fretlessjazz

Hey there-- James from Dasheroo here. We're looking into the iOS scrolling issues on our homepage; sorry for the inconvenience!

It's pretty smart, actually. They don't want to ruin their SEO.

I run Rails and became tired of seeing 404s to standard ASP or PHP software (such as phpmyadmin), so I added this to our Apache conf:

RewriteRule \.(asp|aspx|php|jsp)$ - [F,L,NC]

RewriteRule (w00tw00t) - [F,L,NC]

RewriteRule (phpmyadmin) - [F,L,NC]

RewriteRule (php-my-admin) - [F,L,NC]

That cuts off those requests before they hit a Rails process and suck up any additional resources.

Austin startup here as well. I actually moved from San Francisco to Austin to launch http://www.ideaffect.com.

Also, hey Jason! Still owe you a beer sometime.

My first customer came from my own personal network as well.

The first customer that did _not_ come from my personal network was a result of posting to app directories such as feedmyapp.com and the like.

The best advice I can give on signing and keeping your first customer is to _make them happy_. Be nice. Crack jokes. When they call or email you, respond immediately. Your first customers are really important because they're vetting your business model in addition to trying your product.

Accept/understand that, as you observe your first customers interacting with your product, you're going to have to make changes. Make them quickly and reasonably.

Every company is unique, but that's how I found and retained my first customers.

I'm not a design genius-- but when I saw Gap's new logo I think I knew what they were going for, and imho I doubt it was created haphazardly. The new logo is exemplary of the transition of "best practice" design principles from print to electronic media.

They unabashedly violated two rules of logo and print media design, and it's so blatant that I can't believe it was an accident. Their logo features a gradient (print-media epic fail), and two low-contrast overlapping colors, the P and the background square (also a print-media epic fail).

I hope that the executives do not knee-jerk a reaction and demand a logo redesign, but instead play out the campaign and see how it pans out. I'm not convinced it was a mistake.

Perhaps the real redesign wasn't the logo, but their website and online presence?

2 days late; not sure if you'll still get a chance to read this. But, I'll bite.

As someone who's hired (good and bad) engineers in both UI/UX and back-end disciplines, my first impression of it was "Yeah, it's not pretty, but he does not allege to be a designer." At that point, I checked out the source code. It was not spectacular, but he did communicate an working grasp of the technology he professed to understand.

If this resume was judged in a biased lean towards UI/UX, my opinion is that you'd be passing up a potentially hard-working and dedicated employee. With a little help from a designer, this guy could possibly do great things.

Many engineers are not designers, and should not be judged as such. Constructive criticism is more helpful here than lambasting them for not adhering to your personal standards of UX.

Everyone who tried to convince me that (vim|emacs) is better than (vim|emacs) was wrong

CKEditor and TinyMCE have solved a very difficult problem in extremely elegant ways; their developers deserve more respect than wishing their projects death.

A big problem is that contentEditable has never been part of an official spec until now (HTML5). My fingers are crossed that we'll see some improvements over the next few years.

Without estimating the traffic of the author's site, I still find his argument valid.

I've employed many of the tactics he describes and have achieved >15 M/s of dynamic content through MySQL. Not Facebook, but it was fast and scalable for the market my app was geared towards.

I suggest focusing on something that many (web) programmers don't have, don't think about enough, and are paid a heck of a lot more if they do:

How are your design skills?

Edit: by design I mean aesthetics and user experience

Maybe this is why my wife hates the fact that I snore like a table saw?

The recording geek in me absolutely loves that you've managed to insert XLR into a company name. Well done!

Thanks for the comments.

My competitors (uservoice.com, ideascale.com, and a few others) charge a similar base fee, but they both have a tier-based pricing structure. I'm shooting for more of an a-la-carte model that lets my customers choose which features they want.

If, after a few months or so, I find that my pricing is too high, it's a lot easier to lower prices than raise them:).

Thanks again!

Gah! Sorry about that; fixing now.

=~ s/y/sp/

...does anyone else have a tough time getting past that?

My company still uses Sybase. Wish we didn't, but our stored procs are so complex that switching vendors would be very expensive.

Possibly, but Google Docs doesn't write in HTML anymore. Advanced positioning and stuff like tab stops don't translate easily into CSS, so even if they _did_ open source the editor, the final HTML will look different than what it did in the editor.

Example: create a document with two lines of tab-stopped text with varying lengths, and then export to HTML.

As somebody who has dealt with ActiveResource in a production environment, thank-you!

My company noticed an absolutely whopping performance boost when we dropped XML in favor of JSON for a transport format, fwiw. Ruby has quite possibly the slowest XML parsing libraries on the block (even when you wrap libxml), and we avoid parsing XML at all costs now.

From cnbc.com:

Trading Error at Major Firm Blamed for Market Plunge: Sources (Story Developing)

finance.yahoo.com = down<br /> bloomberg.com = down<br /> cnbc.com = realtime quote problems<br />

This is some serious load...

"If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer. All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file."

Ha! When I started to program, everyone told me the opposite. After weeks of head scratching and spending more time learning editors than coding, I secretly switched to Pico. But man could I use the hell out of Pico.

While the metrics behind his assertions are short-sighted, specifically ( years in workforce / number of jobs ) = job-hopping likelyhood, I think he left out the most absolutely critical reason why I and other hiring managers look at the duration of employ at previous establishments.

I've reviewed hundreds of resumes, hired great people, and hired some not great people. Sometimes they leave because of you and your company, sometimes they don't. In my experience, a history of short employment can mean one of two things:

1. This candidate is extremely talented, independent, and a self-starter. Hire these people. Now. 2. This candidate leaves before he or she is truly accountable for the code they write.

2 is very dangerous. You don't want to hire an engineer who will write a subscription billing platform and quit the week after launch. It's often tough to determine the difference between 1 and 2, and it takes many pointed questions to figure it out.

"Browser-Specific Code Is A Waste Of Time. Use Libraries!"

The author has clearly not had to use contentEditable :)

The next San Francisco suburb? Austin Texas.

Congrats guys! I love your product and hope that you continue to evolve it under Rally's wing.

Man... I wish all I had to do was push static content. Must be nice.

It's silly to boil this down to a black and white issue, because it's not. "Listening to your customers" is not equal to relinquishing creative control of your product's direction. It means that you, as a company, address the day-to-day pain points that your users experience while using your software. That's it.