Hartley Brody

One of the first emotional responses we must learn as children is how to handle disappointment and loss. Whether it’s learning to share a toy or coping with the loss of a family member, our formative years offer constant reminders that life doesn’t always work out how we want it.

Coming to terms with that is a huge part of growing up.

But I’m starting to see the other side of that coin.

As a young adult, I have the autonomy to be relentless in my pursuit of happiness. I don’t have to go to class. I don’t have to mow the lawn or do the dishes. There’s no systematic frustrations I must put up with or tribulations I must survive.

It is 100% up to me to make sure that I’m enjoying every single day. And if I’m not, it’s my own fault. The only constraint is that I provide for myself. Past that, I’m essentially unencumbered.

In my last article, I talked about how I sent a weather balloon and video camera into space, but needed help finding the footage. I posted the article to Hacker News and promptly fell asleep, exhausted after a long day of adventure.

When I woke up, my inbox was full of comments from people all over the world showing support and offering to help. Apparently, the post made it to the #3 spot on the front page and drew almost 10,000 views to the article.

One email was from a HN’er who goes by wavewash, or Mo in real life. He told me his company was offering to sponsor the search for the missing footage, using a remote control airplane with a camera to fly over the forested area and conduct an aerial search.

He and I went back and forth and, two weeks later (waiting out hurricane Sandy) we were on the road together with his girlfriend, driving up to Maine to continue the search.

Like most of the nation, last weekend I watched the Red Bull Stratos live stream of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump.

For me, one of the best parts of the stream was the moment when the cabin finally depressurized and the door slid open. Suddenly, you could see both vastness of space and the bright blue curvature of the earth over his shoulder, and it took my breath away.

It had always been a dream of mine to see the earth like that, and watching Felix’s live stream got me so amped up, I couldn’t hold off any longer.

The Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS) is almost as old as the market for software itself.

Back in the 1980s, Richard Stallman started the Free Software Foundation as a reaction to the growing commercialization of software. He framed the issue not as a commercial one, but as a moral one:

Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”.
— Free Software Definition

To this day, many people still think of FOSS as a matter of liberty. Quoting again for the GNU project’s answer to “What is Free Software”:

When users don’t control the program, the program controls the users. The developer controls the program, and through it controls the users. This nonfree or “proprietary” program is therefore an instrument of unjust power.

Clearly the FOSS movement is grounded in morals and philosophy.

But for me, I don’t tend to moralize about software too much. Instead, I work with open-source projects and technologies for more practical reasons. I’ve found they tend to be more well-documented, efficient, secure and easily extendable than their close-sourced counterparts.

If you’re starting a project or learning a new language – or just choosing software as an end-user – those are all great reasons why you should consider an open-source option.

Just a quick collection of things I’ve learned as I’ve transitioned from college into “the real world” these past 4 months.

You’re a lot less active.

On campus, I was always walking or biking around. Not only cause I enjoyed it, but because I had to. Every class, every meal, and every study group or party meant walking at least a few hundred yards. And I’d rarely be in one place for more than two hours, so I’d end up walking or biking a pretty decent amount every day, without meaning to.

Now, on an average day, I only have to bike to work (about a mile) and then back home. I spend hours sitting at a desk during the day, and then again sitting on a couch when I come home. This is actually something I was warned about by a recent alum. It’s easy to get stuck in one spot for hours.

Some people try to compensate for their new found sluggishness by joining a gym. These are never cheap, and usually not as good as the world class facilities we had available to us as students, which makes them feel like an even worse deal. Personally, I do calisthenics in the morning and sometimes go for runs or bike rides on the weekend.

You have to really go out of your way to stay active, or else you feel like shit.

It’s been a while since HubSpot has made a fun video. The last one I was a part of was actually one of my first projects at HubSpot last spring.

Huge shout out to HubSpot’s awesome video team and to all the background dancers (both the volunteers and the unwitting).

I’m glad I get to work for a company that has this much fun.

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One of the first steps of tackling a new web application is figuring out where bottlenecks might arise.

Now, you don’t want to go too far down this route, or you’ll end up designing yourself into oblivion. As Donald Knuth famously said:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

But it’s still good to have a sense of where your system might get bogged down under heavy load. For example, database calls are often the first place you’ll start noticing slowness in your app. Or if you have to make a network request – say, hitting a third party API – that can add more than a full second to the amount of time it takes your application to serve a response to a visitor.

Break It Down

I’ve heard it said that good code should only serve a single, specific purpose. If you can take a given process and break it down into two or more simpler processes, that’s usually the best way to go.

I always kind of knew that was a good design goal, but I didn’t realize how powerful it was until I started playing around with message queues.

Along with about 35 million other Americans, I’ve been watching the Olympics in primetime every night after work.

And while NBC has done a notoriously bad job at keeping the production fair and balanced, it’s still pretty easy to tell that some countries are pulling in way more medals than others.

Currently, the United States has the most gold medals while China has the most overall medals and Great Britain is third in both categories. But these totals are changing every few hours, so check out the latest numbers here.

Seeing the same countries on the podium made me curious: are there patterns between the countries that bring home the most medals?

Specifically, if you controlled for the size of a country’s economy, would you be able to predict the number of medals they’d win?

Could Olympic prowess be a leading indicator of a country’s financial success? Or maybe it worked the other way, and a growing economy was a sign of increasing athletic competitiveness?

The questions were piling up and I needed to find answers.

A lot has been written on the topic of personal finance, but it all comes down to a fundamental fact: In our lives, we earn money, and we spend money – and in between, we accumulate money.

Pretty obvious, right? So if we want to accumulate more money, we have to either earn more of it, or spend less of it. Still with me?

The Power of Wealth

In my college economics classes, we rarely dealt with the topic of “money” directly, it was always just a worthless medium of exchange. People don’t really derive value from money itself, but from the things it helps them buy.

But in the real world, that’s not exactly true. Having a small fortune gives you peace of mind if you lose your job or want to take time off. It allows you to purchase things when you want, rather than having to bounce from pay check to pay check. And if you accumulate money for awhile, you can purchase big ticket items like a house or a car.

We all know that we should be saving money, but there are all sorts of reasons we don’t.

As a recent college graduate myself, I still vividly remember getting my first pay check and the feeling of seeing a few extra Gs in my bank account. I suddenly had all sorts of spending impulses.

I could go out for dinner every night. I could open a tab at the bar and put all of my friends drinks on it like a boss. I could get a new bike or a bunch of new clothes.

Fortunately, it was easy to rein in those impulses and put money aside – all without having to turn into an obsessive penny pincher.

Here’s how I do it.

Yesterday, Sam and I met with a VC in a shiny new office building in downtown Cambridge.

We knew we were punching above our weight class meeting with top-tier VCs at this stage, so we were simply hoping to pitch our concept, demo the site and get some advice on how to make it successful and raise money.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to our competitors. “This is a very, very crowded space right now,” he emphasized. “There are lots of well-funded sites you’d be competing against.”

Of course, we already knew that.

But while there are many differences between our startup and the others, one difference stands out as most glaring to me – they’re funded and we’re not.

Our competitors don’t necessarily have a better product (although this is hard to measure objectively). Their organic user acquisition channels aren’t very strong. Some have atrociously designed flows and a confusing user experience. The founders couldn’t be that much smarter than us. ;)

But they’ve been able to do a lot more in large part because they’ve been given resources to hire talented people, spend money on paid user acquisition channels and pull big PR stunts.

In order to compete on their level, we’d have to raise money. But how?

I pressed him.