jollyjerry

A friend brought up a good point the other day that the popularity of the iOS app store has actually pushed back on advances in web technologies on mobile devices. Because the sanctioned way to sell applications must go through Apple, less attention overall has been spent building mobile webapps. Also, since the hardware is also out of developer's control, there hasn't been a push to make native hardware available to the javascript.

Even with that, I do think that we're on the cusp of a big webapp revolution (again). With all these emerging JS frameworks (backbone, ember, derby, knockout, etc), and the modern and capable webkit powering so many mobile devices, developers will take note.

+1 on finding a way to leverage both fields. I've only heard of R and never used it, but I'm sure there are domains where it's the perfect tool for the job. You could potentially freelance to make some side income as well.

I think it's still a good idea to learn web development in general. It's such an interoperable medium. It's dense on the first read, but I recommend skimming RFC2616 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) the HTTP protocol. It won't teach you to program any specific language or framework, but it's a great way to get a feel for all the pieces involved for a web app.

After that, I recommend taking baby steps and tackling each piece of the puzzle individually. Learn some html/css, build a portfolio page. Then take on some javascript and add some dynamic elements. Then add a backend for dynamic elements you compute server side. For learning coding, nothing beats practice. To improve, write something that solves you own problem, but also look for how other people implemented the same thing (github's a great place to see well maintained and well factored code)

Best of luck!

One downside the post doesn't cover is that these microgems aren't discoverable. You can't do a gem search for them. If these really take off, it'd be neat if there was a section on ruby-toolbox that was dedicated to microgems.

I strongly agree. The learning process takes as long as it takes. What might take one person an hour, could take another person a week. But when it comes to education funding in general, the easy way out is to set a easy to quantify metric and use that as the yardstick

I've been out of the perl world for a few years, but seeing all those familiar terms makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Also I just appreciate the article as an example of open source working.

My plan is to be financially independent from what I love to do. I love coding because it's a medium for me to create something tangible out of nothing. I loved it before I was paid to do it for a living, and I'll love it till I become senile (the plan is to write lolcode when that day finally comes).

That said, I love other things in life as well - friends, family, girlfriend. All these loves are first class citizens and I can't tradeoff on one for another. When forced to choose, I always find a way to compromise. For example, when my girlfriend started grad school, I started working with Intridea (an all remote web and mobile consultancy).

I constantly in the process of finding ways to allow me to code what I want to, and still make money. I like to think of it as a daily and incremental refactoring of my life.

I agree with many of the points brought up. It's strange to me that Facebook would consider a practice that limits the number of eyeballs on their pages. For a social network, the real competitive advantage is the number of users and how engaged they are. While they may make more money in the short term, cutting into the developer ecosystem (healthy as it is now) will cut into their reputation and eventually their bottom line.

On the other hand, I could see them charging just the top 1% of the heaviest API users. In that case, it would fit Michael's cases for when charging for an API is ok.

At my last startup Outspokes, our product was an embeddable JS-widget. While we did load jQuery after initializing the widget, we still used basic Javascript to load the initial widget (think bookmarklet-like code). Because so much of our app was written in JS, we put more effort into structuring models and creating tests for our widget. This was pre-backbone days, so we built out a set of conventions for ourselves.

I agree that jQuery is almost like a superset of JS, and it hides a lot of the nastiness of some day-to-day chores. But it's still good to understand the underlying JS that powers jQuery.

3 books that I helped me tie my daily work back to more abstract computer science concepts are:

- Ruby Best Practices - Javascript, the Good Parts - Higher Order Perl

I recommend picking these up after you've done work in the languages they're about. They assume that you're already comfortable with the language, but then go back to show how that language uses CS concepts. They highlight how functional programming, and other classic introductory CS concepts, but stays practical. None of them are long reads, and there are clear take aways that make you better at programming.

I especially liked the Ruby Hoedown, and Magic Ruby conferences because they were free admission. All you had to do was convince your company to pay for travel and lodging. The quality of talks and technical skills of people who went to those conferences were definitely not lacking

Got the beta account and shot you guys an email with the feedback. Keep me posted on your progress and I'll keep using it whenever I can!

jch@whatcodecraves. I misspoke about Blank Space's location. Glad to hear that you guys are opening up in Santa Monica though. Ideally, I'd want to do something within walking or biking distance.

I saw the link to Office and Company in Pasadena. The rates are a bit steep for me at $325/month. I've also been to Blank Spaces in Santa Monica. Are there any folks out near Caltech that be interested in sharing a space or just working together? I usually work at home now and I wouldn't want to do co-working everyday of the week; I find I focus better outside an office environment. But I think spending a day or 2 every week with fellow developers and designers sounds fun and interesting. Ping me if you like the idea of part-time coworking.

