As I referenced yesterday in my previous post, I have, after much consideration, decided to leave my role as CTO at Tour Wrist and move on to other things. I won’t review the reasoning here in detail, but will summarize, that I put my best efforts into that position for 8 months, and believe I helped provide a more solid technology platform they can build on for years to come, as well as provided some valuable input into their business plan. But in the end, the company culture simply wasn’t a fit with the way I think and work and problem solve. And when you aren’t able to be yourself, everything just feels off. It’s exhausting. When that happens its time to move on for the good of everyone involved.
Why I’m Leaving Tour WristJune 29, 2011
Important Note: The purpose of this post is to discuss the importance of culture fit between employer and employee and use a personal example of why I was not a good fit at a company as a timely example. This article is not intended to bash TourWrist or disparage them in any way. I wish them the best and still have good friends working there who I continue to cheer on in their endeavors.
If you’ve been paying attention to the startup world over the last few years, you are very familiar with the emphasis on company culture. 37 Signals and Zappos might be two of the most famous companies for stressing the concept, but many of the successful startups have discussed the importance and purposefulness of it as well.
When you think about company culture, you might think about the way the office is designed, the clothes people wear to work, the benefits provided, and the company mission statement for dealing with customers and employees. But what you don’t often hear about are all the other pieces that I believe come together to form the company culture.
The Pains of Switching Checking Accounts…and the online solutionOctober 22, 2010
I recently switched checking accounts and I have so many auto payments going and online services hitting it that its been a total nightmare to get them all switched over. On top of that, I often have several accounts where I keep money and I’ve long found using that money to be a pain when spread out.
That got me thinking, that it would make for an interesting online service, to have a front account, complete with checks and debit card, that you would always use, but then hit whichever account you had setup with it at the time. This could also be a great solution to security issues. No one would really ever have access to your true accounts, only this account facade. The service could also easily help track all expenses across all accounts and log them all. You could setup that certain expenses pull from one account and other expenses pull from another. You would have a grace period of a day on all purchases before it hit your account, to report a false payment, and decide which account that particular expense should come out of.
With this, you could actually keep your money in multiple banks, benefiting from various different features at different banks, without the hassle of bank switching.
Just a thought. If anyone decides to go with this, let me know.
I finally made it through the rest of the Rails entries from the Rumble. In a previous post I published my favorites from the first half, but now that I’m done, I’ve picked my top ten, and I’m putting them all together here and listing some as Honorable Mentions.
The point of the Rumble, of course, is to show how much can be done in one weekend with the powerful web development framework, but too many of them seem to have taken the opposite approach and tried to see how little they could do in 48 hours. I’ve always felt this competition needs a ‘How much did you get done’ category, since I assume that was the point of the Rumble in the first place. Now it seems to be more about micro apps that could be built in 12 hours, which is safer, but less impressive regarding what Rails can do.
Favorite Rails Rumble Entries for 2010October 18, 2010
Before I write about my own experience this year in my second Rumble (my team’s entry this year is CommendableKids), I decided to try out as many of the entries as I could. I’ve gone through half of them at this point, and below are my favorites so far. Before I get to them, here are a few observations I’ve made while reviewing them all.