barrydahlberg

The idea is wonderful. I you haven't built anything yet I feel a little deceived because the wording on the landing and invite page strongly suggests it's already there. I also don't like the fake quote at the bottom, take the quote marks off it if it's not real.

250GB is about my cap for the YEAR.

Sometimes it feels like we don't even have a Gigabit to our country, even if we were allowed to use Netflix...

(New Zealand)

First thought: Oh crap what will happen to the great work he's been doing in the .Net tools?

Second thought: Oh wow, he could actually do great things for the Azure developer experience!

Grr. Piracy is still dominating down my way in NZ.

It's a nice mid level developer salary down here in NZ too.

Typically with something like this it will be a one time effort because the code produced is what enables the development time tools like intellisense. .Net does have run time code generation options but unfortunately we don't have support in the tool chain to tie them back to these sorts of tools.

Availability and pricing of things like Twilio is pretty variable outside of the US. Last I checked Twilio wasn't going to work for most SMS down here in NZ for example. Not sure about voice.

Is there a gallery somewhere of designs people have done? Can I enter mine in the Ugliest Shirt Of All Time category?

This seems like it has great gift potential. Is there any way we can load a gift card so that when entered it comes up with a shirt design the giver prepared as a suggestion? That way it's a step closer to a personalised gift but without the difficulty of returning it is not liked!

Edit: No I wont be sending out the Ugliest Shirt Of All Time as a gift...

Personally I just rephrased it...

How do you get over the fear of working jobs like this for the rest of your life and not doing what you know your heart wants to do? Quit and start a startup.

Works great if you're me. Your results may differ.

Stable salaried jobs -> Contracting, business, chaos.

It suits me better.

I love the concept. Are you trying to get funding to produce a decent volume or for another reason?

Try signing up for NZ events at http://startupdigest.com/, they are doing a decent job of keeping us updated at the moment.

These guys won the Auckland Startup Weekend down here in NZ at the start of the week, it's been entertaining viewing since.

And it's lunch time down here in NZ at the start of the world :)

Some thoughts from personal experience:

- Stop thinking.

- Take a blank sheet of paper.

- Write 1 simple task at the top, e.g. do the laundry.

- Do not write any more tasks.

- Put the paper somewhere in your face.

- Complete said task. Force yourself to do so.

- No interruptions, get it done.

- Cross off the task.

Congratulations, you've set a goal and achieved it. Trivial, but it's progress. You are now allowed to turn the brain back on and think. Momentum is good. Breathe deep! I noticed that at extreme low points I damn near stop. Perhaps this is why exercise is recommended so much, to help you move and breathe again.

Mentally I've found two things help:

- Knowing that there is a way forward out of this mess. May require outside help and support to convince you of this.

- Simplifying and focusing on one small thing at a time. There are very few things in life that really must be done right now, some will have to wait and until there is space there's no point stressing about them.

If you have understanding friends or family, TALK.

I can code, play a tune on guitar and tap out a rhythm but oh my, you do not want to hear me sing. I'm not sure the maths carries over that far!

I generally find that if you are well read the first steps towards scaling ASP.Net / IIS are reasonably well guided. E.g. we've had things like solid caching support at a variety of different levels (app, cache, output etc) built right into the server / framework for a long time.

The web forms model has been a huge issue for programmers who are not mindful of its consequences and I'm glad MVC is making headway. I'm also happy to see MS starting to think about more developer oriented tool sets with projects like Nuget and Entity Framework Code First.

Scaling to higher levels is always going to require an awareness of design and architecture more fundamental than knowing any particular technology well.

shtr?

+ .Net support please. Not that it matters being US only.

Grr. Argh. I don't know what the market outside of the US but since there's basically no one serving us in this space you would think it would be a huge opportunity if anyone figures out how to crack it.

Because Windows 7 is great and Visual Studio doesn't run there.

Pondering when I'm going to be able to start pushing production sites to AppHarbor. Does anyone have any experience to share in terms of robustness, scalability, support etc?

FogBugz with some clients depending on size, timeframe, etc. Nothing other than email with others.

Yes, but he is giving this as an example of how to hook programmers into learning Lisp. I'm all on board with the macros, but you have to do better than this as an argument.

And now no one can forget to close the file, plus it’s shorter as well. There is no way to do this in a non Lisp language.

C# has the IDisposable + using construct for exactly this purpose. If you're not happy with that you can write your own using a lambda, just like his example...

  using (open file here)
  {
    // Do work here
  }

  WithNetFile(f => do work here);

Lisp is neat, this is not a great argument though.

Is oppressive.ly registered?

IIRC generics came in 2.0 which narrows it a little.

It is actually having quite an impact in Auckland. I don't care too much for the rugby, but I welcome any improvements to our transport system etc.

http://www.auckland2011.com/Getting-Auckland-ready.aspx

They have me excited anyway.