The Pair Programmer is critical since the Senior Programmer aims to limit his use of the keyboard.
Alex is a Doctoral Fellow and PhD student in the Operations and Information Management Department of Wharton Business School, slated to graduate in May 2010. He studies optimal team design in medicine, engineering, and consulting.
I'm not convinced the optimal team is a typist/secretary and a Senior Programmer with his capitals letters and Ph.D. and everything dictating the code ;)
CF was one of the nicer programming languages I've ever worked with. Circa 2002-2005 there wasn't anything close to a better alternative.
The down-fall of CF was Rails since Rails is open-source, huge community, is free, and powered by Ruby. CF was closed sourced, small community, and powered by Java. Yuck.
It would probably be a lot smaller with a packer that obfuscates field names too (ie: Closure Compiler).
He could probably get it down further by stripping all of these exception strings from the release version and replacing them with structured types and numeric codes. Some of these are really development-time assertions that shouldn't be in the release code anyways:
throw ("doSelectJoinAllExcept requires an array of peer names as an argument")
Sure some people will get rejected for having inappropriate content associated with their name, but the lack of having a good online persona is way worse then having a bad one.
What do I mean? Do you have a professional blog? Are you an active commenter on any professional mailing lists or forums? Do you help run or maintain any open-source projects? Does googling your name reveal a comprehensive history of your career?
I know personally that I get most job offers directly from my github account and linked in account.
If you have an Internet-based business and don't have any particular emphasis on your location ("helps you navigate the local subway"), then "based in NYC" means very little; you could always relocate for at least a summer.
As for "doesn't really require any funding", the money represents the least important reason to work with Y Combinator. We didn't apply because we thought $17k would make the difference between our business succeeding or failing. We applied because we want the business guidance, connections, meetings, resources, investor days, and the opportunity to work on our project full-time distraction-free.
