mgeraci

Our back-end team sometimes adds calls to a new service that they're building to test the load, a lot like this! So the idea was in the air at OkCupid, so to speak. And with such a big new piece of infrastructure, I knew there would be problems, it's just how it works. So I wanted to get something into production really quickly to have something to troubleshoot against.

OkCupid | ONSITE | Full-time | NYC

We're looking for a number of engineering roles at OkCupid right now:

• web engineering manager

• mid- or senior-level iOS engineer

• junior-level android engineer

Our career site, okcupid.com/careers has links to detailed descriptions and all that, but feel free to message me directly if you want to hear what it's like working here from a front-end engineer: michael@okcupid.com

Frontend Engineer at OkCupid - New York, NY

We're looking for a full time front end engineer here at OkC. I've pasted the HR'y text below, but as a front end dev at OkCupid, I can say that it's a great place to work. If you're interested in building stuff with autonomy and responsibility and push it to tons of users, you should reach out. Feel free to ping me with any questions! michael@okcupid.com

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Do you want to work on a product that truly improves people’s lives? Do you want to work on a small team with exceptionally talented people? We’re looking for an experienced Frontend Engineer to join the OkCupid Product Team in New York City.

We're looking for enthusiastic and talented Frontend Engineers to join our growing team. You’ll be helping to make our products awesome and scalable for millions of users. You’ll get to work with a team of fantastic and fast-moving hackers to make the social web a more insightful and engaging place.

The Atlantic's photography blog, In Focus, has some photos of the mirrors in the two cities: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/10/using-giant-mirro...

This looks great! One suggestion is that in full screen mode, the textarea doesn't stretch across the screen (it's a centered column) but since there are no borders it is hard to tell where the active area is. I think that clicking on the empty space outside of the main column could give focus to the textare, and that would have made it more clear for me.

Here's a google maps link to one of the charts mentioned, on Edwards Airforce Base:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Edwards+AFB,+East+Kern,+Kern,...

Interesting perspective! I agree, but think the majority of people prefer semantics by language.

That's a holdover of the project from which I extracted these, reachably. We decided to use snake case across html css and javascript to keep things standard - feel free to judge that decision.

Given that people will most likely be using this in more traditionally camel cased situations, I think I will go through and change that this weekend. Thanks for pointing that out!

Thanks a lot. The CoffeeScript marketing is threefold:

- I think CoffeeScript is really cool, so I like spreading the language.

- I wrote them in CoffeeScript for a Backbone app also written in CoffeeScript, so for what it's worth it's more "authentic"

- I thought Coffee Filter was a cute name

Glad you might find them to be useful!

Haha, that's an MVP animation. The next iteration will have a filter that slowly gets saturated and THEN drips.

Totally. It's not necessarily meant to import into your project whole hog, it could just as easily have been a set of gists. So feel free to pick and choose ones that you might find useful!

xdissent made a great command line installer on github for virtualbox and these virtual machines; you can get them running with one command. I've used the script for the last year or so when I've had to set up a new box for testing and I've really enjoyed it.

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

Happy to help!

The slideshow on the homepage is hard to use. There is quite a bit of information, and I would like to read it, but the length of the slide is set too fast for me to read the captions (not to mention look at the image!). Then if you hit the left or right arrow, it pauses for a moment, but then restarts itself.

If you just have two steps in the slideshow, I would recommend making the images more narrow and having them side-by-side with an arrow in between. This would mean that a user could easily see the flow of the process (step one: make filter, step two: enjoy filter) and read at their own pace.

here you go: http://i.imgur.com/5Bdmk.png

I am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking take on RSS feeds.

As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding social features are.

(fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog post, http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-revie..., and there is a social branch on github, https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/social)

I think people should wear what makes them feel comfortable. Ties work for Jesse, but there are some jobs where a tie is required, and that doesn't work for the wearer. This could explain why people have an aversion to "dressing up." I'm a jeans and t-shirt person when I'm at work because that's what I feel most at ease in.

You might like this boilerplate SASS file that I made to handle a bunch of this type of thing: https://github.com/mgeraci/Sass-Boilerplate

I also see this post explaining the presence of the -webkit-background-clip (http://tumble.sneak.co.nz/post/928998513/fixing-the-backgrou...), but I don't see that behavior in Safari 5. Potentially fixed? If not, I would certainly add that to my boilerplate.

For what it's worth, if any of you haven't heard Kind of Bloop yet, it is fantastic. Seems like HNers are basically the target market for it, too.

Coming from knowing Kind of Blue very well, it's fascinating to hear what other people take from Miles' songs, and I've caught things from Kind of Bloop that I had never noticed in the original. Highly recommended.

I just updated the script with both of these features. Enjoy!

I just updated the script with 3- and 4-color gradients, and with the call to action button as a helper method with color as a parameter. Thanks for the suggestions!

1) I agree. I made the H1 the same color as the examples (close to white, with some cream) and reduced the size of the H2s.

2) I agree that the navigation and H2s should have a similar visual weight, so the nav. got bigger.

3) I'm not a fan of dropout text for large quantities, so it's staying dark, but I did brighten the background to increase readability.

4) A rule of thumb for me is that you only need one layer of emphasis for a differentiation of text. Both of our solutions are currently breaking that rule, and I happen to like larger text.

Thanks for the feedback and mockup!

Yes, and yes. These are both now on my list. Thanks!

Thank you! Fixed. (it was supposed to be borderRadius)

Most of the CSS3 browser compatibility came from Paul Irish's awesome CSS3please tool (http://css3please.com/). You should definitely check it out if you're coding css without a framework.

I like the simplicity of the home page, but I would want to see what a user would see when supplied with a gumroad'd link before singing up.

I still use old school email for signups when I can.

I like the layout - the landing page looks pretty good. A few suggestions:

- While I like the script font in your logo, I think it's a little too hard to read. The letterforms of the "u" and "v" are very similar and could use some slight modification to differentiate them. The kerning is also off - the letters are suppost to connect, but the tracking is too wide.

- I think there's too much movement on the home page. There are three sections that animate (the slideshow, press, and recent activity). All that movement distracts from your call to action. Think about what you want a new visitor to focus on when they first see the page. (This is admittedly not as much of a problem for people with smaller monitors, but I can see below the fold)

- Why not make your search bar in the header wider? Longer titles are cut off.

- I'd shorten your overview sentence ("Share what you read with your friends and discover new books?") and maybe set it in a different color or font to help it stand out. I think this is a very important sentence.

Overall it looks great! Good luck!

+1 for Game of Life. But that's coming from two guys who just made Game of Life simulators. Good to play with canvas, as well.

I wish I would remember to keep picks with me more. They turn out to be more helpful than you can imagine when you least expect it (and with no nefarious intent).