countessa

Unsurprising really - most older programmers I know are fed up with solving the same problems over and over again with whatever the new technology happens to be. After a while, writing what amounts to CRUD by and large is pretty dull.

Sad news - RIP.

"10x represents the best freelance programmers and designers"

not to be too snooty, but couldn't they get one of their best design freelancers to give their site a bit of a makeover?

dodgy popups that encourage you to "join Free as a Bronze member" :/

Nothing specifically for the eyes. I take cod liver oil regularly and zinc if I start to feel the early stages of a cold.

this should so have been called "How to make a quick bug"

I use Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins on Dvorak for one handed copy paste, but I also don't really find the standard ctrl-c ctrl-v a problem with two hands, I sort of poise my middle finger over "c" and pinkie over "v" with left hand on the ctrl .....feels comfortable to me, but I've been on Dvorak for over 10 years now :)

nicely done. It would be extra awesome if you could weight the answers a little by date and whether the current version of the language matches the date. Actually that would probably be a pain. Maybe just some (optional) sorting by date?

sucks to be on the receiving end of some nasty/uncivil comments. On the other hand, you are now the person that re-wrote sed. That's pretty awesome.

Mostly, BBC

I had RSI a few years ago. Apart from paying attention to posture (I took up tai chi to help with that), I changed to a dvorak keyboard layout which helped a lot.

Not sure I see the point of this with tools like RVM and rbenv around.

very nice - thank you for these

it's easy to sling mud, and I'm fighting my knee jerk reaction to sling some back but I wonder if Josh was provoked into that comment, otherwise it seems unnecessarily aggressive....especially given that the ruby community is probably poorer for not having the conference at all.....nose, face, spite etc.

the noun project is awesome much kudos to them

Please change the "Wanna" - it just grates. There is nothing wrong with "Want to ....." maybe even just "Have" and "Want" buttons.

On the other hand, the trap of always "doing" something or "going" somewhere is equally harmful. You can trick yourself into thinking you are achieving something when you are just spinning your wheels. Like anything, balance is the key.

"If you can wait and not be tired by waiting" - Kippling

don't know the twitter api very well, so....maybe instead of scaling back and doggedly trying to get the current record set, you simply mark the 1st 1000 as having an error somewhere, proceed to the 2nd 1000....come back to the ones giving you problems later. I know eventually you have to come back and get the broken ones, but if you manage to process 80% of someone's millions of followers, then you can start digging into the other 20% a bit at a time and at least provide some value for your customers in the meantime......

I haven't actually checked out your service because i'm not really a twitter person so maybe you do this already, but could you provide statistics based on the amount of data you've got so far? (i know they will be inaccurate), but you can sort of give them as a "moving target", based on x number of your followers type thing. That way the user gets a little bit a value right away.

In general, I think people are often too worried about this. In any industry where you already have the relationships with the customers, you are already ahead of the competition. It takes hard work to foster relationships and sell well. Any dev who thinks ripping off an idea is easy money is sorely mistaken. Without marketing and potentially funding (depending on the kind of idea), it is just code sitting on a server somewhere that nobody will ever find.

Also, as a developer who does occasional contracts to help people build out their MVPs, it would be career-suicide to steal an idea - the last thing I would want is bad word of mouth. Entrepreneurs do sometimes cluster, attend meetups, bump into each other when pitching etc.....word gets around fast in that kind of circle.

And lastly, as someone who works closely with other developers on occasion, for any given idea, half of the devs I chat to don't think the idea has legs, the other half have no inclination/time to build it themselves.

In the end, if you are hiring someone to build it for you, chat to some developers, get a feel for them, ask for a reference or two if you don't know them well (in other words, do you due diligence) and go from there.

oh yes - I kept that sheet taped to my monitor for a few weeks as well, but once its gone.....heh looking at the keyboard while i type these days, just confuses me :)

I switched to Dvorak about 8 years ago - nothing makes you touch type quicker than not being able to refer to the keys printed on the keyboard.

It is nice, but to my mind, a slider is different to a switch. The classic "on-off" switch that the author takes on is like a light switch - to that end, it does its job pretty well, I think, telling you what state it is in.

While I appreciate the frustration (and lord knows Microsoft have frustrated me plenty given I spend half my time developing for their platform), no matter how difficult they make it for you to buy, it's never an excuse not to.

A LAMP stack will be easier to deploy simply because pretty much any cheap hosting you get as a playground will support it out of the box. Rails is a little more tricky to deploy. That said, Ruby and Rails is, in my opinion, more fun than an equivalent in PHP (pure opinion though so don't let that colour your experience).

I would suggest taking one bite at a time - find the easiest deployment possible for your chosen stack (if it's rails, then deploy some test projects to heroku). Learn to program a little before trying to jump in and do the Apache setup etc. Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to see your creation on-line but you just keep hitting your head against a brick wall because you can't deploy. I'll also put in a good word for webfaction for good cheap hosting that supports rails, django, and php very nicely without you having to do a lot of server admin - perfect for a playground.

neat - never seen those before - thanks.

placeguitar is up :)

unless you develop metro apps using javascript/html - then you can use vector art.

>>"What understanding would my comment add?"

Agree - this should be the default in any comment. It would be interesting to see a "karma" score for those who hold their tongue when they have nothing constructive to say, but obviously, that's pretty much impossible in an online format. In a way, the karma on a forum encourages opinions whether vacuous or not.

Build stuff that is already out there - competition is fine in any marketplace if there are enough consumers for the product. Create a copy of software that is already performing well, tweak a bit of it to give it your own flavour - copying something that already exists will give you the chops to pull off something unique when the inspiration hits you. Kind of like learning to play music - learn some basics, copy the classics/standards in your style, improvise a bit on the classics and eventually, write your own tune.

If you can find it, look up jgc's talk at the last HN London meetup - he gave a talk on "ideas" it was good.