paulbjensen

Lead Node.js Developer - Starcount, London UK.

Starcount helps businesses to better understand their customers through analysing social media data. It is lead by Clive Humby and Edwina Dunn, the founders of DunnHumby, and the creators of the Tesco ClubCard.

We're looking for a Lead Developer to join us and help us deliver a new audience analytics platform, as well as take our new content curation platform to market.

This is an opportunity to take an important role in a small company during an exciting period of growth and help build a business with the leadership of one of Britain's most successful business couples.

For more details, see the posting here: http://lnug.org/jobs and here: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/80693/lead-nodejs-dev...

Can't comment on Ruby, but in relation to Node.js in London it's very much a seller's market at the moment; good developers with commercial experience are contracting at £550pd, and very few are interested in taking permanent roles.

It's a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if you're trying to recruit one.

As someone who built a dashboard app, I tip my hat: this is a very powerful new feature.

I grew up reading Dune, and then reread it when I was in University. Thanks for sharing this, especially liked how he likened the themes in the book to existing problems of that time.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable game, especially with laser beams and the invisible cloak.

This reminds me of how someone once tried to recruit me with a picture of a giant pair of knockers in a bikini, which had no relation to the job at all. It was kind of insulting.

This article pretty much resonates with my experience, except that my employer (a 4 person established company) can't afford to hire a QA and sysadmin alongside my role as developer.

The bad side is that doing this DevOps role across multiple projects at the same time can lead to burnout, and I think I came close to that in the last few months.

The good side is that I've learnt a great deal about how to architect and deploy distributed web systems, how to do end-to-end testing, and how to effectively run the ops side of the business.

It's a mixed bag, and the burnout is the worst aspect of it, as well as the case where people are forced into situations where they are way in over their head.

In my opinion, the form factor is the key issue.

Ask people if they would wear one? Not just techies, everyday folk out on the street.

Until the form factor is indistinguishable from a pair of sunglasses, this wonderful piece of equipment will remain a niche tool.

I used to work at AOL 2 years ago. It was known within the company that Patch was not going well; even the Huffington Post's localised properties were generating more revenue.

It's easy to say with hindsight that AOL should have tried to let the project grow organically first, with a focus on profitably instead of executing a loss leader strategy, but that seems to be the general consensus here.

It doesn't help either that Patch was being undertaken at a company like AOL. AOL needed to wean itself off of the cash-rich but declining ISP business, and establish itself in the media and advertising industries. Undertaking that challenge at the same time as investing heavily in Patch put the company under a lot of scrutiny.

Thanks to the advertising business doing well, it looks like AOL will be able to run as an independent business, so even though the CEO staked a lot on Patch, I don't think that it will be a fatal blow to his tenure at the company.

It's a shame that he didn't invest that time and money into other promising efforts within the company.

There is this interesting pattern of having template compilation be possible from both the server and the client, such as with AirBnB's Rendr. It gives you the flexibility to choose where you want that template compilation to occur.

With regards to Twitter's Time To First Tweet being slow under their Single Page App, I recall Alex Maccaw mentioning that their JavaScript library execution was inefficient, in that the client had to download a whole bunch of JavaScript before it would load the part of the app responsible for rendering the data.

I believe he was suggesting that if Twitter optimised the delivery so that parts of Twitter's JS were served after the rendering part of Twitter's JS code, then the time to first tweet could be faster.

In my opinion, delegating template compilation to the client offers a nice separation of concerns; the server is the API, and the client is the UI.

It would be interesting if there was benchmarking done into comparing these approaches, to see where server-side template compilation can be beneficial over client-side template compilation.

"There is no worldwide directory of people and, especially, (outdoors) clubs and events and it sucks"

There you go.

I would recommend asking a few outdoors friends whether they feel the same, and see if bringing about this worldwide directory would be a great thing to them.

To me, it sounds like a great opportunity because you have a specific audience to interact with, and there are opportunities to turn it into a business; think of outdoors venues and outdoor equipment companies who would want to promote their products and services to that range of people.

I would recommend asking friends, and in terms of further research, I recommend 2 books: Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston, and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Go for it!

Hi, Thanks.

Working in Finance shouldn't prevent you from working in a startup.

