Comment by zemo

I was in batch[1] and wrote a startup simultaneously in my non-HS time. One day I did a little work on it during HS hours and it was something of an open secret; we didn't talk about it, but we all knew it was happening, and it was clear to me that the consensus was that it was extremely uncool. Everyone is working together on projects, pairing or openly discussing things, and there I am sitting in the corner all by myself, keeping my work hidden. I wound up having to leave early or taking a day or two off to work on my startup during critical times (during the initial release), which made me feel like I was missing out on some HS time (because I was) and made working on the startup feel like a chore.

Yes we had a talk about a/b testing, but really that was just a talk about how to do interesting things with randomly assigned sessions, how to collect data, how to interpret the data, and how to build a system that takes action based on the data in a way that is both robust and easy to use. a/b testing is a step function for finding a local maxima based on some observable metric of user behavior over time. That's it. It's not some evil capitalist plot about manipulating user psychology with digital parlor tricks, it's an optimization strategy for improving user experience.

I don't recall a single HS discussion focusing on startup equity structures, legal issues, marketing, agile development, or lean startup methodology, but I do recall discussing generators in Python, the proper use of a JavaScript closure, the occasional Ruby vs Python argument, and how Scala's concurrency model differs from Erlang's (now that discussion went right over my head).

When we say shipping, we just mean that we have a show-and-tell every Saturday. During the show-and-tell, your project should be stable, it should show progress from the week before, and the code should be made available to the group. It's something of a weekly ritual at the end of every Saturday where we hang out, have a beer, and discuss our work. That's all we mean by shipping.