Isaac Sukin

I participated in my first (!) hackathon this weekend, a 48-hour student-run event at UPenn known as PennApps Hackathon. A friend and I wrote UnStock.Me, a stock trading game that -- at one point at least -- was intended to be educational. "Codecademy for the stock market" was the original idea, which we intentionally chose because it wouldn't take very long. We used the extra time to sleep and attend rush events for our fraternity (Phi Kappa Psi).

I talk to a lot of startups. I have a lot to say about what (not) to do if you are on the hiring side of this exchange, but for now I'll cover the minimum set of information you should be prepared to discuss if you want to hire a developer for your early-stage company. This is the first real interaction you'll have with a potential coworker. If you struggle with convincing someone to join your company, you can bet you'll struggle with convincing someone to buy your product or service, so you should be prepared with the information a potential hire will want to know. These are questions I will pretty much always ask you about your startup in an interview, and they're pretty similar to what a VC would want to know. When I say "I" below what I really mean is "any developer" but it's more convenient to write in the first person.

Facebook hasn't switched everyone to the new Timeline profiles yet, but they will soon.

On Friday I went to a series of talks for the kickoff of the Marketing and Social Systems Engineering (MKSE) department at UPenn, chaired by one of my professors. There were four speakers -- I missed the second -- and the talks ranged from monetizing people's browsing behavior on the internet to proving that humans exist.

I've been building an open-source suite of social networking software as a hobby since 2007 so the underlying topic of network science has interested me for a long time. I have mainly focused on building user engagement. Towards that end I've thought a lot lately about the right way to represent relationships on a social networking website given varied successes and failures of Facebook's Friend Lists and new Smart Lists as well as Google+'s Circles. My expertise is in Drupal and the choices there all require tediously, manually building your network. I'm convinced that the best approach for usability is to automatically identify people's friend groups. In general it's a good principle not to make users do anything that is not directly related to accomplishing their task of participating on your site, and manually maintaining friend lists is awkward anyway.