Friday, April 27, 2012

Looking for an assistant, apprentice, or intern programmer

I have the good fortune of having three awesome software business projects in the pipeline. My idea garden has never been more luscious!  Our goals for these three projects are ambitious and I'd love to get some help with them.

If you've got basic programming ability and are looking for a way to get started as a professional programmer, or you want to get some experience working on early-stage products, or you think I'm an interesting person, I'd love to work with someone who wants to learn the ropes. I would give you lots of mentoring and lots of responsibility for executing different parts of these ideas. We could work out equity compensation if that's interesting to you, but the main benefit would be experiential. By the time we're done you would know a lot about how to launch your own products.

All three of these involve working with successful, super interesting, super smart non-technical entrepreneurs. So that's an additional benefit.

I don't even know if such a person exists, but I think when I was getting started I would have loved to do something like this.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Three more important, straightforward computer security precautions

I had many non-tech friends tell me they appreciated my article about two important computer security precautions everyone should take. So here are three more I recommend:
  1. Start using different passwords for everything. I recommend either LastPass or 1Password to help you track them all. These tools take care of auto-filling the password also help you generate super strong passwords.  If you only change ONE password from the default you use everywhere, it should be your email password. If you lose control of your email you could lose control of many online services. (Note: LastPass is better if you use multiple machines, as it seamlessly syncs passwords across browsers in a secure way)
  2. Make sure the browser you regularly use has locked-down Java and Flash settings. Mac users are no longer invulnerable to these attack vectors. That article explains what Windows, Mac, and Linux users should do to avoid the whole class of attacks represented by the new Flashback malware.
  3. For laptops, store your data on an encrypted disk. Ideally you would encrypt your whole hard drive; OS X has a nice feature called File Vault that will do this for you easily, and doesn't seem to affect the computer's performance.