I'm the OP. This happened two years ago, but I figured I'd post it now since YC interviews start tomorrow, and I already heard of one person in this batch who's going through the same thing. Good luck to everybody interviewing! If you have any questions, I'm game.
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Six days before the interview, my laptop crashed and we lost our entire demo.
I am constantly shocked how intelligent technology people frequently fail to make backups.
Backups are so easy today - USB sticks, cloud backup, server backup, etc. Why do so many people ignore this basic step?
It's kind of like eating your vegetables and exercising. You know you ought to. But most people don't.
You'll never lose money betting on aggregate laziness and lack of foresight.
Just put all your project files in Dropbox!
Seriously, it's so easy. Every time you hit save, you'd have to try to lose the file. Pair this with git going to github or bitbucket and it would take several well placed nuclear explosions to destroy your work.
If my laptop instantaneously combusted at any point in time I would, at maximum, lose approximately 6 seconds of work (or the last time I hit "save"), and could set up a new laptop and be productive on it in about an hour (to install Dropbox and give it time to sync, Sublime, iTerm, Chrome, and custom keyboard hacks). Pet peeves, man.
I used to do this, but then when compiling the project the Dropbox client would shoot to over 70% CPU usage and the fan on my laptop would go into overdrive.
Switch to GitHub/BitBucket
This is due to churn on the compiled files right? The fix would be to compile these files someplace outside of dropbox. (Because the important artifact you want to back up is source code, not binaries). Depends on your language / build tool for how complicated this would be...
CMake encourages out of tree builds. I find them superior to in tree builds in most cases. But if it is just a random utility that I'm compiling from the Internet and do not intend to dev on, in tree works fine for me.
A suggestion off the top of my head would be writing a script that pauses Dropbox syncing before running a compiler. (From a quick Google search, there seem to be a couple of scripts already written that do this.)
Dropbox has been a life saver for me. The ability to restore previous files in particular has helped me in many situations.
Well-designed backup systems (say, Dropbox) don't actually require any overcoming of laziness.
You'd need to install Dropbox and then also save your project in your Dropbox folder.
Dropbox isn't a backup solution, and you're doing two steps when you could just do one - install backup software.
I can't imagine writing code without pushing to a remote git repo. Bitbucket is free!
This was my thought as well, pushing to a remote repo is that moment after which I stand up and walk away from my computer. I can stretch, make coffee or whatever. If I get back to my computer and it has exploded I know how far I am.
Heck, without git how do I revert changes? How do I stay organised?
Its just a property of humans I guess. If it worked the last 600 days, why would it fail tomorrow?
And thank goodness a lot of people have ignored that.
Back in Ye Olden Dayes, we trained everybody to back up. It was an important ritual: every once in a while you had to stop whatever you were actually trying to do, spend a bunch of time fucking around with odd, expensive media, and the store the media in complicated ways.
It was a giant pain. Most people didn't do it. But we programmers, wanting people to be as programmable as computers, told them they were doing it wrong, that they had to learn the rituals to pacify the machine gods, who would otherwise destroy their data.
I'm glad they ignored us, because without them we wouldn't have moved toward the correct solution, which is making the computers do the work to solve the problems created by computer use.
We still haven't reached the logical end, which is where every consumer computer is backed up by default on every change. But we'll get there eventually, thereby freeing up people to spend their time on what really matters. Which isn't wasting that intelligence on making backups.
Are you the dude who did the "we're going to make it so nobody's going to fuck with our customers" line at demo day? Cause that was awesome. :)
Indeed, that was my (new) co-founder!
Looked at your website, wish I could see some kind of demo or case study.
What was the original idea that got you into YC?
A mobile app for local events. To put it lightly, YC strongly encouraged us to change the idea to a better one:
http://brandonb.cc/no-filter-the-meanest-thing-paul-graham-s...