kingofspain

I think the monthly whoishiring 'bot' will probably be posting this within the next few hours.

Does anyone know of a decent and up to date guide on what is/is not allowed? The official guidance is typically not much help and my searches reveal a lot of stuff out of date and other sites that are more interested in selling me cookie analysis - so I'm taking their advice with a grain of salt.

Started typing BASIC from my ZX81 manual because the machine could do little otherwise, moved on to a bit more on the C64 but it really kicked off when I got an Amiga. A lot of games in AMOS and then after weeks of delicate preparation, convinced my parents to buy me a book that was a spin-off of an Amiga mag, it came with the full version of Dice C (£25 was a lot of money for a book for a 14 year old!).

Later I got a C compiler off a PC mag and dabbled with that, moved on to Delphi and then by the time the internet made an appearance in my household I began with the HTML and shortly afterwards Perl and then PHP. It was only at this point that I started learning "properly". I guess partly because it was time and partly because it was the first time I ever had some level of access to best practices, theory and whatnot.

It appeared for me around the time I hit 500. Since then I only used it once and it didn't feel anywhere near as maniacal as I'd hoped.

I've used PhoneGap in the past and whilst it worked well enough for a basic CRUD-y app, I'm not so sure about games, especially given the webview is nobbled in comparison to the browser.

I'm toying with the idea of building a game I never got around to on my old Amiga and looked at Corono (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/). Obviously no good for HTML games but it does look up to the job if you fancy switching to Lua.

In my previous experience of working on a distributed team, the main things were Skype, Basecamp and Bitbucket. Well, except for the designers who used email exclusively and infuriatingly :)

Oh man, reminds of the time I was working on an intranet app for a big furniture company and all test user signups were coming through as 01/01/1970. After several frustrating hours trying to track down the source of the error I had the client enter a new user in front of me to see why it was happening for them & not me. I watched in horror as he set the birth date to January 1st 1970.

He had some limited exposure to development in the past and had got into his head that this date was the Universal Developer Test Date.

I gave a similar thing a whirl some time back. The fee was around the same I think but the first few people to sign up got a big discount (I was one). The names that came back were a bit underwhelming. From what I can remember it was a bit [keyword]box.com, [keyword]hq.com, go[keyword].com etc etc. Stuff that implied not a lot of effort had been put into it.

Now, sometimes those domains work well, but I'd like a bit of variation and thought put into it. Not something I can unimaginatively test out myself in 2 minutes.

However, for $100, is it worth your time?

SEEKING WORK - Remote

I'm a designer/coder which I hear is rarity. So there you go!

- Front end: HTML 5, CSS, JS/Jquery. - PHP development. I'd like to do more 5.3 but I'm more weathered in 5.2 due to client demands. Also Codeigniter. But I can pick up most things.

If you're really desperate, I can hit things with Perl too.

I use Mercurial for source control but I'm comfortable with git also. I'm familiar with most modern day practices & processes. I won't say I've been overly-exposed to something like Agile or TDD for instance because I haven't. But I get these things and I learn quick :)

I have worked on pretty much every kind of site imaginable now and would estimate I've built an area of internet roughly the size of Ireland.

My own site is currently temporarily based at http://pitbot.pgkit.com (and something else I threw together at http://applab.pgkit.com). Happy to supply URL's of other recent work (and not so recent too if you like history!)

Email is in profile.

I'm UK based.

This should probably come as a timely reminder for me, as I'm dangerously close to burning out at the moment. I already find myself losing motivation and taking 2-3x longer to get anything done.

I think my problems are mostly related to chasing payments. If I was paid even half what I was owed, I could take a break for a few months quite comfortably. As it is, I get just enough to cover my bills. So I find myself working longer hours to try and bring in more money, getting less sleep/time to myself and none of that is helping. It's a kind of vicious circle in a way, I haven't the time or inclination any more to create an amazing Github profile or do freebie work to land a decent gig. I'd love to take a holiday (have had maybe 7 days off in 18 months) but I just can't afford to.

It's also quite difficult to talk about this to friends etc as it does sound on its face a very first world problem to have, especially when friends are having pensions slashed and the corporate axe dangling ominously. I can understand them having little sympathy.

Now, this isn't to whine (although it may read like that!). I know I'll figure it out in the end but hopefully reading stuff like this will give me that extra little bit of hope or the last push I need to really starting fixing things. It's a horrible feeling and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, except maybe Hitler (what a bastard!).

As someone who recently had to deal with a system with two different (incompatible) SOAP services, I fully endorse the message behind this site.

Luckily my exposure seems to be restricted to legacy and enterprisey stuff nowadays.

I hadn't noticed that. Not sure why they can't have the href point to the docs page and use JS to show the fancy menu if enabled.

Then again, this is still a prototype. Hopefully someone will fix this before switching over.

