http://leavingcorporate.com On technology and startups Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:31:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Socialbrowse all started with us wanted to help you waste less time online. Really! Our initial project during Y Combinator was 8aweek, a browser extension that helps you limit how much time you waste browsing the web each day. 8aweek generated a large and passionate following and just before demo day, ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/07/11/the-evolution-of-socialbrowse/ I just finished debuging a confusing issue on socialbrowse.com and wanted to make a quick note about working out of the django trunk.  I've been happily working from the django-trunk for over a year now and ignorantly updating whenever I felt the fancy or I found a new feature to ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/07/09/working-from-the-django-trunk/ I've been answering a lot of questions for a few friends who just got into the summer round of YC and are figuring a lot of things out.  It reminds me of how much I learned over the past 11 months using Django and 3 months on Elastic Compute Cloud ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/05/13/8-thing-you-should-know-about-amazon-ec2/ Here are my cookbook notes for setting up cmemcache, the python extension for libmemcache on Ubuntu. You'll want to install this if you're using the Django cache framework or need to use memcached for any other python needs. The cookbook is mostly an abbreviation of the setup instructions for reviewboard. ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/05/04/installing-cmemcache-on-ubuntu/ The current winter cycle of Y Combinator, which Dave and I are participating in, just completed the 2 demo days and is now moving into a new stage: raising investment capital and growing the businesses. As our "official" Y Combinator experience comes to a close (the network of founders will ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/24/how-to-get-accepted-for-a-y-combinator-interview/ Paul Graham, our investor and the brains behind Y Combinator just wrote a great essay that really sums up my feelings about leaving corporate america and really goes with the theme of this blog. Wanted to pass it along to our readers. Check it out. http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/20/you-werent-meant-to-have-a-boss/ 8aweek is getting some press back home in Minnesota. Dave and I both attended the University of Minnesota, and today 8aweek is featured in the campus newspaper, The Minnesota Daily. http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/07/8aweek-article-in-the-minnesota-daily/ Fans of 8aweek may have heard of another company that helps you manage your time: RescueTime. If you're a startup junkie you'll also know that both 8aweek and RescueTime are funded in the winter '08 batch of Y Combinator -- as Michael Arrington noted, "The products seem too close for ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/04/8aweek-and-rescuetime/ A friend is asking how to install HAproxy because I'd just done it three weeks ago, so I'm publishing my install notes, most of which I stole from another friend. HAproxy is a pretty sweet tool but currently has little written about it so installation and configuration takes reading a large ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/03/session-based-load-balancing-with-haproxy/ I just got around to reading the Newsweek article on YC. In it Paul is quoted referring to the Zenters "These guys have written 40,000 lines of code in three months!" The Zenters were just a couple of guys with some work experience similar to Zack and I. But ... http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/02/keeping-up-with-the-zenters/