bscofield

I'll be in the Atlanta area around Thanksgiving if you wanted one not-regular-attendee person - I might be able to sneak away from the in-laws for a meetup.

Aw, man - I thought I'd coined "polyglot persistence." Darn InfoQ article from July (referenced in this article)!

One of the complaints that people have about the NoSQL label is that it attempts collect a huge variety of databases that don't fit the traditional label under one name. The problem with that is illustrated in this article, which does a great job of describing problems that some of the NoSQL alternatives experience – but the problems here don't apply nearly as strongly to document-oriented databases, or to graph databases. I think the title's overstating the argument, in other words.

Now if it were "the dark side of column-oriented databases," Bob's your uncle.

Nice! I just added a project like this to my "weekend apps" list a couple of days ago.

I've used Twitter to poll peers, learn new things, coordinate meetups, find out breaking news, discover useful resources, and more. All of those are valuable to me.

In the end, it's what's valuable to you. If you can't (or don't want to) find a group of people to follow that you find interesting, helpful, or whatever, that's fine. Just because you (or sharpn, or my wife) don't find the service valuable doesn't mean that there's no value in it for anyone, though.

Doesn't that just mean you're following the wrong people? It's not like Twitter forces you to listen to (or continue to listen to) people when you're not getting value from them.

LaunchBox Digital is a DC-area incubator along the lines of YC and TechStars - you could try connecting with them to see if they know of any startups looking for devs. If that fails, I could also connect you with my CEO (I work for Viget Labs, which is headquartered near DC); he knows most of the people in the scene.

I did -

Mind Control: Psychology for the Web: http://bit.ly/HUyl9

Difficult Domains: Alternative Databases for the Web: http://bit.ly/9sK0a

(Hmm, guess adding "for the Web" wasn't required after all :)

Hey, they totally stole our schtick! http://developer-day.com/

Though we're only doing one city at a time...

C'mon, any upvote for wbr should be more than equaled by downvotes for saying label is rare and/or obscure.

Why is a two-year-old article being posted now? EDIT: Sorry, should've added: Especially in a domain that changes so quickly? Both Django and Rails have grown immensely since this was last updated.

Worked a bit on some iPhone dev, but mostly I was busy cooking

My general experience with the Future of X conferences (I've been to FOWA, and had coworkers go to FOWD) is: they're very well produced, but are more about the present than the future. In other words, I've been underwhelmed by the amount I've learned at them.

Conflating epistemology and metaphysics is never a good idea.

Wait, so this guy is recommending against storing predictable user IDs in cookies, and against pre-filling password fields such that the values can be read in the source for a page? Brilliant! /facepalm

I think both the .gitignore and .gitattributes examples are helpful, actually—especially for those of us not used to developing compiled projects.

As a consulting firm (Viget Labs, http://www.viget.com/careers), we have a slightly different relationship with the economy (some companies are more likely to come to us, some are less so). As a result, it hasn't really affected our hiring priorities at all. We're looking most actively for a senior-level Ruby/Rails person, a front-end developer, and some marketing folks...

Solo here, on http://foreverhome.r08.railsrumble.com/

Several of my coworkers also competed - details here: http://www.viget.com/blog/viget-rumbles

Signup (to be a judge) requires OpenID—there are some really good apps in this batch (and hey, I wrote one, too: http://foreverhome.r08.railsrumble.com/ </shameless_plug>)

Does the opinion on this change when you're cheating "the boss" vs. when you're cheating a client? Using billed time without permission seems different to me...

Never heard of a mass import/interview like this - certainly seems like a fun idea.

You can listen to them on the page by clicking the play arrow in the embedded widget. Rubyology's also on Odeo, though, which gives you a few more options. Go to an episode page there (like http://odeo.com/episodes/23382315-Rubyology-71-Avi-Bryant) and click on the Download tab under the player to grab the file itself.

I'm much more interested in the web platform here (versionista) than I am the particular content being tracked - this looks like a great tool with a ton of uses.

Bernd Heinrich (biologist and (ultra)marathoner) wrote a book that dealt with this—Why We Run: A Natural History. It's very good (like many of his books).

If you're interested in flog but disagree with Ryan's scoring of various constructs, check out the self-flagellation gem: http://github.com/bscofield/self-flagellation/tree/master

With it, you can specify score profiles in a YAML file. We've also got a website in the works that will allow people to share score profiles for various types of code (for a Rails app, for a test suite, etc.)

I never really dreamt about Tetris, but I did start seeing it during my waking hours—I'd be driving along, and realize, "Hey! The negative space between those two cars would be perfect for a z-block."

It was very disorienting when several of those happened one after the other.

A collection of records can itself be a record. Browse is just Read for a set of records.

Gah, I hate this suggestion.

I found this post interesting, given that I heard a similar rant in the speaker lounge at a conference a while back—a designer was complaining loudly about people who asked her what tools she used to produce her oft-admired products (obviously, I'm anonymizing here). "MY BRAIN," she said snarkily.

My reaction (which I suppressed at the the time, since I was rehearsing my talk yet again) was that not everyone is out to get you when they ask about this. Not everyone expects to be able to do what you do just by picking up the same tools. Many people may just be asking out of interest, looking for alternatives to the applications they currently use, trying to improve processes.

Personally, I'm happy to evangelize the tools I use. I think they improve my productivity, and in general the more people using something, the better the community around and support for it.

Has anyone here done much pairing? We're gradually adding more of it to our standard process, and we're seeing some really interesting results...

I actually replied over there (with a couple of my co-workers). I think that the post is exaggerated; agencies can be the wrong way to go, but if the founders are non-technical I think it's probably safer to at least start with outside help. VCs should know which companies are best able to help a fledgling company get going, and there's an increasing tendency for companies like ours (Viget Labs) to build in a transition period to an internal team once they're hired. Heck, we even help vet and train the internal team candidates at times, as it's in our best interests to make sure that competent people take over the applications that we built.