Git completely replaced Subversion so quickly because the benefits were apparent even at a small scale. Subversion was centralized and slow whereas Git branches were cheap and fast. It turns out the distributed model is just a lot better. Even my college project teams benefited from the superior experience of Git.
I was actually satisfied of it, and surprised that it never got attention, in particular, because there were no requirements in order to use it with existing SVN repositories. I'm actually baffled, because SVN is still active, so SVK would still be useful nowadays.
I used subversion for a long time and was resistant to moving ardour.org to use git instead. 24hours after we switched (we never use 3rd party git hosting as our canonical repo), I was already convinced it was not the right choice, but an excellent choice.
It's also Subversion where you can commit your changes and write the message before pushing, instead of at the same time, so you get the chance to review it. That's enough to make it better.
I love using iCloud's Hide My Email feature to create a unique email for every signup form or random person you contact. You can also use a Custom Email Domain with iCloud so I can imagine this feature might be usable outside the Apple ecosystem.
Overall I find this system very easy to use. If you are outside the Apple system you can use the web interface for managing your email addresses, but it's missing some small features: for example, you can't see when's the last time an email address has been used.
Is it unusual for a successful company like Stripe to take so long to go public? It seems like their house is in order, and they are profitable, but employees aren't liquid.
I think this is almost a case of a company being too successful. The general pattern is that you grow, you raise money, you grow, you raise money, you grow, your IPO. At each stage of growth there's a different investor. Initially you have Angels and YC style places. Then you have various stages of VC, then you finally have the public market.
What normally happens is that you become too big and that's when VCs step out of the way, you IPO and everyone takes their gains. But in the case of stripe you have $100Bn company that the VCs will still happily plough money into. So there's no reason to IPO. You can get all the liquidity you need privately. On top of that, Stripe doesn't really need capital, they aren't some uber buying market share with loss making. They are real SAAS, they can scale and see a drop in their earnings:cost ratio.
There have been liquidity events before, which allowed old enough employees to sell shares. You will find that many a former employee has managed to leave while being able to exercise their options and have a partial cash out with a lot of money to spare. So it’s not been an exercise of keeping employees tied down. A visibility one is Will Larson: You bet that he didn’t leave without being able to sell shares to cover AMT, and getting some immediate payout.
As for why stay private, what John C has said publicly is that they still see a lot of growth to go, and that not having to provide detailed financian statements to the general public, which would include competitors, is a competitive advantage. It seems believable to me.
IPO right now is very difficult as the door is closing, and investors are wary about paying a premium like they have before. They delayed it too long and have missed the window, it is unlikely from a year from now they will be able to get any bids for the current market valuations.
PC has spoken admirably of Koch Industries and he thinks there's some merit to remaining private. That's probably why. I don't have the source at hand but probably one of his podcasts.
I feel like it makes sense for Koch to stay private since their work mostly focuses on fossil fuels and specifically fracking. Public markets can be a big distraction with protests and what not. Is stripe worried about being cancelled?
Is there any reason they can't do a direct listing without selling any new shares?
The only downside for the company seems to be that employees would be able to sell, and that seems rather greedy for the company to not work in its employee's best interest.
The automatic control lowers the window a few millimeters as the door opens to clear the trim. This design ensures a tight seal to eliminate wind noise.
If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage. It’s meant for emergencies.
> If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage.
On a Tesla. Other cars, mostly with similar frameless windows, have this same functionality and have had it for at least the last 15 years and they do so with mechanical releases.
There is absolutely to reason why a purely mechanical solution would be unable to lower the window. Heck, they can use the same engine/latch that's controlled electronically when using the manual handle.
If your bank supports Oauth it won't share your credentials:
>Stripe generally defaults the authentication flow to OAuth if available at the financial institution....OAuth is an open standard authorization protocol that allows users to let applications (for example, Stripe) access their information within other applications (for example, bank apps) without having to share their login credentials.
But for banks without Oauth you DO give your credentials to Stripe:
> For these banks, end users provide credentials to Stripe or one of our trusted partners.
Interesting. I'm much less sympathetic, then. I would imagine that kind of situation would be far more formal, with lawyers from both sides present, and, to be frank, this kind of information gathering an expectation. It would be pure naivety for it not to be - these are multibillion dollar companies talking to each other!
On the other hand, if I, a random hypothetical engineer, were interviewing someone for a team, in a 1-1 situation, and they asked about what I worked I'm, I'm naturally going to be less guarded nor really prepared to sufficiently redact my answers.
Right, but that doesn't imply malicious intent and it doesn't disqualify them from building their own.
Talking to companies about their product and then later deciding you'd rather build your own isn't really surprising. Plaid was definitely aware that Stripe was a potential competitor going into those meetings.
Yeah, have to say, the level of knee jerk defensiveness here and on Twitter from cofounder level figures from Plaid does not exactly evoke confidence in their ability to outcompete.
Really? The Ruby ecosystem has been around a long time (Rails itself has been around for over 17 years!), so I'm surprised to hear there is any difficulty hiring highly experienced Ruby professionals.
It just isn't the language that people learn as their first language (via college or bootcamps). Plus it's not a gaming, data or machine learning language so it's not the kind of language that people come to from some other motivation. So I would say it hasn't had great organic growth for 5-7 years. That's practically a generation of programmers at this point.
I think all the big shops have most senior ruby devs locked up. If one has any meaningful rails and ruby experience under their belt they can stick their thumb out and land a job immediately.
If you look at all the job postings for Stripe, you'll notice that none of them require you to know ruby and expect you to be able to learn it on the job.
Right, which would indicate that they have more or less given up on appealing to ruby devs specifically. I work at a ruby only shop and we are the same way. I would say only about 30% of the candidates I interview have any ruby experience and of those, maybe 50% have recent experience.
We would prefer to hire talented ruby devs, but they just aren't there.
Yeah, duh, that's why we hire devs with any talent -- like I said. I'm not sure what you are pushing back against?
The contributions of a senior ruby engineer in a large, complex rails codebase will be immediate and will have a long tail over someone that has no experience in rails or ruby. This seems self-evident to me. It's just that there aren't enough of them.
I'm pushing back because I've had the opposite experience. I've started in a new team with exceptionally talented people, all of whom who have never written a line of ruby, all providing incredible contributions and hitting all our (pretty crazy) dates. All in a large highly complex ruby monolith.
It takes like 1 month to ramp on ruby, maybe even less. The cost of one month of ramp is highly justifiable given the fact that it's hard to find anyone who knows ruby (for real knows ruby) & most of the ramp is on system specifics anyways
