paulbjensen

I think it's ok to go without tests at the start of your project, but at some point you have to transition to using TDD, otherwise the ability to refactor the codebase or change existing features becomes difficult and time-consuming.

To give a rough idea, I spent ~ 2 1/2 months working on my app (Dashku.com) before I wrote a single test for it. Then when a company approached and asked to use it with a special requirement, I realised it needed tests in order to be deemed production-worthy. Now the app has tests (both unit and integration), and I'm now resuming adding features to the product.

Go for a walk in the nearest Park, it's a good way to have a think about what you want.

Github issues can be a useful place to stash features that you want to implement in your project, and if your project is public and has eyeballs on it, that puts some impetus on you to focus on getting them done.

A todo list app can also be useful, but only if using it is something you use out of habit. That's why Github issues fits nicely with me, because it fits with my natural workflow (filing issues or scouring issues of software I want to use).

Do they provide any other forms of contact? If not, see if you can find people who work there on the internet, and message them.

You're absolutely right, it's a major security risk, and anyone else who discovers it may not be so discreet, and make the company a major target for anyone interested interested in stealing databases with unencrypted databases.

We had the same thing happen 2 weeks ago, worse thing is that the company in our case does things with money. Yep.

I think that you've hit the nail on the head, and highlighted 2 differing styles of building web apps within the Ruby community.

There is a great post about this here: http://rubysource.com/rails-or-sinatra-the-best-of-both-worl...

I agree. In fact, what would be really cool is to have a Single Page App's front-end as a template spec against which to compare different framework's performances against, a bit like what TODO-MVC did with client-side JS frameworks.

Very impressive.

TechCrunch's coverage of Yahoo has noticeably changed in tone since Mayer became CEO.

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse TC of becoming some propaganda arm or mouthpiece of AOL, but I think that there's a clear dislike of seeing Yahoo on the up. The article is pretty lame, it's sad and I was hopeful that TC had turned the corner since being messed around with post-arringtongate.

Disclaimer: I used to work at AOL UK.

I wrote Dashku entirely in CoffeeScript. It was a productivity boost, and for that I owe it my firstborn child.

I read this article a few weeks ago as a result of Tony writing "debunking the Node.js gish gallop" in response to my "Rails, Node, and the web apps of today" blog post.

I have a response coming in the next week/2 weeks, so I won't go into much here, but I will say that Tony's efforts to defend Rails are admirable; despite some snarkiness and elements of being reactionary, he raises good points in his posts.

One quick question. Tony, what are your thoughts on Elixir?

Nice to see 0.3 be officially released.

In terms of production-readiness, my experience with Dashku has been that the software is pretty stable, and that you have to be bold and try it out; doing so allowed me to discover a shortcoming with relation to the asset configuration, which was resolved shortly after.

I'm using Cucumber to integration test Dashku so a 3rd party can use it internally. In fact, there is an npm module for testing SS apps with Selenium and Cucumber.js called "ss-cucumber".

Now someone tell AOL to go put $11.2m into it ;)

I'm glad that Nokia have decided to do this. I understand that it might be financially motivated, but given that they've made a bet on the Windows platform, it's a nicer move than just mothballing the whole thing and eventually shutting it down.

This should be a film, the story has everything: business press coverage, the BluRay code event, death threats to the founder, a near-deal with Google, the exit of the CEO, the 4.0 debacle, the company downsizes, the founder leaves, the company struggles, then the company sells it's shell.

I hope BusinessWeek does a piece on this.

I understand.

Sorry.

I agree, Erlang is very interesting (especially for the hot-code swapping capability). I've been looking into it recently, specifically a project called Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org) which is a language built on top of the Erlang VM.

Hi,

For the beta, yes, which should last a couple of months. I will investigate turning it into a SaaS, but for now I will go and find some work.

Hi,

Thanks. At this point, I need to go and find some work as my bank balance doesn't look great.

I'm going to continue working on it in some capacity, and I will investigate turning it into a SaaS.

There are some components of the app which would be worth open-sourcing, in order to assist others with building SocketStream applications.

Thanks again.

Hi,

It was unfortunate that this ulimit issue occurred and I apologise for that.

I knew about ulimit from 2 sources (a LinkedIn article on Node.js practices) and a 2nd source from a hosting service's documentation.

The fault (and it was mine) was that I didn't realise that in order to persist the ulimit setting between reboots, you had to set it in a configuration file.

Originally, the application was hosted across multiple instances and proxied, but due to the nature of the WebSocket library and it's use of transports with the proxy library, the connection was intermittent, so I reverted to a single instance. Since resolving the ulimit issue, this application has stayed up.

As for admin staff, you may be surprised to learn there is no company with multiple devs, designers, product people and sysadmin behind all this. This is all my work, all 2 and a bit months of it.

CLI (facepalm). Thanks for the tip.

Hi,

Apologies for the downtime.

It turns out ulimit was set to 1024 when I thought I'd configured it to unlimited.

As for paulbjensen.co.uk, I removed that site about 3 months ago but didn't remove the link to it in HN. As for your question about the same bricked server, the answer is no, I run Dashku on a different server to the server that was hosting paulbjensen.co.uk.

Hi everyone,

Once again, my apologies for the downtime.

For some reason, this was the case:

    $ ulimit -n 
    > 1024

I thought I had set the ulimit to unlimited, but that wasn't so.

The site is alive, but may still be intermittent. Will keep you updated.

Hi everyone,

My apologies, I didn't expect to end up Top of HN. I'll try and get it back up.

In the meantime, here is the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf8f9AQBgM&feature=plcp

Fair enough. I'm just concerned in that trying to downsize to save money, Nokia has missed the opportunity to take what was a profitable business (Trolltech's 2007 numbers (in NOK): 174m Rev, 46.5m Profit, 26.7% Net Profit Margin, 227 employees), and salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.

In dollar terms, Trolltech in 2007 was doing $30m Rev and making $8m profit. Obviously that's 5 years ago and I don't know what the current fundamentals are, but it would be interesting to know if that business within Nokia was doing more revenue or less, and what it's costs were.

If I were a former TrollTech employee, I would suggest taking a leaf out of Xamarin's book: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/xamarin-mono/

To give context: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/nokia-acquires-trolltech-fo...

4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.

My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?

And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.

I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.

For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.

Why can they not follow the example of HP and Agilent? Agilent was spun out of HP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.

Would love to know too, can't have been as ironic as the <input type="crash"> bug.

If anyone is interested, I'm building a dashboard app. It's currently in beta and was built in socketstream.

https://dashku.com

Mark-to-market accounting, or window-dressing as the accountants refer to it.

I think so, seeing how they ripped off the nodejs.org site.

agreed, when I get time (ha), I'm going to build my 2d platformer, "escape from corporate America"