Tag: inspiration

The biggest merge ever

I am having a really proud and exciting moment at work right now.  We’ve just deployed the biggest merge ever.  I can’t really share enough details to provide you with the context (NDA and all), but here is a GitHub screenshot that gives you an idea.

the biggest merge ever

If you are not familiar with GitHub and don’t know how to read this, here is a summary:

  • 1,633 individual commits
  • 2,696 modified files
  • 424,292 lines of code added
  • 82 lines of code removed
  • work done by 4 people

And it all went so smooth, that we even deployed it on Friday, without a single second of downtime.  Awesomeness!

Update (April 15, 2013): And just when I thought that that was the biggest merge ever, we did one more the next working day.  Have a look!

the biggest merge ever again

What does it feel like to lose a lot of money (quickly)?

Here is a Quora question that I got in the personalized weekly newsletter.  I never had anything close to a lot of money, but I’m pretty sure that if a miracle happens and one day I do, I’ll lose them all pretty quickly.  Thus, I was vaguely interested in the answers.  However, the answer by James Altucher (most voted) was way more than I expected.

Then Internet stocks started to go down. This is ridiculous, I thought. The Internet is here to stay. I knew nothing about stocks or valuations or anything resembling rational thought. I doubled down. Then quadrupled down. Then 8-upled down.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month. When anyone says, “this is ridiculous”, that’s code for, “I’m about to lose a lot of money”.

I couldn’t stop. I was an addict. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

I was the worst idiot. Writing this now I feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I had 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine and feel my blood going through my whole body when I saw how much was left. I was going to zero and nothing could stop it. There were no jobs,  there was nothing.

Read the whole thing.  It’s fascinating and impressive.