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AlexanderZon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2013)

SEEKING WORK - Remote

Rails & Ember.js developer.

Alexander Zaytsev, alexander@say26.com

Github: http://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev

Blog: http://say26.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexandrZaytsev

I have 20 hours/week available.

AlexanderZon Meteorite crash in Russia

I happen to live 300km from the epicenter. The meteorite was seen in home town as well. I made a list of all the videos I could find: http://say26.com/meteorite-in-russia-all-videos-in-one-place

AlexanderZon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2013)

SEEKING WORK - Remote

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Rails, HTML5, CSS3, Ember, Backbone, Responsive design, SCSS, Coffeescript.

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Alexander Zaytsev, alexander@say26.com

Blog: http://say26.com

Github: http://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexandrZaytsev

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I'm partially booked right now. I'll find the time if you have a great project, though.

AlexanderZon My Top Sublime Text 2 Plugins

If you are using Rails, have a look at this plugin: http://say26.com/rails-file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text...

It allows you to switch between your models, controllers and views really fast.

AlexanderZon Ask HN: Solo startups? What have you built all on your own?

http://feetlot.com - because buying shoes online is hard. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I ordered 2 different pairs of shoes in size 12. One fit like 11.5, the other like 12.5. Ha. That's when I decided to create a place where people can help each other with shoes' sizes.

AlexanderZon Building an Ember app with RailsAPI – Part 2

Watch out, Ember is coming!

Seriously, if you are using Backbone for somewhat big apps, stop it and start learning Ember. The API will stabilize soon as the 1.0.0 version gets released, and the show will begin.

AlexanderZon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2013)

SEEKING WORK - Remote, I'm Russian but live in Bali.

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Alexander Zaytsev, alexander@say26.com

If your backend isn't Rails, you can stop reading.

If you are looking for a ninja, go to Japan or NY storm sewers.

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Rails, HTML5, CSS3, Ember, Backbone, Responsive design, SCSS, Coffeescript.

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Side projects & open source:

http://feetlot.com - Summer 2012, scratching my own itch. To build the shoes database I used several APIs and wrote parsers when there were no APIs.

http://nabbber.com - 2010, 4000 users, 18k words added, Zend Framework (I moved to Rails shortly afterwards). Three 'b's? But dribbble was hot back then!

https://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev/active_model_pusher - I believe the bright future of the web is Rails + Ember + websockets. This gem makes it easy to connect Rails with websockets.

https://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev/human_date - A gem to help in displaying dates for humans (because I care about users).

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I'm really easy to work with.

I know my stuff and improve constantly.

I go through Rails/Ember commits on Github to see what's new before it is announced.

I'm not afraid to say "I don't know."

I prefer the back-end but at the same time I experiment with CSS stuff like vertical rhythm or using single-direction margins. In other words, I'm universal and strive for the best practices in every technology I use.

I almost never use jQuery now because Ember and Backbone, that's why. I know when to use Ember and when to use Backbone. Lots of people don't.

Apart from being good at the technical side, I'm also good at seeing the whole picture. I will help you build a better product. I will scrutinize your ideas and suggest new ones. I will add value to your product.

Get in touch even if you don't have a cool project for me to work on, I love meeting new people.

Blog: http://say26.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexandrZaytsev

Github: http://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev

AlexanderZon CSS Grid Systems Make You Look Good and Your Client Happy

I would advise against using CSS grid systems. Code like class="article column-12" looks wrong. Use stuff like Neat instead: https://github.com/thoughtbot/neat

AlexanderZon Rails is omakase

And what is the fundamental difference?

You can tell Padrino what you want during the creation of a new project.

You can tell Rails what you want immediately after the creation of a new project. Rails simply saves you time by having sane defaults. Convention over configuration at its best.

AlexanderZon Rails is omakase

Changing the defaults takes 2 minutes in Rails. What's the problem? Besides, there are gems like Rails Composer [1], which allow you to create new projects based on a template.

[1] - https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-composer/#your-options

AlexanderZon Show Us Your Production Code

Have you been following all the Ruby discussions in the past few days? A single action from a complex controller in Basecamp would be enough for me to understand how 37 Signals are handling the not so skinny controller stuff.

It would be much more useful than seeing another 'create user and send email' stuff, which I see in almost every article about controllers.

