huertanix

Nice, but I prefer my cookie icons to be chocolate chip.

I have a reputation for being a bit harsh about design critiques, so before I say anything:

* Great work on taking the time to build something cool.

* Awesome work at keeping the functionality simple, intuitive and easy to use. Most people fail at pulling that off.

* Much props for asking for feedback.

...as for the design...

* Some boxes have sharp corners, some have round. Pick just one for a uniform look. You can put stuff like the Facebook fan widget inside a section with rounded corners.

* Doesn't fit in a width of 1024px.

* That green background is hideous and is causing me much gnashing of teeth.

* The logo doesn't seem to fit the rest of the page, in style or in size.

* What is that giant empty blue bar between the header and body of the front page supposed to be doing?

* Some of the small rounded boxes with text in them ("World Cup 2011 Contest coming soon") are center-aligned, but off-center.

* Heading on the left nav bar on the match page could use more uniform spacing so that the match name (sort of redundant) doesn't look like its trying to break free from its rounded div prison to re-join its slightly larger twin to the right.

Other than that, looks great.

The Spectrum's print edition is exceptional; That being said though, any moderate technologist can read the Spectrum. The Spectrum is not a collection of whitepapers, but a series of articles on broad topics and even investigative reporting that I wish were more mainstream (e.g. Dec. 2009 article on what its like to run an electrical generating station in Gaza). Pretty much any Wired reacher can handle it if they can stand not having a liquor ad on every other page.

That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community.

I've been waiting for someone to say this; Every development language includes a development community, and in this case, .NET communities are more or less stenciled across internal department lines and rarely extend much further. When I first started working as a developer, I thought it was just my then employer's department tribalism, but no. These patterns are things I've seen in every .NET shop I've ever worked for. Each shop had their own interal closed-source data logger, data mapping, and some other frameworks that were shared internally, but accomplished in an unpolished, mediocre manner. Each shop's code was redundantly similar and none of it was impressive.

The internal frameworks developed in .NET shops are inefficient and mediocre not because the Ruby or Python communities are full of pure genius, but because they have more than a single person continuously working on improving them. Pythonists and Rubyists have a culture of sharing and coding in a constant loop of feedback. They talk to and work with each other. People in .NET culture do not. As a .NET developer I have rewritten code that has been created several times before, and it will die in obscurity behind the closed doors of the companies I've worked for.

This is something I only begun to realize by talking to JS, Ruby, and Python developers. I've been teaching myself Ruby since September and hope to leave .NET as soon as I can.