First, don't go it alone. If you can't find a few friends that you can convince that you are on to something with whatever product ideas you have then you aren't on to something.

Software development is a team sport. Even if the other players are you in 6 months. Have coding standards. Have have your IDE or some program enforce them. Write documentation. Use version control. Use a bug tracking system. (Yeah, all that stuff you've read is best-practice... it got published as best-practice for a reason.) As a startup select a "major" language but for scripting just accept that any of perl, python, ruby, bash are fine. Train, mentor, and grow your people. You want really good generalists at this stage and not experts that can't also do ops, admin, front-line, etc. Using open-source software is a force multiplier. If you are going to extend OSS just make sure that your product value is in the data you are generating and not the code (since you'll be giving the code away for free).

You'll want to find people at least as good as you are for raising money, marketing, sales, product development, and IT (assuming you'll be CTO/VP Eng and leading development; if not find a CTO [tech strategist to put in front of investors and give you something coherent as far as technology goes], and/or a VP Eng [developer+manager who can wrangle the cats and makes sure product gets delivered when product is supposed to be delivered]. Coming from the tech side of things do NOT undervalue marketing, sales, and your CEO. The better mousetrap will not sell itself. At the same time while a great sales guy can sell snow to Eskimos they won't pay a lot for it. Find/build a team that covers each others weaknesses.

Gonna stop here. Could go on like this for a while since this is what I've been living the past 4 years.

Blogs in no particular order: Joel on Software, Paul Graham, any other 2-3 of the top tech incubators in the country (Google em).

Finally, ignore anything above that doesn't make sense for the business you are running.

It's not being an expert at some particular language that ends up paying. It's being an expert. You will always have to play your cards right but there are high paying jobs in any of the languages. Figure out the style you like, become an expert in one of its mainline languages, play your cards right, profit.

First all the unicode operators of scalaz have names as well. Second, just what language is the functional library scalaz written in? I'll bet *that* would be a pretty good functional language to work with.

It's Scala. They left out pattern matching and didn't drive the monadic nature of common programming collections through the collection classes. You can leave out the monads (although the first time you want to convert the contents of an Optional value via a function returning an Option you'll wish they hadn't) but leaving out pattern matching was a plain and simple misstep.

I guess I did miss the point. Since in my family it was all about how misguided the Vietnam war was and talks of student sit ins and such. Fonda was naive but she was, I think, on the correct side of the argument.

But I guess you missed the point too. Holder stated [1] that the Executive Branch wasn't going to make a blanket statement hemming in the Executive to use drones during such events as Peal Harbor and 9/11. So what we've got is a temper tantrum which compares two of the most epic events in US history where the power of the Executive would have swept pretty much anything before it to a single Vietnam war protester who happened to get a lot of attention because she was a celebrity over whom the Executive could only exert the most minor of authority. If a drone were to have killed Jane Fonda it would have been an obvious criminal action. If a drone had shot down one of the remaining jets after the towers were hit it would have been a justified use of a military force to avoid a larger death toll. Trying to compare the two is simply trying to derail the stated response to (Rand's) original question.

[1] http://paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanHolderResponse.pdf

Holder's comment that set off Paul was that he wouldn't rule out a President using drone attacks on US soil during such hypothetical events as those of 7 Dec 1941 and 11 Sep 2001. From there to Jane Fonda. I didn't realize she was such a national treasure.

Have the drones on the border only been going after sub-humans?

(Dang. Wish I'd gotten in on this thread earlier because I'm just gonna repeat elements from the best posts.)

Yes I have daily meeting with my team; Monday and Thursday 10-10:20 Mountain.

Yes it's productive. Younger hands call roadblocks and the elders speak up with, "I'll help you on that".
Someone's stalled for a couple of weeks or three without calling roadblock and I start to ask about things in our weekly 1-1 (burnout; too proud to ask for help; "Nailing top tier in my guild's PvP rankings but I'll be back in the saddle next week").
Meetings run long with dirt-diving, carping, gossip about execs then my canary just died.

I was a unix sysadmin for six years, manager for three, developer for four and now I'm back in the manager slot. In that time I had a manager that held a daily hour meeting and a project manager that held once weeklies that I would trade my teeth to get as much out of my team as they did out of us but I'm not them and my team isn't the one they worked with and my dailys held twice a week work for me.

Dailys are the answer for everything. (Except when they aren't.)

    -CZ

I envy you then. Our Alamo's food is less than stellar. (West Oaks, Houston.) The special features are very good but the normal menu is straight out of cans and the freezer. Just a touch more effort on their part would go a long way. I'm not expecting miracles but I'd rather not have to stick to the two things on the menu I've found to be... hard to do wrong.

With that mini-rant out of the way I totally agree with you that, in general, they are the way to go for a good evening at the movies. (Other of their locations I've been very happy with the food so I suspect it's a kitchen issue.)

    0.02USD

Joel also runs Fog Creek Software. Tell your boss you want this sort of environment http://www.fogcreek.com/about.html since Joel recommends it.

10-11 hour days can be done. I aim for 65 hours a week. They can't be done without extenuating circumstances though when you can just walk on over to the next shop and get the same pay for a standard 8 hour day. Update your resume. It might work out but I'd bet against.

    -CZ

Just encrypt your email. You'll get the noticed desired when the warrant is served for your encryption keys.

    -CZ

When this happens to me I just imagine my wife and children living under a bridge. It's amazing how motivated I get to grind out the code. Hmm. If you don't like your wife and kids you might check the next post.

    -CZ

Fine. No null references. So I create the same thing by having a reference to some unique structure (probably named Null) and I still *fail to check for it*.

Null references don't kill programs. Programmers do.

    -CZ

I also am forced in to clearcase. Here's the workflow I use:

        ct mkview ...
        cd /view/VIEW/vob/blah/dir
        git init
        git add .
        git commit -m 'Init'
        cd /somewhere/else
        git clone /view/VIEW/vob/blah/dir
        # do real work rather than fight clearcase

Git plays quite nicely with other systems.

        -CZ

PS - Easy enough to write a small script to sync difference back to clearcase or update your clearcase master and merge into your workspace.