glenbo

I must agree. For what it's worth, at a previous job, I remember observing a real shift in my team's personalities after a few months. Negativity can be really contagious, and it's possible that an unshakably positive force (you) may be the cause of a greater shift.

Might be worth a shot.

Know your audience, I guess. I enjoy gifs, and enjoy getting a sense of the author's personality when I read an article. I don't think I've ever bounced from an interesting article because of a handful of cheerful gifs, but hey, that's just me.

To each his/her own I say.

Pretty spot on, I think.

The most problematic part of SCRUM (and the first thing to start killing productivity) are the interminable meetings it facilitates. The SCRUM master is constantly trying to gauge scope on this or that feature, and everyone feels like they need to bring up what they've been working on during the standup in order to feel like they're not appearing to be slacking off.

I've abandoned SCRUM in favor for a Kanban approach that puts the onus on the Product Owner to manage and estimate scope and deadlines, thereby leaving us developers alone to focus on our work.

I've written more about my approach here: https://medium.com/@glenelkins/agile-is-good-for-managers-bu...

All-too-angry rebuttle!

I agree that meetups, open source and friends can help with mentorship, but being forced to solve problems in a group is a lot more effective than casual encounters and meetups.

That said, it probably depends on the type of person you are. If you're super outgoing and involved, freelancing full-time is probably similar to working at an agency in that regard, but if that's true it sort works against the point of your post.

5. Freelancing Forces You to Keep Up to Date "By contrast, I know some design shops in my area that are still using Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build HTML-based websites on GoDaddy. Know when they opened their shop? When Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and GoDaddy were still cool. That’s not acceptable, and young whippersnappers in the area are on the creeping in with their fancy new WordPress installations, scripting skills, and jQuery, and grabbing new business. The moral? Learn or die.

And some of those whippersnappers are going to be rolling on the same technology stack 10 years from now."

I couldn't disagree with that sentiment more. I'm a developer who works full time at an agency and freelances on the side when I feel like it. I know a lot of developers my age (mid-late twenties) that have only really ever freelanced full time and never worked in a company 9-5 and I can say the one noticeable difference between us is the skill set.

being surrounded by better developers than I has forced me to learn new things in a way that striking out on my own would never do. Sure, necessity is the mother of invention, and if you're running your own business, you'll have to learn things to keep the lights on, but you miss out on all the mentorship and guidance working with a team of more experienced people gives you.

I've worked at around 4 agencies in my career thus far, and have never seen or heard of an agency that fits the description in your hyperbolic example. In fact, I tend to think it more closely resembles a one-man freelance dev shop.

Just my thoughts.

I like the idea a lot, and I like the UI and aesthetic. From a writer's point of view though, you're marketing page and these requests for info in the comments seem too focused on the tech details. I would guess that bubbling up the problems you're solving here for writers on your marketing message would help you gain more traction.

Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.

For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon: "I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."

How do you successfully build an audience? Posting to reddit and HN is nice and all, but one or two popular posts rarely builds a ton of repeat users in my experience.

Why not use use html since the point of the fonts is for web use - load time's be damned?

The white text on near-neon background is tough on my eyes.

Have you thought about touching up the UI? Seems like a more refined aesthetic might attract more repeat visits... PM if you are interested in help.

I work at a startup that has an amazing office, with a full bar and eight taps for draught beer. This makes it easy to knock back a few while coding throughout the day/night. I'd dare say, that the availability of free drinks coupled with a culture that promotes drinking as a social lubricant is just about the most tempting atmosphere possible.

Surprisingly, people do not take advantage. I think some less mature people may like to brag about how much they can code whilst drunk, but it's just like any other drug: If you can do X, Y, and Z incredibly well while under the influence, odds are you'd do even beter while sober.

If you can "get shit done" while drunk b/c you're no longer afraid of the awkward situations, odds are you'd do even better at handling them sober.

We've never had an awkward situation where someone checks in epically bad code due to being sloppy-drunk that I'm aware of, but that's b/c people are largely self-policing and they realize that what you an manage to do drunk, you can dominate sober.

I don't wish to sound like a prude. We do enjoy the refreshments, but usually after-hours, or at least when doing exploratory R&D, perhaps playing with a new design. To do your best work on the most important projects at a startup, you really to to bring your "A" game.

Well said. I completely empathized with your sentiment. So much so that I had to write more in response them what is probably appropriate in a comment section.

I commit to small one-off projects for friends, longer-term work with acquaintances, and whip up my own projects all the time. Sometimes the projects are freelance, and sometimes they are simply "free." All this serves to satiate the needling feeling in the back of my brain that I might just be missing out on something.

Here's the rest of my thoughts: http://blog.glenelkins.com/the-over-committers-dilemma/

The technology that drives this is undoubtedly very interesting, but what does this truly offer? What would be the practical application of this?

Are there droves of people who could benefit from constantly changing css?

Perhaps I'm just missing something rather obvious. If so, please help me.

yikes! Embarrassing, but fixed nonetheless. Thank you.

Well no duh. Not to sound juvenile, but it should come as no surprise the extremely inventive and competitive genius that was Steve Jobs would take aim at one of the lagest internet companies in the world delving directly into his business space.

Patent issues alone, I find it very likely Jobs saw Google's foray into iOS as a direct assault on one of his flagship products.

I commented on your original post, but there's one more thing to add:

I do not contend that the early morning is the most productive hours of the day. I usually take an hours or so to really warm up, get some coffee in me and start working well. Another common mistake I'll make is spending the hour+ time on checking emails, reading up on news, checking fantasy football & stock prices... all things that I'd normally do in my "personal time," yet do not have anything to do with my projects.

This idea definitely works, but requires discipline :)

In my limited experience with so-called "spinners," writers would easily prefer to creating their own content as opposed to regurgitating phrases from a source article. This is usually more inexpensive and a better liked job for the writer. It's a little counterintuitive, but letting someone research a topic and develop content on their own (even when given SEO metrics) takes a good writer far less time so it ends up being cheaper & better.

Sometime you can have your cake and eat it too, although this doesn't solve a common problem when sourcing work . If the writer is uninterested or unfamiliar with the topic, the quality will invariably suffer.

* edited for grammar