JohnDotAwesome

Really loving the piping example. It would be interesting to see more small composable utility web services out there. A sort of standard library of APIs

I worked with an IT department (all windows shop, but not afraid of Linux) who setup large screen high definition tv's around the facility for a request to support digital signage. The department wanted to save money, so they took on a DIY attitude instead of building it themselves.

Well, they know the windows platform and had windows machines lying around. They hooked up PC's to these TV's mounted high up on the wall, either mounted the PC on the TV or put it somewhere that couldn't be seen, and put powerpoint viewer on the PC's.

This might sound like a disaster, but the higher-ups loved it. And it worked quite nicely to my surprise. Windows can easily be configured to start the powerpoint file of your choice in fullscreen mode when the machine starts. Creating the material was as easy making a powerpoint.

So, in the end, the cost of materials and time was minimized because these guys used Windows + Powerpoint for their digital signage. And since they weren't using some buggy piece of custom software, it was fairly stable.

You may not like Windows, but it's a _fine_ computing platform. People get _work done_ with it. Personally, I'll stick with OSX.

WUT

I think the answer to that lies in HTTP discovery protocols. I'm imagining self-organizing applications based on the need of the user, wiring together representations of disparate data sources into a cohesive interface.

You shouldn't have to be a dev to take advantage of the API universe. You'll just need tools that are able to reason about the data available.

Well, no password on their phone unlocks. But I thought Apple intended to replace your passwords in application services as well. Now, I didn't read the article at all (not a single damn word), so maybe the hack only applies to phone unlocks. If that is not the case however, then I think _you_ are missing the point. This would compromise all passwords replaced by finger print scans, right?

It would be nice if you could add multiple files. Otherwise, lookin' good!

I read this as I sip my daily coffee.

Is it _literally_ just a skin? Looks like a mostly different codebase.

Compare mixins.less https://github.com/sapo/Ink/blob/develop/less/modules/mixins... https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/less/mixins.le...

Personally, I like it. It's nice to have competition :)

Maybe. Or maybe the broad constituency is not on a mobile device. Perhaps this is a tool for someone who is coding. Presumably, someone who is not on a mobile device.

Pretty good :) But it feels a little sluggish. I'm used to my regex tools displaying feedback with seemingly no delay.

This would be the coolest god damn phone. If Apple made the smaller form factor again with a slightly bigger screen, I'd be on that. I hate the wonky rectangle of the 5.

Thanks, Johnny. This stuff is fun to think about.

Great piece, but...

One thing bothered me. He said it took a double click and cmd+c to copy? That's not true at all. Single click auto selects. I think the hiding the of the URL is kinda lame because the URL _was the design element_ for "clone" for so long. I see the URL and I know I can click it to select, CMD+C, paste it into my terminal.

Ian certainly has some valid points, but in the end, I think he's not appreciating the full-range of use cases that everyone has. Github has a lot of different kinds of users. Enterprise development flows are a bit different than the open source ones. And those are the flows that bring in the money.

Though, I'm sure they use Github enterprise, so maybe he does appreciate that use case as well.

Not much oil money. A lot of gas money. The Barnett Shale being one of the big cash crops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Shale

Yeah, breadth of geography. Which I think is super cool. Paul Graham advocates that a startup really shouldn't start outside of Silicon Valley, but that's total crap. Cohen and crowd want to spread their formula to other cities (I think they started in Boulder). When Tech Stars comes to Austin, no doubt it will further re-enforce entrepreneurship in our culture, and it will cause more people to want to start businesses. I think that's awesome. +1 to the breadth strategy for spreading the startup love!

THIS. Exactly why Mongo fails (though I love mongo). No freakin' transactions!

Dang. Yeah - Definitely should have said there's not JSON type known to Node PG, which is actually incorrect as of this morning: https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/pull/239

Thanks for pointing out the error!

It really depends on the data structure. If you've got something that can have an unknown amount of variables in it and you're already serving up JSON, then I think using JSON is the way to go.

Another use-case: We've got hundreds of clients that send health statuses for a ton of different metrics every 10 minutes. Stuff like Wifi strength, exceptions caught/uncaught, various errors and crash reports, blah blah. Anyway, we need a flexible store for all of this stuff because we're always adding more metrics. Whatever the clients send as their request body gets added as a JSON object.

We also want to dynamically display all of these metrics. We can literally grab the data as JSON and make the keys table column headers in an html view. Adding new metrics can automatically be reflected in both the database and in our html views. We can query against new fields without changing schemas or business logic.

Depends on your needs really. The querying capability in Postgres is so much nicer than NoSql DB's and generally, or at least is the case with Mongo, you don't get transactions.