lisperforlife

That is true. Coming from Ruby world, you find that Java and the Clojure world have a lot of rough edges. But Clojure makes things as easy as possible. For example, reading from a file or a URL is still (slurp "https://"). It works fine on a stock OSX, Java 8 sdk and the latest clojure. Don't let such minor inconveniences discourage you from exploring Clojure/ClojureScript. The language is fascinating. I feel that learning and practicing clojure has made me a better developer.

I also found http://blockcypher.com to be quite nice. In addition to the blockchain API, they also have APIs for creating transactions and even provide web sockets and web hooks. They do not host the wallet so you do not have to share your private key with them. They will create a transaction for you and you can then sign it with your private key. This is a good gateway for developers into the bitcoin system. The alternative is running bitcoind to download the 17 gig blockchain and then start coding. This provides instant gratification for developers to get started.

I am an Indian here. I have heard horror tales from TCS employees on how they are given "on-site" experience. Mostly it is a portrayed as a favor done by the management to the employee. You have to earn the on-site opportunity which involves a great deal of kissing people's rears. It is mostly not about the talent you have. One of the guys who had gone on-site on one such occasion had told me how the organization billed him as an Expert Oracle consultant while he was told to study oracle while he was boarding the flight. It is true that they get paid a pittance when compared to US nationals. A developer with 5 years of experience makes about $2.5k a month. They usually subsist on Taco Bells, McD burgers and so on. On the other hand many indians prefer this, as it still works out better than if they had stuck to the indian job. In fact, in many family circles you are not considered a human if you are working in IT and do not have any "on-site experience". Most these folks are completely dependent on the organization that they work for and are willing to fight for it tooth and nail to defend it even if the organization is holding them under a sort of an indentured servitude. There are a few genuinely smart hackers but those are far and few in between. Most of these organizations are as dysfunctional as the companies that they consult for.

I would pay money for a google maps app.

Seems like a poor fork of http://tantaman.github.com/Strut/web/index.html

Sometimes you want to do things just for the sake of doing it without thinking about its use/utility. There is nothing wrong with that. Not everything you do needs to have a purpose but that may/may not lead to great things with purpose later. Richard Feynman was famous for working on the physics of wobbling discs that led him to a nobel prize later.

Probably once LFTRs come in or we find other ways to get away from coal for energy this would stop being a toy and get rid of our reliance on gasoline for ever.

But we need to simplify things. As an Indian business serving Indian customers I can tell you that the whole thing is pretty fucked up. I cannot put it more politely than this. Most of the enterprise clients of mine have 30 to 60 day payment cycles which involve a lot of paper, rubber stamps and signatures. That is just retarded. To add insult to injury the government expects you to pay service tax (due on the date of invoice) for the money that you have not collected yet. I regret setting up a business in India. There are too many unsavoury things to deal with.

Actually it would hurt their iOS market greatly. iOS devices are worthless without their third party apps. And these apps can only be produced on a Mac. In fact, I bought my Mac so that I could build iOS apps. If not for 3rd party apps, it would simply boil down to the device, the software that Apple ships with and the browser. Android devices will clearly win hands down in such a scenario. Initially it would be the case of worse is better but over time it would overtake iOS devices in terms of features and sales.

If you have to borrow at 36%, you are doing it wrong. You must consider your exit strategies or simply look for a job.

Alright Captain Obvious.

Design alone is horseshit. Engineering alone is horshit. Blogging alone is horseshit. Marketing alone is horseshit.

But put these together in the right proportion and you get a beautiful product. The proportion depends on your product/service. It takes a lot less selling, if the visual design of the product is impressive. It releases dopamine in your customer's head which urges them to put their credit card number in the checkout form. It may not be important for enterprise product as the person signing the cheque does not use your product. But it is vital for consumer and small business based products. But I agree with the author that pretty design is not a substitute for good engineering, good customer support or good marketing.

May be he is smarter than the other utter idiots around him but he is still an idiot nevertheless. https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23IdiotKapilSibal

Sibal is an idiot. Nobody in India takes him seriously. When he is not busy kissing sonia and rahul's ass, he talks from his own.

My mother succumbed to cancer over 10 years back. I was in my late teens and remember the treatment being way more painful than the cure. The medical care was so bad in india that once the nurse messed up the chemo shot and delivered it wrong. This resulted in oedema. Doctors could offer nothing more than an apology. I still find a lump in my throat when I recollect those days. However, in the end, my mother rejected treatment. She did however wish to live a long life. But she could not bear the treatment. Doctors gave her 2 months. But she lived on for 8 more months on painkillers to maintain as normal a life as possible. She managed to remain cheerful and positive before us kids. Living with someone you love knowing that they would die soon is really painful.

If I am terminally ill, I will probably reject treatment and choose to go peacefully.

This is true. I've found that I find it vastly enjoyable working with startups. Even if it is a couple of guys with an idea, they take time to talk about the background and they are in the selling mode. I feel more energetic and worthwhile working with people who value my effort. People in big companies do not value you as most of them do not value themselves. I worked for a big company. I know how I felt then. Now I have a new found respect for people doing things on their own. Be it freelancers/entrepreneurs or craftsmen of any kind. It is easy to miss it if you are allowed only to press "a" on the keyboard and you optimize your life and efforts around that. Sometimes you get promoted and get to press "b". They may not pay you for it and term it a lateral promotion. Nevertheless, getting out into the real world and getting jobs is an experience that has made me simultaneously humbler and wiser.