I quite like it. I don't think it's too bad as a standalone site but compared the previous one, it's amazing.

I do like the documentation menu. Similar to the way Codeigniter does it.

Yahoo is usually talked about as if it's a joke or a failure. According to a cursory check (ahoy - I'm no finance king so I could be reading this wrong) it's worth $19 billion. If I could fail half as well, I'd be pretty happy.

Honest question: Am I missing something really obvious? Is Yahoo really falling apart (slowly I guess as the same has been said for the past decade)? Or is it a case of not fulfilling potential?

I've noticed the same. Did a lot of agency work last year where the agency boss got every client on MT to get the affiliate perks and was getting constant grief over slow sites, slow scripts and whatnot. I stuck copies of everything onto an old Dreamhost account I had and it flew.

In my experiences over 6-7 mo, MT had these speed issues roughly 50% of the time.

This seems to have been downvoted but its not an invalid point. The web is old enough now that a certain level of design is expected of things people need to trust. A shop down a side alley with a hand written sign inspires less confidence than something plastic on the high street - however wrong that initial impression may be.

People with background knowledge may know startssl is legit/good but to a newcomer I can easily see why their first impression is off.

Like it. I finally feel we're at the stage now where I can start dropping things like this into pages without too much worrying about compatibility.

Many a year has gone by where I've seen cool things appear that I'd love to use but just couldn't write off ~ 70% of browsers. Those days are numbered, more or less, and it makes me unsad.

I don't know about for non-programmers but I'd certainly like to see more screenshots/examples - especially for projects where it's relatively easy, like JS.

I see innumerable github links to JS libraries especially and I just don't have the time to evaluate the code on all of them. A little demo can make the world of difference.

Hey - if there was a low-to-no effort way of signing up for something to handle a one day burst in traffic then I'd imagine you'd rake in a pile of cash.

Indeed! I have been quite pleasantly surprised lately with the more constructive discussions around PHP related items. The LOLPHP posts have been at a minimum (I don't mind genuine criticism).

I remember using CPAN for the first time and thinking it was magical. Like how they tell me the iPad is magical. Then a few years later using PEAR I suddenly felt the complete opposite.

I won't claim to know what the best alternative would look like, but I'd definitely take npm over PEAR any day.

Titanium desktop has the feel of being abandoned - even if not officially the case. For anything non-trivial, you're entering a world of hurt.

Ugh. I did a favour for someone by added some very basic FB integration to his site. I've had to go back 2 or 3 times to fix it and he now thinks I'm pretty incompetent as a result.

I got London and I'm on the Dorset/Devon border.

I find the "personalised" geolocation stuff mildly annoying in general - and not only because it's invariably miles off. It doesn't show me a site 'cares'. If anything, it looks lazy.

If it's for showing prices in my currency rather than dollars then that's useful, but more often than not it's to show some stupid "What ho, old bean!" message. I'm a Northerner living in cider country - you may as well have said that in Spanish!

Heh, I haven't paid for an IDE since Turbo C but I've yet to hear a bad word said against this one. If it doesn't suffer from the occasional memory gobbling antics of Netbeans then I might treat myself to an early birthday present.

I use for it PHP and I really like it, especially with the Mercurial stuff built-in. I've heard Jetbrains PHP IDE is better but of all the others I've tried over the years, Netbeans is by far my favourite.

SEEKING WORK - Remote

I can do two things!

- Front end: HTML 5, CSS, JS/Jquery.

- PHP development. I'd like to do more 5.3 but I'm more weathered in 5.2 due to client demands. Also Codeigniter. But I can pick up most things.

If you're really desperate, I can hit things with Perl too.

I use Mercurial for source control but I'm comfortable with git also. I'm familiar with most modern day practices & processes. I won't say I've been overly-exposed to something like Agile or TDD for instance because I haven't. But I get these things and I learn quick :)

I have worked on pretty much every kind of site imaginable now and would estimate I've built an area of internet roughly the size of Ireland.

My own site is currently temporarily based at http://pitbot.pgkit.com (and something else I threw together at http://applab.pgkit.com). Happy to supply URL's of other recent work (and not so recent too if you like history!)

Email is in profile.

I'm UK based.

The only domain I have left with Godaddy (moved all mine a year ago) is one I set up for an ex-girlfriend so you'll have to forgive me for putting my own sanity ahead of the greater good :)

I have noticed a few promo emails from Godaddy in recent days though. More than usual I couldn't say - this whole situation may make them stand out.

I can second this. Especially if you get a coupon/referral code. I'm in the process of moving the last of my stuff to Linode but I never had any problems with Dreamhost and the one time I needed support, they were quick and helpful.

Count me also for the white version.

The contrast (for me at least) on the green one between the green section and the rest below is a bit jarring. The white one could maybe use a little more colour on top but I do like it.

I think it's pretty damn nice though :)