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I built this… September 28, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Freelance , 3comments

Glad OnTheSnow released it, it’s a widget I programmed in Flash for them. Turned out really nice/useful :)

Check it out to embed it in your MySpace or blog!

I have a new cell phone number September 20, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Life , 2comments

+1 415 367 5181

Now update your address books!

thx

Here I come! September 15, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Life, Noodle , 8comments

It’s official… I have joined YouNoodle and I’m moving to San Francisco to work, and boy, am I excited!

I’m taking a gap year (or 10 hehe) from university to join the founding team of YouNoodle, a startup in San Francisco. I heard some advice the other day from Max Levchin on the GigaOm Show about how VCs invest their money. VCs don’t invest in ideas, they invest in people. I feel the same way about the people I choose to work alongside; YouNoodle has put together a team of superstars who can execute like no one’s business (think PayPal). I would do anything to work with these guys — heck, I’d even work for free just to be around them (wouldn’t be possible in SF though hehe). I will be starting as a Ruby on Rails engineer. I’ve had to learn Rails these last few weeks and let go of Django, but it has been so hard! I will also have a lot of input on the product and hopefully dabble in whatever else I can so I can learn everything possible.

So I’m 18 years old, moving to San Francisco… crazy, right? I know I’m not ready for everything that is going to happen in these next few months/years. Good — you have to step outside of your comfort zone to do amazing things. It’s sort of like what people says about having children — there is never a “right” time to have kids, the best time is to start having them now. The same goes for startups; I would venture to say that there are no people in the world who are ready and prepared to start a startup, and that’s the beauty of it — you learn as you go, adapting to the situations and opportunities that arise. Though I am not one of the two co-founders of YouNoodle, I am already very attached with the product and the team behind it (my second startup family, MonVia counts as first :p).

I still intend on attending university after this, even though I don’t know exactly how many months/years that will be. I have confirmed my deferment at Santa Clara, and I heard that I can be held on deferment there for up to five years. Please don’t ask me when I am going to university or try to make me feel guilty for not being “normal”. I’m not normal, get used to it. I also intend on trying to get into Stanford again (after being rejected last year), and will be applying to other schools (Oxford and MIT so far) for the Fall of 2009, but who knows what is going to happen from now until then. Maybe I’ll end up going to Harvard in 10 years and then getting my MBA from Stanford right after, but seriously, I have no idea what my future holds at this point.

To all the friends I will make, the people I will meet, the experiences I will take with me, the knowledge I will attain, the good judgment that I will gain through the bad judgment that I will make, the amazing city of San Francisco, and everything else that I will get out of this journey… Here I come!

There are many ways to die, you have to find the one way to live.

What I did this weekend - simplebucket.com September 9, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Rails , 1 comment so far

So we just finished RailsRumble, and our site is up and running at simplebucket.com.

checks it out!

I uploaded a picture of my good friend Ben, best drummer in the world. His show last night was awesome too.

48 hours - Rails Rumble annual competition
4 guys from Vacaville, Denver, Indiana, and Houston who have never met in person
Skype
Beer [just kidding]
Ruby on Rails
My brother’s show and pizza from Pizza Pucks during a 2 hr break
Alayna’s bday party
4 Rockstars and only 3 meals
and a TON of Cheez-Its.

Voting for our application opens up on Wednesday, so I will post the link there.

Yay!! Fun weekend.

48 Hour Ruby on Rails Hackathon! September 7, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Rails , add a comment

I just joined this 48 hour hackathon, more details to come but check out the page here for our 4-team group that is building a startup in 48 hours.

The internet *is* boring September 4, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Technology, Google, Information , 1 comment so far

Every time I open up Firefox, I only go to four sites:

In that order. Beyond those four sites, I don’t really have the need to visit anything else. When I have a question about Rails, I search in Google, that is probably the only other site I frequently visit. So that’s 5 sites. I recently added one more site to that list, Mint.com, which is gearing up for a massive launch on September 18th. Mint has the coolest technology I have *ever* seen on the internet, beating out Flash and the PageRank algorithm respectively.

So 6 sites. Out of hundreds of millions of sites out there. Only 6 currently make the cut. To make something that will work from now on you have to be 1) extremely niche and 2) has paying customers (this is just opinion). 37signals have done it right.