I discovered The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran around 2009 and it quickly became and has remained one of my favorites. I appreciate the descriptiveness and beauty of the language along with the continuing relevance of the advice. It's very easy reading and enjoyable to pick up for a short time and enjoy in small bits or read straight through.
In retail, "lift" is usually used in the context of sales. If you can consistently get customers who were visiting your store once a week to come back three times a week, but you only lift sales 20%, something is terribly wrong.
That said, the notion that there's a technology or technique that can sustainably triple repeat store visits on a widespread basis for small and mid-sized services businesses is absurd. If you could do this, you would not be raising $26 million from VCs.
Obviously, it's most likely that the author of this post simply didn't understand what he was writing. Or that I'm not hip to the New Math of the New New Economy.
I'm just not clear on how branching gets in the way of continuous integration here. What I've started doing is any time I change anything I do it in a branch. Once I've got my changes working, tested, and I'm ready to deploy, I merge that branch back to master. The idea here being that I could deploy from master at any time and be completely functional. That way I can just constantly deploy any time I merge something back to master.
Perhaps I misunderstood something here though. Does anybody have any thoughts on this idea?
In general, it doesn't. It just looks like they've established a process where CI takes place on the shared master.
Builds/testing can happen on any branch, any repo. I'd like to have some local testing take place (for syntax at a minimum) before anyone submits changes to a shared branch.
I absolutely agree with this. I recently started working on a small web app as a side project. I was dealing with a lot of elements that were new to me and was constantly pushing the limits of my knowledge and breaking things. I realized I wasn't using the power git provided me with branches.
Once I started branching things got quicker and more effective because I could bounce between tasks without affecting my deployment (master branch). In five days of frantic coding using git branching I now have a clean easy deployment of about 750 lines, which I iterated on through four different branches and, probably over 3000 lines of code.
It's not perfect, but it's eliminated any apprehension about aggressively changing my application, and made me far more ambitious. I feel great about it.
I've had a similar feeling of empowerment, although less structured. With hobby projects where sometimes I realize I was thinking all wrong about a certain solution, I'll just check in what I have and commence the deleting of large blocks. Occasionally I'll go back and find something that maybe was a good idea, but for the most part, having an excuse to part ways with bad ideas has alone been really great.
That's great, reducing the barrier to entry for new projects allows for more experimentation. More experimentation increases the likelihood you'll stumble upon something you really like!
What I meant to say more clearly is that I probably iterated through the creation of that web application so quickly because in five days I committed to git 75 times. In my time at Microsoft I don't know that I would have made 75 commits in a year, and creating new branches was very costly.
It would be very surprising to me if PaulG or anybody else at YC approved Dropbox's application without receiving what they believed to be a satisfactory answer to a question along the lines of "What happens when Amazon becomes your competition?"
Hal Abelson is a smart guy. He does a lot of work concerning law, privacy, and technology, including the internet and mobile devices. You may want to take a look at his book Blown to Bits http://www.bitsbook.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_%28book%29
A couple favorites of mine are:
On Pain - http://www.katsandogz.com/onpain.html
On Reason & Passion - http://www.katsandogz.com/onreason.html