This looks really slick. avk and I were were planning on building bug tracking features into Outspokes, but we've stopped work on that project. Our original goal was to have a JS widget for teams to collaborate on their sites. Hopefully you guys keep it up and build out what we didn't finish. Let me know if you guys want any feedback or any help.

I was also a big fan of remapping capslock to control. Fortunately, in OSX 10.5+, it became a configurable option in the keyboard prefpane. Thanks for posting your list! I'm looking forward to giving Lyx a try.

the landing page design really grabbed me, but I'm also really impressed with how simple and functional the actual dashboard is when you login. I had signed up with another beta autoscaling service, but I never heard back from them again. Best of luck with the service! I'll be rooting for ya.

offtopic, but guitaryst looks pretty sweet. You guys should compile a list of other cool apps built on top of last.fm

great job on the UX for tastebuds. It's not only pretty, but the barrier to entry was low and really draws you in to try it. The artist autocomplete was a perfect example of this.

You could even build in a wastebasket paper toss game :)

Great simple app.

Related to Sinatra, the Padrino docs and guides are really good. On top of reference style documentation, guides and tutorials like the ones at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ that are topic based are really helpful

I have the same problem when it comes to buying electronics. I've missed out on having a smart phone because I'm always waiting for the next iteration, or for my current contract to run out. It's an endless cycle of not buying.

What helps me break this cycle is to have specific monthly amount budgeted towards something I would otherwise have a hard time buying. If I put $100/mo towards my "dream X fund", then I won't feel this internal guilt when I finally buy X.

When they were explaining how to form letters, the movement reminded me of dialing numbers on a rotary phone, except that the possible combinations were expanded because counterclockwise "dialing" is also allowed.

Not sure exactly what you guys are building, but I hope it makes a fat dent in how credit bureaus work. I went through my first credit report from the 3 credit bureaus. Not only was the process archaic, but along the way I was bombarded by all kinds of predatory offers to sign up for paid credit monitoring services. After I retrieved my reports, I find inaccurate information, along with an account that I've never seen before labeled as an "adverse account". On top of that, I see misreported addresses and dates as well. From there, I had to do 3 separate dispute claims (all of them slightly different in process, but equally filled with spam). While on the phone with an Indian call center with Equifax, I was cut short every time I asked a question or tried to clarify, and at the end of the call I get yet another pitch to sign up for their paid credit monitoring service.

Please tear down and rebuild these sloppy and fat credit bureaus. At the very least, I hope you guys provide some solid competition for them to shape themselves up.

My girlfriend is a chemical engineer. We both try to talk to one another about what excites us about our work. When she starts talking about nanotech materials, she can't help throwing in a lot of technical jargon that fly over my head. She's always good about thinking of an analogy that I can understand. On the flip side, she rarely has trouble understanding what I do as a web programmer. I think the fact that her work involves all this sci-fi future black magics makes it a little harder to explain.

I love having that we have such 2 distinct passions in life. Sure, there's some overlap in engineering, but the subject matters are totally different. As a result of what she does, I get to travel to where her research takes her and meet people with backgrounds completely different from myself. It's freaking awesome.

The 2 of us are moving down to Pasadena next month because she's starting at Caltech. It's a bummer to leave the Bay Area, but I'm excited about our new adventures.

I like the idea of this because there are benefits for both the employer and the freelancer. For employers, it's a labor model that's pay-as-you-go like cloud servers. For freelancers, you're motivated to complete tasks and not watching the clock for 8 hours waiting to run away. This doesn't fix the problem of stability for hired work or benefits like retirement or med insurance. Cool post!

Thanks! Let me know if I can help you out with launchset.com in anyway too. Good to meet you in person at startup school.

We have a short demo video on the homepage and a tour page. We also made a free account for people to try out. I wanted to make a bookmarklet demo to let you install the widget on arbitrary sites, but it's not a high priority at the moment.

We recently added a script include that referenced the google AJAX api via http instead of https. That was causing the scary message. It's been fixed now.

I agree we need to add some copy and badging to reassure the user that we store all cc information securely through our payment gateway.

Ya my site's down too :( Statuses are being updated at:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23RackStatus

especially like the ability to inject jquery for quick debugging and playing around

The Braintree API wasn't too hard hard to integrate with, but their web interface for configuration and management is pretty ugly and unintuitive. I especially dislike how they share test instances between multiple customers. Their customer support is really responsive and helpful though.

I wrote a quick Rails plugin to interface with the recurring payments with Braintree. It doesn't implement all or their API's, but it's enough to handle monthly recurring billing for Outspokes. I pushed it up to github in case anyone finds it useful. Let me know if anything's confusing about it. I'll polish it up when I have more free time.

http://github.com/jch/braintree_payment_processing