beseku

I don't think I mentioned office politics once in my response. If you regard all communication in your office as 'office politics' you are probably going about things in a less than optimal way.

A 'good developer' is someone who can speak to his team, his bosses and if exposed, the stakeholders, to identify the problem and be able to identify any potential hurdles or roadblocks that may pop up. All of this is learning to be a good communicator, (not politician), learning that your tools have limitations and learning how to manage peoples expectations and understand that what they ask for isn't what they actually want.

For what its worth, your post is an oxymoron - you can't be a 'good developer' without the above. You might be able to code but you aren't a developer.

I think you're showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what working within a team means. Full time experience interacting with other people and with stakeholders of the product you are creating is something you're friend won't have, regardless of how amazing she is with RoR.

Being a developer is as much about being able to write code as being able to identify the best solutions to problems within the particular domain. This ability can only come through working as a developer and dealing with these situations first hand.

Put another way, I've been called very rude names by very famous musicians and being able to deal with that and continue working with these people was a massive learning experience to me.

A few things regarding the pricing page - firstly, the text underneath the 'Quota' box makes little to no sense to a native English speaker. I cant even offer a translation myself, whcih I would be happy to do, since I don;t understand what you are trying to say.

Secondly, alot of your pricing package details are in very small fractions of GB. It would be easier for people to make comparisons, and thus realise you may be cheaper, if you used megabytes instead, no?

This map might make it easier to see how the tube reflects the geography, and so conjure a better image of London, but it makes using the tube system much harder.

As case in point, the fork in the Northern line at Kennington is much harder to comprehend and the number of tourists who get bewildered by this feature on the current map is large enough as it is.

It also still misrepresents a lot of the distances between stations, (Old St to Farringdon is a long way, much further than Old St or Moorgate to Liverpool St). If you are going for a concept of geographical correctness it has to be very exact or a complete abstraction.

Kudos for making a sensible decision. It's much better idea to force your users to go through the pain of upgrading once rather than hitting them again with a MySQL upgrade in a version's time.

Genuinely glad to hear that WP has this foresight in their roadmap.

It was changed because all the idiots who couldn't read the words "to the extent we think it necessary for the Service" were throwing a hissy fit. I'm guessing you were in that group and needed the clarification.

I can't down vote this but I really wish I could. As someone else pointed out this comment seems driven by malice more than anything else...

"Let me tell you what a UX developer is. UX developers are people that couldn't find themselves neither as designers or as developers and got stuck in between."

While I find your tone particularly hateful, this is about as close to being the best definition of how I see a UX developer/designer, without the derogatory tone of course. They are people who want to be involved in the earlier stages of a project, and want to know about the technical aspects of the problem and the design or brand constraints, and are suitably equipped to deal with the people whose job it is to solve the intricate details.

If you are a developer who can turn out a decent user interface, (maybe on a web app you were left to do the settings page), or a designer who can prototype in Javascript to show how modals windows work - congratulations, that is UX - converging the different disciplines to create a whole. Someone who works more in doing that and deals less with the nitty gritty of one or the other is just doing it more, (and probably better for the time and experience they have). Thats not to say because they don't do the nitty gritty that they can't, (although I'll admit my design skills trail off before my technical skills do), its just they are more interested in leaving it to others.

[Aside: I am a technical guy who has moved much more towards doing prototyping and UX work. I find alot of the comments in this thread pretty insulting since they all are assuming I am either a shite designer or shite developer.]

Whats worrying about the apparent proliferation of security breaches like this is that as the attacks get more sophisticated, so do the prevention methods. This could get to the point whereby the skill level required to protect an application or server goes way higher than the skill level of many developers.

The result being that independent development is impossible as you would need to hire ever more expensive security consultants for anything that stores data.

I've come from PHP, (specifically CodeIgniter) to learning Rails in the last month, and so have focused on learning from the great online Tutorial by Michael Hartl and the rails edgeguides. All are up to 3.0, but I've managed to work fine with 3.1 since I'm an experienced CoffeeScript dev and everything is very well documented in the GitHub commits. I just can't see a cause for complaint.

In regards to the framework being too opinionated and/or moving too fast, its the exact opposite of the landscape in PHP, where there is a splintered and slow moving culture, with no one framework and certainly nothing as technically advanced as Rails.

If I had to pick I'd take the Rails culture everytime, its more exciting and fun for one.