I can recommend trying to scratch your own itch(es) - are there any problems in particular that you run into on a frequent basis, for which existing solutions are poor and you feel could be done in a better way?

Another exercise I could recommend is to ask yourself what would you be doing now, if you were free to work on anything?

Thanks, you're welcome.

I was let go from a social networking startup because I wasn't implementing features as fast as they wanted. At the time it felt like a death sentence on my career as a programmer.

I spent about a week in the doldrums, but then I felt angry, and decided I wasn't going to let their decision define me. I decided to build an app to show what I could do.

I spent 2 1/2 months building an app called Dashku. It was a realtime dashboard, and when I put it on Hacker News, it went to #1 within 45 minutes, and then the server fucked up because the ulimit config on the app server (which I had set but not persisted between reboots) was 1024, and got the flak I deserved for not making sure that the ulimit config has persisted when I configured the machines.

After doing it, these things happened:

- Bechtel contacted me and asked if they could use it internally. They did.

- I had a meeting with Geckoboard. They asked if I wanted to work for them, and I offered to sell Dashku to them. No bite.

- I interviewed at Forward Labs in London. I had about 4 interviews in the space of 2-3 days, but did not get the job offer. I failed to refactor a fill detection algorithm which was functional and fully tested, but memory inefficient. I had stayed up all night to crack it, slept for 2 hours and had no food when I came in for the interview and was asked to refactor it.

ProTip: Sleep well and eat before you go for an interview, otherwise your brain suffers for it.

Eventually, I got a job in London working for webcasting company, and then open sourced Dashku. Here's what happened next:

- Ninja Blocks gave me a free Ninja Block, and asked me if I would like to work with them.

- An Indian health startup asked to integrate Dashku into their IoT robotics app.

- A BI startup basically took Dashku, slapped a coat of paint on it, and called it their own.

- Another IoT startup asked to use it.

- An energy company told me they were going to drop Geckoboard for my app.

- I discovered a professional social network (called Viadeo) had created a wonderful collection of widgets for it.

Then,

- I got an email from someone at Facebook, they said that they were evaluating it for internal use, and asked me if I would like to interview with them in California.

I had to decline as my mother has health problems and I could not move to another country.

All of this, within 14 months of being fired from a startup.

Failure feels like crap, but don't let it define who you are; you have to move on and prove to yourself and to others what you can achieve. I've done that now and found peace with that period in my life.

I should probably thank the guy who fired me.

In the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', it mentioned that the company had a "rank-and-yank" system, whereby annually everyone would rank everyone else. Those ranked in the top 10% would be promoted, and those in the bottom 10% would be let go. One guy commented "I don't know a successful company that fires 10% of its employees every year".

You think that's bad, I once worked in a startup where the Product Manager told me he didn't have time for tests.

As a developer watching that video, that line was the one that stood out the most.

There is nothing more frustrating than to be asked to build something using old tools when better options exist, or when you are asked to build apps that don't stretch your abilities, or when you work for people who don't understand how software can change the way that their business operates (who tend to not be technical).

After I graduated from university back in 2006 (studying Management Science), I decided that I liked computers more than I liked Banking or Management Consulting, so I worked for a friend of a friend doing web design, and began to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I read the Pragmatic Programmers books, and spent 6 months at home learning Ruby and Rails in my free time.

About a year later (summer 2007), I got a job working for a ticket search engine called Tickex, doing Rails. I was paid £9 per hour, and worked at a BBQ table and chair. It was a really enjoyable time. we were Seedcamp finalists and nearly got funding from Sequoia, but sadly the funding ran out and the business moved back to California and then shut down. Since then, I've worked at a few other startups, at a web agency called New Bamboo, at AOL, and now I work in a small business. I also had offers to interview at Square and Facebook, but a temporary lack of nationality/family circumstances meant that I couldn't move to California.

The decision to deviate from the path offered by my degree has been one of the best in my life. Before I had learnt to program, I had ideas but no ability to program, so they remained as ideas. Having learnt to program, I have the ability to have ideas and do something about them.

If anyone needs a free dashboard tool for displaying their metrics in realtime, I made this one, which is available on Github: https://github.com/Anephenix/dashku

It's a valuable experience, but can be a very frustrating one to go through, especially if the company has internal power battles and little appreciation for the importance of technology.

