Leanpub
Leanpub is one of the fairest publishing platforms that exists, only keeping a small fraction of a book’s selling price, and giving the rest to the author. They provide a publishing toolkit to authors, and they have an excellent online store of programming and other books. They also developed a number of software tools for organizational management.
My history at Leanpub
I joined Leanpub as my first software job. It was a 4-month co-op sponsored by the company. They were impressed by my performance in the first two months, and hired me on for an additional 4 months.
Then the co-op came to a close and I moved on to Reelgood.
The technology
I was working on a React app which used Coffeescript, MongoDB, and Sass. It used a waterfall pattern to manage async calls. It was very advanced stuff for a co-op to be working on; the senior devs at Leanpub were no slouches. Later I worked with Ruby on Rails and on a standalone Node app.
Things I liked
I really enjoyed the Smash Bros. games we would play after lunch every work day. I also really enjoyed going out for lunch with the team. I felt so good being a part of the team. I was a super young and inexperienced guy, but I felt right at home. I felt taken care of.
Things I didn’t like
The boss had this philosophy towards me: “You are not worthy of investment unless you absolutely need it. If you can make minimal progress, just do that, and don’t bother us.” I get it, startups are lean these days (this is where the ‘lean’ in their name comes from), and attention is a scarce resource that must be guarded. It was fortunate that I got a job and was given the opportunity to work on advanced codebases. But do you ever notice that this is how we’ve all been thinking in this country for the last 60 years? The next generation is always worth investment. It is painful, it is inconvenient, but it is worth it. It is frustrating to me to think back about how much of the work I did was totally lonely.