AlexanderZon Show Us Your Production Code

It's not to win an argument but rather to share it with other developers (and get feedback). So your request to the boss will sound like "I'm hesitant if this piece of code is the best way to do it, can I show it to the world?"

AlexanderZon Show Us Your Production Code

That's been my guess as well. Probably some developers are ashamed. But if you think about it, sharing real, messy code is much more useful than showing a polished, contrived example.

AlexanderZon Show Us Your Production Code

Showing one controller action or model method will not compromise your application security.

I'm not saying people should put their application to github, just asking them to use real examples in their articles (like I did with MessagesController#create)

AlexanderZon Show HN: Survey Builder with Drag/Drop Logic Branching

Yeah, I think a back button will be a good solution.

I'd prefer to click a few times to fix a mistake then have to click twice for every answer.

AlexanderZon Show HN: Survey Builder with Drag/Drop Logic Branching

Remove the "Next" button when it's not necessary (when there can be only one answer to the question). Just go to the next question when a user clicks on an answer to the current question.

AlexanderZon Foreign Language Learning Hacks

Shameless plug: two years ago I created http://nabbber.com to help me learn English. Basically, it's like Twitter, but instead of tweets you post words that you've recently learned. You can follow other people and see their new words on your home page (just like tweets).

I'm in Bali now and I'm using Nabbber to learn Indonesian. Whenever I see an unknown word (in a shop, at a gas station, etc) I save it and then revise from time to time.

Here's how my profile page looks like: http://nabbber.com/AlexanderZaytsev/words/id:en

I find this method (just got out in the wild and write down unknown words) the most efficient one.

AlexanderZon Rails Rumble is Complete - Judge the Entries

I went solo and built Genka - time tracking that motivates: http://genka.r12.railsrumble.com/

AlexanderZon Digg v1: Betaworks Flushes Seven Years of Internet History Down the Toilet

They didn't delete users' data, they preferred not to import it into their brand new product.

They will also allow users to download data later: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4325004

As for historians, the content is still out there. Digg doesn't host content, it "hosts" links.

AlexanderZon Digg v1: Betaworks Flushes Seven Years of Internet History Down the Toilet

Oh no, I always begin my morning with digged articles from 2007. Actually, no I don't. So, who cares, apart from SEO guys?

And I love how they say: What would've been the harm in leaving those archives up? It's not that complicated.

Of course it's not complicated, it's actually fun! What can be better than starting a new project with importing old and unwanted records from a screwed up database?

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

If you say "Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users" then you do miss the point of subreddits.

There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.

In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.

Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.

That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

What you are talking about is still incapable of recommending (with a high chance of the recommendation being spot-on) new things. In music a new thing would be a completely different genre, not a new song in your favorite genre.

The system you are describing will find people who have a strong correlation with me and who also like:

1) Classical music and Justin Bieber.

2) Classical music and Metallica.

3) Classical music and Dubstep.

And it will recommend me Bieber, Metallica and Dubstep. I might like Dubstep, but I won't like Bieber and Metallica. How is it better than listening to random songs?

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

Are you talking about any existing recommendation engine that I can try out to prove myself wrong?

Just how exactly will they do it? I'm really interested, maybe I'm missing something?

Simply speaking, if a system knows all I listen to is classical music, it can recommend me a new classical composition, but it cannot all of a sudden recommend me dubstep (which I might actually like).

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".

No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.

Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

I believe that in the future that's the way to do it, but not right now.

Besides, I'm not a fan of automatic recommendations as they have a lot of drawbacks. Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you didn't know you liked.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness.

I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.

If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.

That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

And how are you going to tell content aggregators what you like? By upvoting/liking? Doesn't it count as spending time?

I don't want to spend time upvoting 50 submissions to tell the recommendation engine what my interests are (and with the current state of technology it will get my interests wrong anyway). I just want to click one button (subscribe to a subreddit) and that's it.

And when I become less interested in a certain topic (fitness, starcraft) I can just press the unsubscribe button once and never see submissions for that topic again.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits? If you are interested in fitness, you subscribe to /r/fitness. Fitness materials won't all of a sudden be posted to /r/gaming where you (if you are not subscribed) will miss them.

So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.

Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests.

Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."

So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.

AlexanderZon Can Digg make a run on Reddit?

If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.