It's a very cool idea, I wish I had an excuse to use it.

I've come to the view that CoffeeScript is the marmite of programming languages, and that issues like this will rage on for years to come.

I'd dare and suggest that TJ is JavaScript's DHH; very talented and productive, but also very vocal about he doesn't like.

Programmers are some of the most argumentative people that I know, my father being one of them. When you're immersed in a community, it becomes easy to develop the kind of language bigotry that happens between Rails and Node.js, which is sad and regrettable.

I think that mature programmers see code for what it is and don't get religious or wound up over these things; in the end of the day it's all a bunch of 1s and 0s.

Congratulations to Tony, he's managed to follow one of those rare startup journeys and buy-back his start-up at a profit, and escape the fate that Brizzly encountered.

Great article, especially in coming up with a clean way to reaching the holy grail. I remember seeing in Spike's tech talk some months back that they initially chose DerbyJS, but it seems from the blog post that they went with Express instead. Curious to find out why.

Agreed. I wrote this blog post:

http://paulbjensen.co.uk/posts/2012/07/11/thoughts-on-rails-...

Then Tony Arcieri wrote this rebuttal:

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis...

He made some good points in his post, but the snarkiness was in my opinion a bit uncalled for. Being labelled a Rails Enthusiast when I had worked with Rails for over 4 years (2007-2011), 2 of those at New Bamboo (a big Rails agency in the UK) was cheap.

I then tried to deduce why he was so rude, so I looked through some of his older blog posts, and found this:

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/why-critics-of-rails...

but then this tweet summed it all up:

http://twitter.com/bascule/status/274281490437767168

The issue I see here is that there are some in the Ruby community who hate Node, but who then extend that hatred of Node to being rude to people involved with Node.js. Tony has been rude in the past to both Substack and Isaac Schlueter (major figures in the Node community) over Twitter. I can only reason that the rudeness towards Substack was because he made this comment on his blog post: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis....

As for his replies with Isaac, see this: http://twitter.com/bascule/status/281932459719921664

I'd like to say it stops there, but it doesn't. I actually had someone email me because Tony had been rude to them on Twitter because he compared npm to Rubygems. Can you believe that?

Tony is a smart guy, he's written some really awesome software, but when it comes to Node, he is a troll.

As for Steve, he hates Node, but I don't think that he intends to be rude to Node.js people. When I posted this on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271691672348409856

followed by this:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271733415580164096

and this:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271734483538018304

Steve Klabnik followed up later on with this:

http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/271749289154330625

Compare that to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5018201

Both Steve Klabnik and Tom Dale retweeted that HN comment. So where Steve might hate on Node, he doesn't hate on people who like Node.js, or have expressed a preference for it (otherwise he would probably have not linked to my post).

I know I'm not the best person to say this, but I wish that this could be the end of animosity between the Ruby/Rails and Node.js communities.

Thanks for your advice. I didn't realise that commercial software EULA's had clauses for things like that. I guess it means that there is a market for, or should be commercial support for the app.

In terms of traffic, lots of individuals have tried it, but in terms of trying to make it break, no. That is a great idea, thanks for the suggestion.

Ah, Thanks for pointing that out. I'll scrub the word out from the screenshot.

Sorry to hear about this, it looks like a fork of the project might be the only way forward, ala Hudson -> Jenkins.

My former colleague was in the position that AOL wanted copyright ownership of a very popular project's name he was in charge of; thankfully he refused.

I think that although Turbolinks is an improvement on how current Rails app do view rendering, the article is absolutely spot on; Single Page Apps consuming JSON data and handling the view rendering provide a better user experience, especially when taking the issue of offline into account.

On a 2nd note, that's why I think the Rails API project is more important to the future of Rails than the Rails 4 release. I believe that Single Page Apps will become the defacto way to build web applications, and that the war to be the platform of choice isn't just about Backbone Vs Angular Vs Ember, but also about which server-side language and frameworks you use.

Rails is great (I never said it was crap), but you have to ask why companies like LinkedIn and AirBnb would choose to move off of Rails. If you checkout these talks (LinkedIn - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMd45Ij2DYQ), (AirBnB - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g5Kzj6TpPY), you'll see some of what the guy wrote in his article in them.