BornInTheUSSR

Rich now!

Awesome work making it happen, I know many people who have been professional programmers for years who never created anything outside of their jobs. Love the design too, how did you go about coming up with it?

How about blogging about starting a blog and how you go about discovering your goal. Some artists have a vision in mind before they start, but I don't think this is a requirement. You chose a medium to play with, sometimes the lump of clay reveals its potential after some experimentation.

A lot of this is already available. DailyBurn with scanner app will fill in nutritional info from labels. Scales transmit your weight to online services. Fitbit will track your movement levels and sleep. Runkeeper will track how much you run. Not perfect yet, but a synthesis is inevitable.

Thanks for all you've done, working with Rails has been (if possible) even easier and more fun because of you. Can't wait to see what new possibilities open up to someone with nothing more than an idea and a laptop.

I hope they get somewhere with this, but it just seems like the wrong direction for tablet interface design. "Perfection is not when nothing more can be added, but nothing more can be taken away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery

A martial-artist friend of mine told me about an exercise his teacher had him do. For a week straight, he would have to just sit calmly on a chair or a cushion for at least an hour and envision everything he wanted to be doing and accomplishing at that very moment, but keep sitting and not doing anything at all. When you get to the point where you are so excited to do it that you can't sit anymore, go. I tried this for coding personal projects and I recommend it highly.

Allow me to add another data point to your survey: software developer/entrepreneur own a four-year old crappy laptop and a netbook dual-booting Linux/win xp, have a MacBook pro for work. Just got an iPad and there really is no better way to keep a bunch of technical books on-hand. My favorite sins are lust and vanity :)

Good question, but as a developer I would try to analyze more the value your code provides in a working state than how quickly you can crank it out. You're competent when you can be depended on to get a job done in a way that doesn't break anything that is already there and can be picked up by someone else when you inevitably move on to something different. What is a reasonable amount of time to do that depends on complexity.

Waaah!

I really like this article for the way it builds its arguments based on facts and draws measured, reasonable conclusions with no fanboyism or vitriol. Bravo.

Johnny should try Ruby, now to write some intro-text interactive

RTF4HWKWK

IMO Biggest bang for your testing buck - cucumber with webrat

http://railscasts.com/episodes/155-beginning-with-cucumber

Maybe you're already doing this, but you generally want to optimize the funnels from impression -> click -> landing-page -> some conversion event. Focus on one at a time. To get better click-through rates, ensure that you have tight integration in your ad groups between the keywords and the ad copy. If you're not using keywords people are searching for in the ad, it is much less likely to be clicked. Also try dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy if you don't feel like breaking up your ad groups. It's a bit of work, but once you find a combination that is effective, it's a matter of continuing to test new keyword permutations and dropping the stinkers to laser-target your adwords campaigns for high ROI.

It is also generally a bad idea to include price in the ad copy. You want to give enough honest information about what you're selling to make an interested user click; it is the job of your landing page/web site to build value and sell, but test to see what works for you. Hope that helps, good luck.

This looks like a definite step forward in design for Facebook, but does anyone know what they are doing about their business model? This is what I am really curious to see. Do flyers and beacon alone justify the multi-billion dollar valuations?

I see a startup kind of like the movie 300... but without the 0's where the speed, mobility and adaptiveness of (around) 3 allow them to out-smart, out-maneuver and out-bootstrap a larger, more established company. Madness? This is startup!

All right... owners are rewarded for their capital risk running the factories and creating the product. John doesn't get paid if he doesn't sell since he's working on commission. He sells at the risk of wasting his time (but not capital), makes bank and now he's fired. Where is the injustice of him losing everything? Did he have to give back his commission? His risk was rewarded. There's a definite hint of an agenda here.