jeromeparadis

I agree. As long as you can afford to. But even when you think you can't afford to, you're probably better off firing the client that gives you to much trouble.

As for having a startup with investors, if the fun isn't there anymore you always have the option of walking away.

Walking away isn't for everyone, though. Getting to the point where it's an option in your arsenal, having the confidence and experience of knowing you'll find something else to make a living by yourself is what separate entrepreneurs and employees.

Working on a side project for yourself is easy and as he says, it's possible to find the time.

However, having my own founded and co-founded companies for the last 20 years, I must say unless you have enough money to really work on what you want, you're always working for someone else. As a consultant, you're always working for clients and if business isn't too bad, you can at some point be picky and chose your clients. But, your still working for someone else.

Then, as a pure startup that gets funded, you are working for your investors. Usually, you try to have the best fit and keep enough ownership to make your own decisions, but you're still accountable, which is ok with me. It's sometimes good to have someone to check a bit over your decisions.

But, unless your are extremely fortunate, you are still usually working for someone else. Still, you gain more autonomy and flexibility as opposed to purely being employed.

This said, working for myself works for me and I would never go back to being employed by someone else.

Just know that you'll still be accountable to someone else. The difference is if you screw up, you cannot blame the company. You can only blame yourself. If this happens, it will be a good learning experience.

If it's to automatically follow people in your Facebook (or Twitter) account when you link your account - and, big and - if they are already using the app, then I have nothing against it. I'm personally sick of having to do the grunt work of mirroring manually and micromanaging my social networks for each new app. In these apps, if I find later on athat a few connections don't publish stuff I like, I unfollow them.

Yeah but in MMORPGs, people do shit work to get rewards...

It is hinted in the article that node.js is better for some use cases than others.  One thing node.js is good at is realtime apps and socket.io and the evented model make these easier.

However, as a server developer guy too, I must point out that if scalability ( or premature optimization ) is dear to you, I would look further than cluster to run multiple node processes. A good solution I found for a few projects is to use Redis pub sub to encapsulate socket.io messages to connected clients to make it easy, non-blocking and performant to scale to multiple nodes. For a project where I have some potential CPU bound code, I further split these operations in another process (let's say a game state machine with calculations) with which I exchange pub sub messages. In such realtime apps, the worst that can happen is that some process intensive functions may take a bit more time to dispatch information to the clients but the core communications node processes won't be blocked and will be screaming fast and horizontally scalable.

I've found that Redis pub sub is awesome for simple and fast interprocess communications.

Works well on my iOS 4 iPas too.thanks for the risizing tip! It's awesome.

Am I mistaken or they didn't used the golden ratio for the arrow in their icon? The arrow seems bulky and weirdly proportioned. I wonder how it would look like if they did.

I entirely agree. Apple forgot an important use case? I hate it when software is built to think in place of the user. There are two culprits here:

* the lack of persistent, non backable offline storage * the addition of a auto-cleaning procedure

The auto-cleanup without a storage alternative is a blunder. iOS 5 decides for the user what should be deleted to free up space. An alternative would be to prompt what application data you would like to remove instead of a blind decision. Otherwise, that's the kind of programming that will one day lead robots to cleanup the human race! ;)

Of course, having permanent local storage that's not backed up would be a more user-friendly solution. However, it would probably lead people to run out of space when developers begin abusing it like some did with temp or cache storage.

It seems like a trend at Apple these days. With Lion, the OS now decides when an application should quit when unused.

For the record, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Buyosphere.

Yes, for the moment, Buyosphere may at a first glance look a lot like Pinterest. At the moment, the main visible difference is: we focus around products people want or have... and the site is much slower (that will be solved soon). The end goal is to help people discover products they want. Hence the name Buyosphere.

We're working on a nice twist that will be released at the end of the month. It will make our unique value proposition much clearer. Stay tuned!

Just stepped into this thread and I thought that was the cul-de-sac: pointing back to 127.0.0.1. Would have made somewhat sense. :-D

Very nice. I've also been using the async node.js module which is quite handy for some other patterns. Of course, having direct support directly in node would be the best. Can't wait for the yield keyword!

It doesn't seem much like the same kind of project. I watched the video from the WATCHME file and it looks like wpshell is a shell to your installation where you have a command prompt to execute wp code.

Interesting.

From the commands currently supported, it looks like it's an update tool to update the core and to update plugins.

Here are some commands I think may be helpful and a few notes:

* upgrading the core could check the installed pup and mysql versions for changing WordPress dependencies. i.e.: latest wp versions had php requirements changes. You wouldn't want to be able to update unless your system is up to date * secure: command to secure the wordpress installation based on best practices * language: download/install language packs * backup: tool to backup wp-content and the database (optionally to another server) * restore: restore from a backup * migrate: copy to another database, optionally change DB/WP prefix, migrate/merge user IDs, etc. Could be complex, but the use case would be to help moving to a multi-site single DB installation.

I'll probably thing of other stuff.

I like that plugins can be developed for this tool.

Sounds like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

I would recommend that app publishers, has a good practice, explicitly put the action as buttons to replace or complement the Like. So, I could click "read" and then it would publish the action. I think that doing so automatically on behalf of the user is asking for trouble.