I'm new to Rails and am currently working through the tutorial at railstutorial.org. I'm a PHP/CodeIgniter dev so a lot of the features are new but many concepts are familiar.

Browsing the linked GitHub code on the OP's link relating to the new secure_password stuff - does this make the authentication code used in the above tutorial obsolete - the commented example on GitHub indicated included BCrypt based password storage/authentication method ... ?

I should just add to this - I took a step down career wise, (Tech Lead of a good UK agency to a developer position) so I could make the move, so my perspective may be very different to yours as we actively wanted to move abroad (and specifically to Japan) for a while.

I can't claim to know anything about your own personal life but I would say one thing - whats the worst that could happen?

I moved from the UK to Japan nearly two years ago (with g/f of 7 years). Sometimes being away form home sucks, as does the frequent feeling of isolation and knowledge that if the work life sucks you have to leave the country. Sometimes its amazing - I love the country (and my work) and the people I have met. My overriding feeling is that even though I really miss a lot of my UK life, (including the company I worked for on the odd occasion) I am glad I took the leap, for no other reason than I got to experience this.

YMMV

I heard on some podcast or other that there is a clause in the iOS developer term that expressly forbids developers from acknowledging that any of the IP they use ISNT Apples? If that is the case then the iOS terms are preventing the developers from settling and the ball is surely in Apple's court.

Any devs got the terms handy?

This and the recent release of 1.1.0 gave me a push and I spent some time converting a small library I maintain (http://flickrshow.com) to CoffeesScript as an exercise and and education into the syntax and potential benefits.

As it was a 1-1 conversion it was fun to see not only how much syntactical cruft the CS syntax removes but also how a few sloppy lines got tidied up, (mainly existence checks). In that sense, it adds value. It'll be interesting to follow this up with how easy it is to churn out new code ...

My post was very negative. Apart from the above, minor, details, its a great service that I hope I can use as much as I do Instapaper.

(Be even better if it could work with embedded Youtube/Vimeo on other domains, like devour.com).

I didn't realise I had to scroll this up to see videos I had sent, and so I thought it was broken. From a usability point of view, starting the bar at the right hand side, showing everything, and scaling the list back when you slide left would be much better in terms of educating your users.

Also, Instapaper nailed it with the "Saving ..." > "Saved!" language in the book mark. If you are using the name, go the whole hog and copy that - the feedback to the user that it is safely stashed on the Insta~ servers is invaluable.

I think its nice in that its a great example of someone having so much passion for what they do that even something as trivial as this fix is to them worth the time to remedy.

I disagree - The more people work with something, the more it can be refined. If you read through the Issues page on Github for Backbone, there are 100s of comments, suggestions and bug fixes, all helping to improve the code and make a better framework.

By introducing a too-similar competitor, (in general, not necessarily Spine) you risk fragmenting the above, which leads to many okay projects, not one great projects.

I'll be honest, it's an MVC JS framework centred around jQuery or Zepto. If I'm familiar with Backbone, what is going to drag me over to this - the size/number of lines of code isn't, thats for sure.

Javascript frameworks are making all of the mistakes that PHP frameworks did, no differentiation and promoting fragmentation. Backbone is up on Github so would it not have been more constructive to fork it and create one great product, not two less great products?

Surely it would be in their best interest not to continually flag their own services as needing improvement.

Running http://www.beseku.com primarily indicates that they don't setup their Analytics or jQuery CDN properly.

I did this, partly as there were no solutions to the frontpage I wanted, and partly as I wanted to implement better caching than any of the current platforms offer ... My site queries the database once per day, unless I post an update. So it's fast, (~100ms on $20 hosting).

What I enjoyed was making software that isn't bulletproof and distributable, but safe, secure, fast and fun to build. What personal sites should be, imho.

http://www.beseku.com/

I default, (by which I mean redirect non-'www.') to 'www.' simply because if you have a few subdomains too, it makes sense in a 'grand scheme of things' kind of way ...

www. dev. old. cdn.

etc etc ...

After my first job out of Uni, I never needed my degree. Until 7 years later when I wanted to move to Japan. Alot of countries won't let you get a visa without a degree, or at least will make it very difficult.

Even if I never need to use it for work again, allowing me to make this move makes sitting through horrible, boring and outdated lectures infinitely worth it.