Posts Tagged ‘start up’

How to Build a Billion Dollar App

Sunday, September 25th, 2016 | Books

In How to Build a Billion Dollar App George Berkowski takes you through the stages of coming up with a mobile app from concept to being a billion pound company. It is based on his story co-founding taxi app Hailo.

As you might expect it is a pretty whistle-stop tour of each stage of the business. However, it provides a good overview with various comments and advice that Berkowski brings from his experience at Hailo. He stresses the importance of getting the product right for the market and how you should be measuring growth, two of the keys to getting a successful product out there.

While it is a good overview, I am not sure how much I am going to take away from it. Compared to something like The Hard Thing About Hard Things which offers plenty of specific and useful advice, this is more of a general guide to the journey. The one thing I did really like was a list of concepts that have universal appeal to humans. This is great for brainstorming ideas from.

I also found it interesting that he recommended having one Scrum Master for around 12-15 engineers. I have worked at a number of companies that do agile and a typical setup in the UK would be one Scrum Master to around 3-5 engineers, a considerably different ratio.

how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-app

Start services automatically on boot in Gentoo

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 | Life, Tech

If you want a service to start automatically when Gentoo boots up, you need to tell Gentoo to start it. Gentoo looks at /etc/runlevels/boot to see what it needs to run, so all you need to do is add a symlink in here to your init.d script. In this example, I’ll use exim.

cd /etc/runlevels/boot
ln -s /etc/init.d/exim exim

Next time Gentoo boots, it will see exim in the boot directory and run the script. This isn’t just limited to boot either – /etc/runlevels also has directories for shutdown and system initialisation.

Removing fonts to boot Windows quicker

Thursday, December 30th, 2004 | Life, Tech

When you first boot Windows up, all the fonts must be loaded. If you delete or move unwanted fonts, Windows will load up quicker.

Prevent applications launching automatically on Windows boot up

Thursday, December 30th, 2004 | Life, Tech

If you don’t want all your programmes to automatically boot up when Windows starts, hold control key down to skip loading them.

Stop Windows automatically launching applications on boot

Thursday, December 30th, 2004 | Life, Tech

Sometimes you will have applications running when Windows starts up and some which you may not even be aware of. If you can’t find the application in Start > Programs > Start Up or you just want to see what exactly is running then try your MS Config box.

Goto Start > Run
Type ‘msconfig’ into the box
Hit the ok button
Wait for the box to load
Click the start up tab

This displays a list of all the applications that run of start up. Many are Windows applications which should generally be left alone. You can disable them from starting up by unticking the box next to it.