I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. If I’m being asked to do startup Some founders are taken aback. They are calling me to go build what they tell me to build.

That’s why Roger Smith puts the focus of the CTO on programming for the earliest stage. What worries me a bit is how often I read that startups should hire a developer / hands-on lead developer. But often the result of a Founder hiring a developer or lead developer or even a VP engineering is a gap created between the founders and the developers. I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO

Just saw a great post by Mark Geller - Developers wanted… in Los Angeles, U.S.A. (you can get to know Mark a bit more in my post Product Manager Entrepreneur Mark Geller ). Mark tells us: there is a lot of demand for developers right here in L.A. who would love to talk with you. There’s quite a bit of truth to what Mark is saying about startup software developers, but my guess is that If you have solid web skills and a few years experience, either with a commercial company or running your own legit projects, there are dozens of companies in L.A. reduced

Los Angeles-based social networking site is looking to court developers with the launch of a development contest, the MySpace Developer Challenge , the firm said recently. Tags: myspace developer challenge contest prize social networking application softwar The site said the challenge will award $50,000 between winners submitting MySpace applications, which use the firm's Real-Time Stream API, Open Search API, Photo Upload API, or which integrate the service on the Apple iPhone. Judges on the contest include Mike Jones, COO of MySpace; angel investor Ron Conway; Google's

He is a software engineer at heart and loves tinkering on the site to make it the best product possible. Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. He essentially mentored me into becoming more than an engineer, becoming a product manager, and by the end of Tickle, I was not just a coder, I was managing a team of ten people including marketing, design, business development and engineering, and et cetera. Here's an easy way to vote for this interview on Hacker News. --Andrew Andrew

In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them. LA CTO Forum Dealmaker Media Digital Family Reunion Startups Uncensored Social Media Club, LA Twiistup Mindshare LA LA Hadoop Meetup Dorkbot Geek Dinners LA Cloud Computing LA Web Application Developers LA PHP Developers In addition to these, I'd recommend looking at: Technology Council of Southern California – Surprised John didn't mention this one.

This is a private group of CTOs who are responsible for software development within their companies. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database design, database administration, web development, etc. In a recent conversation with a fellow CTO, we lamented about the fact that while there's very active software development and web development going on in Southern California and West Los Angeles, yet there didn't seem to be as much of a community around it. I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years.

He came to Mixergy to talk about why Varien grew (it had a lot to do with focus) and how the company launched Magento (his developers pushed him to do it). It was developed by Varien , the company Roy created as a student. It was basically a way for me to continue doing what I’ve been doing for years which is engineering and development and maintain a student lifestyle and have a company that’s trying its Roy Rubin was a student trying to make extra money on the side when he founded Varien, the company that went on to launch Magento, an ecommerce platform that enables billions of dollars in online sales.

He was struggling to find high quality developers in Los Angeles. Just the kind of person I like to meet. :) But I was a bit surprised when he emphasized how hard it had been for them to find a web developer in Los Angeles. My flippant comment was, “If you do a Google search for Los Angeles web developer, you’ll find a LOT of people and firms.” His response was that he had done exactly that, but that the long list is not all that useful. Yesterday, I met with someone at the early stage of a startup. He has a great concept with some complexity to it.

But it was not until the last couple years that I updated my skills and capabilities in web development. You can experiment with web development on your Mac. do not know much about PHP yet, but I am able to do everything mentioned in this post without basic PHP or MySQL knowledge, since most of the apps I run were developed by someone else. I first started messing around with HTML in DreamWeaver and Claris Home Page around 1999 to put up my own music website. I would like to share what I have learned.