Well, it's a space with a lot of competition and the top paying ads go to the sites with millions of pages views. Ads are paid by CPM (cost per thousands) and the best paying ads are 10$ to 20$ CPM. So if you have 3 page views by Uniates, you can expect to make 600$ per month at most. In reality it would probably be a fraction of this. The ad market, especially in the US is trending towards lower CPMs even if the overall industry is investing more money.

Some models where you have a very targetted niche involve sponsoring content, reviews, videos, contests or events. But usually, you need a niche advertisers can't easily reach to make good money.

In general, don't expect to make a living unless you invest a lot of time in deals and grow your page views.

Interesting prediction. It would make a lot of sense to produce/fund more original content. It's definitely the direction the streaming business has to follow. If cool and original stuff is on Netflix only, it will be good for them and other original content producers may be more inclined to be there.

It's only boring if your network is boring. I'll take a boring UI anyway if I connect with others in a way that wasn't possible in the past. Social networks are tools. How you use them and with whom is what may make them engaging or not.

That's good to know. If my app ever needs it, it will be a nice problem to have.

That's awesome. For a project I'm going to work on using node.js and Redis, this is exactly the functionality I need for a component. Would be quite useful for scheduling one-time events through Redis.

I'm working on a pet project with nowjs and find it quite useful. What sucks is I started this a few weeks ago so I wouldn't be admissible for the contest. Nowjs basically kinds of adds an abstraction layer on top of socket.io and makes it easier to develop real-time apps.

It's especially useful if you need the concept of room. They have a multi-room chat sample which gives a good start. For example, this would be quite useful if you wanted to build a MMORPG game with different maps/rooms where each user is in a single room at a time.

I'm using it with the concept of rooms and instead of sending chat messages to users connected to a room, and send JSON messages of different types and based on the type of message received by the client, I use backbone.js to update the UI based on what's received. When a user's action affect other users' views, message a dispatched back to the room.

The only problem I see with nowjs is that if you need horizontal scaling, you would need a license for a more scalable version of nowjs that doesn't seem to be ready yet from their website. Since I'm thinking forward for my pet project, I wouldn't want to pay for this. I'm thinking to add a Redis pub sub layer to take care of horizontal scaling but would love to have access to their solution for this!

If my son was a little older, this would be my excuse to buy a PS3 right away! But my wife also loves Miyazaki's movies and studi Ghibli so maybe I found me excuse anyway! ;-)

I would say 6 hours an average during weekdays. Maybe 9 hours of sleep during the weekend days.

Like the person who wrote the article and as someone who has hired for more than a decade for my own businesses, I've noticed my best developers had pet projects. They tend also to be the most passionate about developing. It's not an absolute rule, but I found a good indicator.

As for having a life, let me tell you I have a 6 months old who spent 1.5 months of his life in the hospital, a wife, I'm CTO and co-founder of startup for which I code about 60 hours a week. On top of that, I have time to help my my wife with her business (my previous company), I have fulfilled time with my family, take the weekends off and have time for personal hobbies and pet projects. I sleep enough and sleep well and I'm happy and balanced.

A lot of the most involved and active people in the tech community in Montreal that I know personally have startups, children and time for their family. I'll tell you they're the most awesome, bright, funny and balanced people I ever met.

One thing that makes it possible for me is a 10 minutes walk commute. The other biggest factor is having priorities straight on how I want to balance my life. Is it easy? No. Do I always have the energy and passion to go forward? Yes. Seeing my son smile when I wake him up each morning helps a lot.

You don't have to be young, without a family and responsibilities to have the passion and energy to be able to do things you care about for yourself outside your work. Even if you work more than 40 hours a week...

Another thing: some pet projects or hobbies can take only a few hours a week or a month. So not having enough time is not a valid argument in my opinion.

Awesome work! Glad they added Paul to the core Django development team.

I would recommend using a different DNS service than your registrar. If you ever need to move registrars, it will simplify your life. Personally, I use DNS Made Easy. Pretty cheap and reliable. And also, don't make the mistake I once did by hosting your domains with your hosting provider. You'll have to move all your DNS before moving your servers.

Bottom line: use different providers for registering domains, hosting DNS servers and hosting your sites. Maximum flexibility and minimum headaches.

My first rule is use a registrar to register domains. Never host your site or DNS at the registrar. My second rule is do not host your DNS where you host your site. It makes it easier to switch providers without downtime. With these rules, I use GoDaddy to register domains and never had any problems. For DNS, DNS Made Easy is cheap and reliable.

Sorry about the remark. What a difference a character makes... I suppose it was too late or too early in the day. In any case, your article was quite helpful because I've been using Redis a lot, but not yet the PubSub functions. I've found this approach solves a clustering problem I foresee with a current real-time node project.

Doh! I really need to improve my code reading skills, it seems. Sorry. :-(

The best programmers I've hired where those who love programming. It's probably the case for any skills. The critical question I ask is if the developer has personal programming projects. It's usually an indication that the person breathes/loves the stuff.

Starting at an early age is great but doesn't mean much. Continuing doing it with dedication and just for fun into adult life is awesome. If you're still sticking with it professionally and still liking it, chances are you're a great developer. But of course, that kind of path works from whatever age you start getting into it.