Paul Biggar, a founder and former CircleCI and Darklang creator, writes about startups, compilers, devops, and politics in tech.
HN links his posts on startup failure, the 'It's the Future' devops rant, and his public stance on Israel and Gaza that drew a CircleCI response.
Founders new to coding write horrible code. And that is ok!
At the beginning the biggest risk is not writting terrible code you will regreat having written, let alone give maintance. The biggest risk is making something nobody wants.
From my experience, the biggest issue comes after you get enough traction/money/funding to hire a team. This is where things can get really bad, when the founder thinks he actually knows how to solve CS problems, and says things like: "This Machine Learning thing is not that hard: I wrote the landing page for the startup in 3 hours without any programming knowledge".
Hubris is one dangerous trait that will get anyone in trouble. Founders, due to their natural Reality Distortion Field[1], can be a victim of it[2].
Kent Beck, creator the agile methodology XP, discussed some of this in his The Flight of a Startup[3]
[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/09/visionarys-lament.html
[2] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
[3] http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=251
This darklang project has been going on 5 years now. From my memory everyone quit or was laid off except the founder, who has been working on it as a one man band. But since the Israeli conflict he has publicly called out the VC industry and has become a sort of political warrior:
https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
Overall I would stick to a normal language like Python over what this project is. It’s too ambitious for one person and it has all this other hair on it.
Blog Post: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
Jim Rose, ceo of CircleCI, responded by pointing out on social media that “Paul does not speak on behalf of” the San Francisco-based company, which he declared was “committed to our customers in Israel and around the world”. Soon afterwards, however, Rose posted: “Effective December 22, Paul Biggar is no longer a director at CircleCI. We thank him for his contributions on the board and wish him the best for what’s next.”
For those missing context, Paul Biggar released a blog (https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/) decrying what he saw as a massacre of Palestinians conducted by Israel, and supported by what he considered the overwhelmingly pro-zionist tech VC industry. He called out some of his own investors by name.
Paul Graham has tweeted similarly, and also called out collusion in the tech/VC industry to silence Palestinian voices.
By the way, there is an alternative to HipHop that is actually easier to implement because it makes php extensions.
It's called PHC http://phpcompiler.org and it's open source.
It was Paul Biggar's PhD thesis http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/a-rant-about-php-compilers-in-general-and-hiphop-in-particular/
It just needs some community contributions to catch up.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but was he really fired just for writing that blog post? (https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/)
That seems pretty crazy, although I suppose to play devil's advocate the ongoing, erm, 'conflict', was clearly interfering with his ability to output work ("I can't work. I code for 5 minutes before their bodies come back")