These are amazing times in terms of going from idea to finished product. But even though you can get cheap hosting, software or services, you need to avoid the pitfall of hiring low cost developers without really knowing how good they are.

I still remember the time in the early 2000’s when I had a web platform idea that I wanted to build and make available online. Back then you couldn’t just “rent” a server. As hard as it sounds today, you had to actually buy at least a web application server and a database server (usually costing tens of thousands of dollars) and then rent actual physical space, usually a rack, in a co-location internet hosting company that would also cost at least a few hundred dollars a month with yearly contracts. …

In a study by Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh, 75 percent of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors, with 30 to 40 percent of those liquidating assets where investors lose all of their money.

I’ve seen it first hand in my consulting practice and it’s specially heart breaking when founders reach out to me too late in the process and have burned the little capital they have raised.

Of course, each company is different and it has various areas where they can increase their chances of becoming successful enterprises, but here are some of the common themes I’ve come across that you, as a founder, can follow to improve the odds of growing a successful startup. …

There’s always a burning question in every manager’s mind: When will it ship?

In the days of the waterfall methodology, my manager would ask me for an estimated delivery timeline for a project and I would quickly open up my Microsoft Project software and start drawing bars with estimations and resources attached. I would then sandbag it by an additional 50% and would reply back to my manager, with a high degree of confidence, that it would take ninety days. …

With Flask 1.0 there was a big change on how we interact with the application management, with the integration of the Click library in Flask, which replaces in many aspects the Flask-Script library. Now all interactions with Flask happens through a Flask CLI that works with the flask command on the terminal.

Flask 1.0 also introduced tight integration with python-dotenv which allows you to handle environment variables and settings easier.

So I decided to update my MySQL Boilerplate application with these new enhancements so that we’re future proof with the new direction Flask 1.0 is taking.

If you haven’t checked it out, you can see the original version of the repository here. …

Back when I joined my first startup, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. The interview was in the lobby of a hotel. The actual “office” had three cramped desks and a dirty carpet. But all I saw was a huge opportunity to build something from scratch. Years later, I left and worked in a number of larger, well funded companies, but somehow I always missed that feeling of growing a project from the ground up.

I always saw myself as someone who would always work for someone else. I didn’t want the responsibility of actually being a founder or co-founder. …

For many years I have been paying a cloud server provider to host my personal site. At some point I had a blog, but lately, with blog communities like Medium, it had been reduced to a one page index.html.

But the cost of having one cloud server, even if it’s the tiniest one, ends up costing around $15 month, which if you add up in months and years, can become a good chunk of money.

So at the beginning of this year, I decided to look at two technologies that can help me with this, cost-wise. One is a static site generator and the second is Amazon’s AWS service which allows you to host static websites with HTTPS on S3 and CloudFront. …

There’s been a long standing debate in the past few months on the feasability of developing mobile applications using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

Facebook’s founder went as far as partly blaming their initial hybrid approach as the reason they had failed in their mobile strategy.

“I think the biggest mistake we made as a company is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native,” he admitted, acknowledging his company’s difficulties in piecing together a coherent mobile strategy.

Recently Basecamp announced on their blog the release of their new iPad app, which follows a hybrid approach just like their other apps (iPhone, Android and Kindle). …

Today I had “Coffee with the interns”, a session where interns meet with executives and ask them anything about the company and our experiences.

One of the best questions I got today was: “Looking back, what would you do different?”

The question resonated with me because I think the answer to that question reflects what I have learned in each of the previous companies I have worked with.

So take a moment and think: what would you have done differently in every company you worked at? In every major project failed?

Some of the things I learned by mistake and that at the time seemed like major issues I would not get out alive from. …