hackoder

I lost a job in the manner he described - told them I was looking elsewhere, but I'd be more than happy to train my replacement. I did it without first finding work and I thought I was doing them a favor by letting them know as soon as I was sure of leaving so their projects wouldn't be affected. I was laid off due to 'lack of budget' within the week. That taught me.

This is the first time I've read something which makes complete sense to me and helps get rid of the "ifs and buts" from my head (I still am looking for work). My ideas would never have been implemented, the organization was too resistant to change. The curve makes sense- it was fun for a while, but after "getting it all", the daily monotony would have killed me. At the same time other employees came in, did their work, and went home. They felt the whole system was very rigid, but they were ok with tolerating it. After quitting I've often found myself wondering if its something in my head that prevented me from "sticking it out". This post makes some good sense and I hope more employers read it.

I dont think there's an issue with controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace. Its an issue that its the _only_ marketplace that they're controlling.

I always thought that fail fast meant the following:

# From there build the MVP (minimum viable product). I believe in launching with a small set of features and learning from the market before you spend too much money building out a feature rich product or before you put serious capital to work.

# If you validate that there’s a market then go for it! If you don’t believe that your product is resonating then pivot and find one!

(taken from his bullets on "What is the right way to build a startup?")

I really haven't seen any definitions of fail fast where it meant that you waste money, don't respond to the market, and wrap things up.

I guess a good compromise would be to not block the ads but hide them after loading (I think thats how the AdBlock extension for chrome works)?

I agree that educating users is a good plan here. Users should have adblockers active because ads sour our online experience and a large majority of sites show ads that distract from the content (Not to mention that we have lots of sites completely dedicated to spam). On the other hand, if a site has been giving you great content for years, it makes sense to support them. But of course, lots of big tech sites have sponsorship deals so its not like they're posting great content out of their love for us...

I think you missed the sarcasm there...

While firebug is clearly superior, web inspector is much more stable. It ends up being a combination of both (or one of the older, less-featured, more-stable versions of firebug).

Very nice, I like it. I agree with the others that you could improve the first impression- Have a nice big tagline that captures what you do in one sentence. I can see this as being very useful in lots of domains (think disaster recovery etc). You could pitch it to businesses even (thought the current look is too casual for businesses) to use this as part of their risk management process.

I stress the point of businesses because you have more money-making potential there as opposed to individual plans.

Beautiful to look at.

For anyone who uses this in an app, my guess is that it makes debugging (in firebug etc) kinda annoying? I mean, even though it maps directly to JavaScript, the mental context switch between what you see in firebug and the code you've written would take getting used to?

Nitpick - Jihad does not translate (in its original arabic) to "holy war". It translates to "struggle".

To keep the entertainment going, lets all do our part and promote the article's link up in google's search results for 'facebook' and 'facebook login' :)

blocks and lambdas in Ruby?

Quick comment - is there any benefit in using flash for the start trial now button?

I haven't tried out their product yet, but it seems like that would be one of the first things they would've thought of. Probably a way to do transactions offline and upload when there is a connection.

There's something called Smart Alarm Clock for Android (if you have a supported phone). I tried it as a way to judge if the idea had any merit, and it worked really well. Obviously it doesn't help with sleeping, just waking you up. But for the last week or so, I've woken up fresh every time, even when sleeping around 5 hours or so. Obviously, this works best if you get into a good sleep/wake cycle. There's something similar for the iPhone too, might be a good idea to do a trial run with a cheap app.

I dont think its about the $5 a month. If you read a lot of posters, WakeMate simply got the whole announcement wrong. It ended up being very ambiguous (no exact date, free service for EACH month that it's delayed, what are the new features- take 10 extra minutes to explain those, etc) which was bound to piss people off.

Same here. What's with the 'fill out the form to stay on our list' bit? Did I not already pay you money to stay on your pre-order list?

I think the point he is trying to make is that we have 'n' reasons why we are better than nation X and we are very proud of those reasons. But despite those n reasons, we aren't prioritizing life, while the countries that we put down constantly for various reasons are still doing better than us in some areas.

Anyway, one can always find specific sentences to nitpick about. I think his overall message is correct.

Its not all that ridiculous. A company that I used to work for did this. And while anecdote != data, I've seen it happen often enough to realize that a lot of devs just dont care about security.

It depends on what brings you inner satisfaction. Is it the "stupid" idea (I personally wouldn't use the word stupid) that brings you $$$ or the smart idea that keeps you up all night trying to figure out a solution?

Is more transparency always better? If every moment of your day was videotaped and catalogued for everyone to see, yes, it might be good (people might be able to point stuff out that you could improve upon), but would you really want that despite all the "benefits"?

Its not just you, and its not about getting older. Its about being tired of watching a tread (the "social" web) beaten to its death. Its not a "great, controversial" idea, its just silly.

I don't think its about working from home vs working in an office. It should be about 'do what works and results in the highest individual and business productivity'. At the very least, if one of your very good devs wants to work from home, give them an option and try it out. If they are comfortable working at the office, that's fine too.

You know something's not right when people say stuff like how it's normal to not be completely satisfied at work, to hate monday mornings and so on. Feels like we're being told this just so we can shut up and keep working like zombies. And it amazes me that so many people feel this way and yet nothing changes at companies.

Anyway, yes, getting help is one option (bad code, like bad driving, is a part of a dev's life. You try to keep a safe distance away from it ;) but you don't get angry). Create an intuitive plan of what you'd really like to be doing and at what company, and then get to work at solving the problem. Don't let it hurt you until it boils over.

I (OP) agree with a lot of what you've said. I have done a lot of work in javascript, and my reason for html/js generation wasn't because I believe that everything should be lisp. I enjoy writing html, js and css from scratch.

The reason I chose it as one of my criterion is because it allows you to get off the ground _fast_ if you're coding in a single language (so basically it helps with prototyping stuff). I really enjoy the html generation libraries- I can test stuff without doing a mental switch between languages, even build a half decent UI very quickly, and that is a huge advantage. My initial scripts will not need to be run in multiple browsers, they'll be simple scripts to get the app going. Since I intend to keep the scripts small and smiple, I can replace them later with javascript as the app grows.

The biggest problem with this is that your own web site/app depends on some other web site being up. Or am I reading this wrong?

Good stuff. Agree with what has been said about it looking like a domain parking page.

Thoughts: - The simple look is very useful. List of books, search, categories. Well done. - The feedback "tab"(?) at the side. Why not move it to the bottom right, or at the top as a menu item?

FYI, the site loads with a rails error for me. Not sure if you guys are aware of this.

Further to what vicaya said, when you are building a huge system like Cloudera, you should invest extra time/$$$ and write your own library.

Crockford wasn't joking when he called javascript the most misunderstood language. A lot of libraries have really bad code- Its a huge risk to take to build an entire system on top of the library, without properly understanding the kind of code you are dealing with. The number of Javascript experts that haven`t gone through the EcmaScript specs is probably upwards of 99% (I only guess, ofcourse, based on the "advanced" code that I have seen).

Seeing as a lot of people prefer jQuery, and not wanting to get into a debate of its usefulness, the point is simply this: When writing a huge system, crank out your own library. 2k-4k lines wont take that long to write. Take a week out, decide what your specific app needs, and then write a library to handle those needs. If its a small site, or one that will run on a specific set of browsers in a contained environment, a library will do fine.

Exactly. This is android's strength. It does everything the iPhone does, but more. It gives devs and users more power, IF NEEDED. If you want, you can build the same user-friendly, no complex-options kinda apps. And if you want, you can build apps to please the geek crowd too. Its the perfect mixture of iPhone and windows mobile.