- I am the founder of Snowtide — which sells PDFTextStream, a PDF text extraction library for Java and .NET – and the creator of the Clojure Atlas. I do a lot of programming in Clojure and just a little in Java.
– Chas Emerick
Category Archives: Business
Stymied from within (an entrepreneurial experience)
In his interview of Andrew Warner, Jason Cohen provided a nice snapshot of the experience of being a software entrepreneur (taken from the transcription provided on the interview page, emphasis mine): You hear all these stories of success, and luck … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship
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Recovering from and avoiding “cloud service” lock-in
We all love our shiny cloud services — until they break, die, or otherwise go away, turning all those unicorns and butterflies into what can only be described as a bark salad. Case in point: sometime this week, I’ll be … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Cloud, Entrepreneurship
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Ashton’s plight, fight or flight
Joel Spolsky is a stellar writer and a fine storyteller. His latest, the apocryphal tale of Ashton, tells of the plight of a software developer stuck in a crummy job, surrounded by sycophants and half-wits, desperate to escape the inevitable … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship, geek
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Xerox’s Inspirational Carlson and Wilson
This book tells a great story, but I’m not writing a book review. What struck me most reading this book was the glimpse provided of Chester Carlson, the inventor of electrophotography, and Joseph C. Wilson, the co-founder of Xerox (née The Haloid Photographic Company). As far as I can tell, these men were forces of nature unto themselves, and possessed an array of values and principles that I find remarkable and inspirational. Continue reading
Posted in Books, Business, Entrepreneurship, History
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Open Source, Positioning, and Execution
In the past month, I’ve read no fewer than 8 articles and blog posts trying to thread a story around what is apparently the “big” question these days: how can software companies make money in an open source world? Well, … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Open Source, PDFTextStream
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Benchmarks and honesty
…like oil and water, right? Not necessarily; we should hope not, for otherwise we’re all in trouble. Last week, someone anonymously posted a comment to a previous entry of mine. In a nutshell, he or she implied that the benchmarks … Continue reading
Posted in Business, PDFTextStream
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Totally flattened
The past 10 days have been just nuts. When it rains, it’s buckets. We got hit last week with serious inquiries from a half a dozen very large organizations — a good mix of governmental, corporate, and nonprofit/research. Each of … Continue reading
Posted in Business, PDFTextStream
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Marketing is hard and scary
Marketing is really hard, despite the rumors you’ve heard. The more I get into it, the more I’ve come to respect the skills (if not necessarily the tactics) necessary to deliver a message to prospective customers. Up until this point, … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship
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Clients and Customers
Many times I’ve been told, ‘Snowtide should forget about doing custom development work, and concentrate on selling product’. Of course, few people realize just how important our custom development clients are to our overall business and to the quality of … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship
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The Fine Art of Listening
As much as we love getting positive feedback, we like constructive negative feedback even more. So, when someone let us know that PDFTextStream didn’t meet their expectations, we moved fast to change that. When we released PDFTextStream, we were pretty … Continue reading
Posted in Business, PDFTextStream
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