joshcrews

A great collection of Latin texts you can use to find your next books: https://thelatinlibrary.com/

Postico is my favorite desktop software of any kind

Another endorsement of Windy. In 2017 Windy knew that Hurricane Harvey was going to stall out over SE Texas days in advance.

St. Domingue (now Haiti) was France's wealthiest overseas possession in 1790. It was a human meat-grinder as slave life expectancy was low from being worked and whipped to death on the plantations. The slaves rebelled, fought the French and won. But then France was her enemy and tried to extract any remaining wealth in Haiti as "repayment" for their lost plantations. That set Haiti back really bad in development deficits that are still very present.

Some of this increase is attributable to lowering taxes brings more income out of the shadows and on to the tax return. If we lowered the marginal rate to 1% I think we’d see a lot more income appear on tax returns that is either unreported or creatively expenses at present tax rates.

+ 5,000 for Postico. Such excellent software.

Many of those un-updated Erlang projects on github are reliable, don't overlook them.

the advance of minifies and transpilers and modules doesnt seem to increase page performance. one of the effect of it being so efficient to minify and transpile is that large imports and frameworks are easier to use, and that boosts the total JS lines of code, making the JS parsing take a long time, and the page performance get "janky"

One reason for them to scale to 10x F-Large on Heroku is that their app gets super-slammed (150x more than average traffic) around college application deadlines. So they can spend most their time on cheap Heroku and just temporarily scale to super expensive Heroku for a short time.

There now is a robot that can knock you out safely

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...

#2 on BBC's list of 100 Greatest Britons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons

The only one in the top 10 I had never heard of before.

I second "raise your rates". I'm 90% sure you are significantly undercharging because a) you live in NYC b) you are getting work for SF companies, and one that's YC c) you care a lot about a $8,000 debt.

Double your existing rate immediately and don't look back!

Did you just merge "Connect" and "Marketplaces" so that there is no "Marketplaces" anymore? I saw that stripe.com/marketplaces is a redirect to stripe.com/connect

In my context, Ruby in Nashville, full-stack has meant you can do front-end html/css/js, backend application code AND the hosting/deployment/linux systems administration stuff too.

I was just re-reading about the Drupal super-vulnerability of Oct 2014. This could be some of the fruit. That was an enormous vulnerability that might have compromised 100,000's if not millions of servers

I think someone could have a hit building a flappy-bird clone off this concept.

Thought 1: I love hearing that good plumbers are getting paid well. There is such a need for reliable, professional just-solve-my-problem-with-service tradesmen in America. In a just economy, the makers and doers (like plumbers) are well paid and BS jobs (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) are hard to find.

Thought 2: You should start taking plumbing jobs, and after 6 months do a big writeup / post that tells the story ("How I raised my rates by leaving software development for plumbing"). I think a lot of people love to read about it. And possibly it could lead to more lucrative software work if that's what you are really looking for.

You can get the best of both by using a dynamic site CMS, and then hooking it up to Amazon Cloudfront to cache your html. The only challenge then is page cache expiration. You can set that by either using the http headers for Cache-Control or setting page rules in Cloudfront's admin.

Such a setup will scale like crazy and skip "compilation" steps

I'm a Ruby developer and interested in creating a business in this space.

Specifically a online-CMS that generates static html uploaded to a CDN. The target market is businesses who need to know their content is "uncrashable" and "infinitely scalable". The price point would be >$100/mo.

Get in touch with me if you are interested in that idea.

You can tell a senior engineer what needs to happen, and the engineer can manage the rest.

A jr. engineer, not yet.

I've been running the sticker, "Hi, I build software. Come talk to me!" at a high end coffee shop in my town (Nashville) for 2 weeks and it's generated 3 good conversations. I would say I'm very satisfied with how it's gone so far.

@CambridgePolice is reporting Scene is clear. Call unfounded. No threat to public safety in #CambMA #MIT

I have everyone prepay me for Rails development. I think the reason it's not an issue is that they've worked with bad freelancers, and people that drop the ball, flake out, stop answering emails.

They don't want that so bad that they will prepay me because they believe I'm not going to do that to them, they really want me to do their project, and so prepayment is a non-issue.

Edit: I haven't asked for $30,000 in advance before; more like 20 hour blocks of time, or thirds of projects paid in advance

Freelancers and agencies: consider having all work prepaid. Your fears may say that clients won't go for it, but they are going for it with other agencies/consultants, and in other professions this is a mainstream way of doing business.

Government and huge corporate sales might not go for it, but you should be adding a 0 to the end of your price quotes to them as compensation.

In my experience with curse-worded commit messages it means the codebase is very frustrating and working on it feels like editing hack upon hack to get small changes to work. The curse words either are for "heck yeah, it finally works!" or "try again for the 12th freaking time"

If you want such calls, but up a website with a title tag of "Ruby on Rails developer in <your local city> | <your phone number>". I'm not trying to parody anyone, that's what my website says and I get contacted frequently by idea guys.

I'm speculating here, and may be wrong.

You may have a more "I don't know how I got here, but I kinda feel like somebody's slave" problem than a CRUD problem. If that's your problem, there's an eject button that will be a wild and scary ride, but you're likely to come out more healthy, excited, passionate and feeling alive. Go independent (as in quit, become a freelancer/consultant).

If you do, your initial contracts probably won't be on the forefront of changing the world; but I'm speculating that that's not your problem anyway.

After going independent, and learning all of the self-management and business skills and establishing a reputation you'll also get more project offers than you can do and you'll be able to choose ones that change the world more, and the impact of your projects will probably go up overtime. And at that point, you'll also be hunted by the world-changing organizations that seem so distant now (if you want to leave consulting and go back full-time)

I've had good success with clients in letting them see the application come to life. I'll release a working something on week 1 ('something' can be very, very minimal) on a staging site and push updates to it a few times a week.

If you can do this, it takes a world of anxiety off the client. Their biggest fear is that despite everything you are saying, their project isn't really making progress. Such a high percentage of software projects fail; fear of investing money and the project not being delivered on time and on budget will be in the back of their head.

The way I am able to push out regular, small updates (and not push crashes to staging) is by using BDD on each new feature so that I can pile up new feature development without getting majorly sidetracked by regressions or getting majorly delayed by diving into writing some major application code that's not directly solving the present feature.

I've been handling offering flexibility in fixed big projects by sharing my Pivotal Tracker story board w/ feature estimates and letting them choose which features to axe to get their new priority scheduled.

In addition I've also been offering a fixed amount of "freebie points" for 'not yet discovered features'. That helps define that yeah, I'm going to do a couple extra things not defined in the scope, but it's fixed amount and when you've used them up, there's none left.