Overall, I agree with the author as well. I have said no to several jobs because I did not feel that I share the client's vision. Especially, when you choose to be in an underserved segment, you can name your price and your terms.

The same here. I do not think I would use a Mac OSX if they said that app store was the only way to get software.

Yes please. No semicolons. And please make it look a lot more like CoffeeScript than Java.

I went through this phase recently. And there was a surprisingly easy solution out of it. Finding new clients and get into a habit of working out. Both these activities have given me a new lease of energy to approach problems. As the clients have right to fire you, you have the rights to fire the client as well. We all want to be nice to our clients but sometimes our decency is mistaken for gullibility and they tend to take advantage of these situations. Working out releases the necessary endorphins to combat the depression. Just a 30 minute jog everyday can make a world of a difference to your life.

+1 for vagrant. It is awesome. It integrates well with Chef for provisioning. I would definitely recommend it.

Thanks for all the hard work. You guys are awesome. BTW, it is business hours in India. :-)

+1 for the 5th point. I had to read a few contracts and I was utterly convinced that I wasn't paying my lawyer enough as he had to read this horrible stuff every day.

I never had a problem using RVM with tmux.

I just joined the inbox zero club last week. Feels so good. I still have about 10000 unread mails in my personal account though. Most of them are from the mailing lists that I forgot to unsubscribe from.

This post is spot on. While building http://keeprecruiting.com we did not obsess over IE. This wasn't planned or anything but we really did not have the time. We ensured that it displays alright and does not break the functionality but we did not bother to make it look pixel perfect. We have built this product for recruiters who are notoriously uninformed about technology. We were helping one of our beta customers and one of the forms in the app was misaligned in IE6. We do not support IE6 but it was the only browser accesible to her at that time (new WinXP image). She immediately closed the browser double clicked on IE again and googled for chrome. This is one of the typical recruiters who does not understand about computers but somebody has told her that if a site looks bad in IE open it in chrome. The machine did not have Chrome so she went ahead and downloaded it after briefly cursing the IT that they do not install Chrome by default and that she had to get it on to her machine.

This is probably because google has started advertising big scale in India[1] as a part of the "Install Speed" campaign. Given the unbearably slow internet lines in India, highlighting "speed" as one of the features is a clever way to market it.

[1]: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active...

So for a bootstrapped startup, spending the time on getting the product right is more important than making it look good in IE. In fact, most customers don't care. They will simply move on to a different browser. You can spend the time providing them the features they need. Everybody wins.

To simply start an arbitrary HTTP server to serve up files in a directory I use python's SimpleHTTPServer. This works on most Linux and Mac boxes as they package python along with the distribution or the OS.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

This serves the files off the current folder under port 8000.

I maintain a couple of non-trivial Rails 2 apps, have just shipped a couple of Rails 3 apps and am preparing to write a Rails 3.1 app. I had always been using Sass and Haml for my views from the Rails 2 days. I moved over from shoulda to rspec 2 for Rails 3. All my solutions run partly on MRI/1.9.2 and have certain parts in JRuby (document parsing, search, etc). I had always been minifying and combining my Javascript. Sass with Compass/Blueprint took care of minifying and compressing my CSS. The only change that I am not comfortable with as yet is CoffeeScript. But after playing with it for a couple of hours I understand that this is an excellent choice. I have been a Python programmer before and significant whitespace in CoffeeScript or Sass does not bother me.

I am extremely thankful to the people in the community who are putting their time and effort to build such great software and essentially giving it away for free. I am personally both awed and humbled by the excellent work put in by all the individuals who directly or indirectly contributed to Ruby and Rails across all the versions. If not for them I would not have quit my day job. If not for Rails, I am pretty sure that I would not be enjoying my life, as much as I am enjoying it today.

The point is that Rails has grown up to the point where makes it simple to write complex applications. For small projects, these choices may seem to be an overkill. But trust me, when you put it into production and start getting traction you will thank Rails. I have built applications with Sinatra and Rack and assembled my own Rails environment using tons of middleware and a lot of glue. I know how hard it is to do it the right way and appreciate the fact that Rails makes it a cakewalk for us. I sure learnt a lot of Ruby but I would choose Rails any day as I know that there has been a lot of thought put in by the community to make it awesome.

Does this mean that we can write apps that target iPhone and iPad with MacRuby?

I discovered this really old programming language. Looks like it has not been touched since 1998 and seems to have been created by Douglas Crockford. Has anybody really used this?

Please correct me if I am wrong. Basically she is dying because she defrauded a bunch of rich dudes and created employment opportunities. The rich dudes are pissed and so she is now facing a death sentence? This is pretty screwed.

Sending her to jail is one thing but death sentence. That is just idiotic.

Right... the majority of the searches involve terms like "download firefox" and "download chrome". :-)