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grrrando

55 karma · joined March 1, 2013

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grrrando··on Ask HN: Do you have side projects you want to sell?
I'd be interested in listing side projects for sale.

And, side note: I like the site. Wish I could more easily peek at other users based on tags or location - the search works but it's not quite friendly enough. A feed of recent blog posts would be great too. I would focus on these things - pretty basic expected functionality thats 90% of the way there - before adding in another feature. Also, as a matter of taste, I feel like almost everything (except the paragraph point-size) is about 10% too large, which these days is almost always related to a dashed-together "mobile-first" responsive build. Looks great all around though, nice work.

grrrando··on Show HN: It's hard to make friends offline, so we built a solution
Hey njoglekar - your window-fixed "Contact Us" bug is covering up your copyright in the bottom right. And the white text shadow on your main headline and some buttons is rendering poorly in Chrome 27 on a MBPr.
grrrando··on 3px of padding makes all the difference in the world
Two things -

First: Where on Facebook is this style? In my current layout (which is the current "stable" layout - pre-graph-search), I don't see this anywhere. Not on my feed, not on my timeline. It looks like a timeline post (feed posts don't have a border around them like this does).

Second: What bugs me way more about the screenshots posted is that the left side of all the info doesn't line up. The large profile picture and the body text are (!) 3px more padded than the action bar, the "Like" list and the comment area. But! It should be noted that, again, I don't see this anywhere on FB, just the screens that Garry posted.

grrrando··on Our Recurring Payment Pricing Was Rejected
Obviously, not all SaaS is created equally and a recurring fee isn't always the best idea. Especially for SaaS or PaaS offerings that people aren't used to paying for in the first place or are trying to disrupt services that are free.

Recurring monthly charges by no means need to be the default and customers should be wary. What if they don't like it? Is there a cancellation fee? How is the time billed - is it hourly or monthly? How much does it cost to upgrade to a better tier of service (if one exists)? If they work in a company, will they need to get monthly approval to continue the service, or (speaking from experience here) will they be bugged by their forgetful accountant every month for the charge on the company account? Probably most of all, what happens when I don't pay (mentioned in the article) - does my service suspend, is it limited, am I forwarded to a collections agency?

"Buy-to-own" or "Buy-to-access" is a much simpler model - far fewer questions need to occur on the path to payment. There's less value that needs to be determined to justify the expense, even if the initial expense is higher. Some of the same questions above still apply, like, "what if they don't like it?" - but the answers tend to be simpler ("You get a full refund" vs. "You're S.O.L. and still owe us for 72 hours of processing time", etc.).

grrrando··on Ask HN: Where to start?
Totally.

Taking it a step further, if you're able to find a friend or a willing mentor, pair program for a couple sessions to get the flow of things. You'll get into it quicker, will be able to ask complex questions and get solid answers, and probably have some fun along the way.

And both the easiest and hardest way to learn a language or framework is to put yourself (or have someone else put you) up against a deadline. Urgency is a good thing.

Don't sweat the nitty-gritty when you're just starting out. You'll get to that stuff when you need to. You can always refactor in better code. And that refactoring will encourage you by showing how much better you've gotten.

EDIT: Meant to mention the great http://railscasts.com. Together with the pairing I mentioned above, RC really got me up to speed on Ruby / Rails - came from a generalist C#/PHP/JS background a few years back.

grrrando··on Margins on website development are shrinking
This article takes a fairly narrow-minded look at the work done by lots of "website developer" professionals, and an even narrower look at what clients want from a website, app, etc.. It's like saying that Graphic Design will cease to be a profession because there's free photo manipulation tools.

There's a valid point that, sooner or later, CMS/app farming isn't a valid long-term business. But, thankfully, what you don't typically find at these shops, or on free/cheap online tools is the creativity that many clients demand.

The author does bring up "Marketing and branding consulting" as one of the two continuing successful business models. Ok, halfway there. However, anyone that's worked in marketing or branding knows that ideas are just a fraction of a successful campaign. A great idea will fail if it's not executed well.

grrrando··on In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M. Scheme
This is guessing, but perhaps the withdrawal limit of a pre-paid card acts as the account balance.
grrrando··on Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?
I've had a good time working with Blue Box Group (https://bluebox.net/). I've been using them as a backup for an uptime-critical festival application that runs on Heroku.

They helped me by setting up a Capistrano script for me that I run alongside my Heroku pushes. They set up the entire stack according to a specification I talked them through. And they helped me write a script to keep my backup DB in line with my production DB (Heroku Postgres). It's not nearly as quick as provisioning a Heroku app yourself, but if you can spare the week it took to get all that put together with just a little hands-on work, it's not bad.

Overall good experience, good support, if a little slow to respond, but I think mainly because they had one engineer working my case for the entire process, who I'm sure was also working with other customers. But having that 1:1 relationship is good, too. Tradeoffs.

grrrando··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2013)
Red Tettemer + Partners - Philadelphia, PA Advertising Agency

We're looking for a lead developer / "Tech Lead" in agency lingo. A great engineer with great organizational and people skills. We've got a team of 6 developers that you'd be working with, managing and mentoring. We're primarily a Rails shop and would hope you'd be a Rails type, but it's not a dealbreaker if you're not.

Check out our full listing here: http://redtettemer.com/jobs/3

And some other openings here: http://redtettemer.com/contact/

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