dutch tourist saw the car parked out front and asked what it was. Then he asked me what my job was. I told him, “cocaine.”

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Book: “Badass: Making Users Awesome” →

I’ve just finished this book and it’s good for thinking about your users and what their goals are for using your product or service, and how to keep them moving forward when they hit stumbling blocks.

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mjml – Responsive Email Framework →

MJML stands for “Mailjet Markup Language”. MJML has been designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email. Leveraging its semantic syntax and a rich standard components library, making your email responsive is not an issue anymore.

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How to configure Xdebug in PhpStorm through Vagrant →

I’ve been wanting to get this workflow set back up and this appears to be a great tutorial to follow along with. /ht @jesseschutt

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