philip_roberts

Thanks for the shout out! I'm still amazed how well that talk struck a nerve and it's a real kick seeing people getting something out of it 8 (!) years later.

Not the poster, but the creator: if anyone has suggestions on how to package this up for windows, or wants to suggest the best instuctions/test on linux(es) do let me know!

Also keen to hear suggestions for improving the security section of the readme so people understand the risks etc.

Curious: is this intended to be a paid product or just a free catalog of videos?

I'll add, most of my understanding was done this way: somewhat experimentally. Come up with a hypothesis of how things might work, figure out a way to prove it, and see if I was right.

Great question, and one i am not totally sure of myself. I guess the question is: if an event doesn't have any handlers listening for it, does it get queued and processed regardless? This is something I've often wondered about myself but never properly tested/been sure about.

My _guess_ would be yes, this would work. Regardless of how fast the file loaded. One way to test it would be to stick a large while loop between readastext and addeventlistener to block the stack for a few seconds and guarantee that the file is read before the handler is bound.

I'll try and take a look when I am back at a computer if nobody else responds either way :)

Sure, I wasn't expecting you to copy edit if you don't want to, just pointing you to the source.

> I appreciate the use of semver, but...

Oh, we aren't breaking things _that_ quickly! ampersand-state for example has been a repo since February.

That works for native types but gets trickier for custom datatypes, and ones where you want to specify custom getters and setters for example, and then specifying some as strings and some as constructors gets messy.

We do need to do some more documentation/cleanup around custom datatypes though for sure.

Did you see ampersandjs.com? Perhaps we don't link to that clearly enough.

Though yes, a better overview would be useful.

> You might be excited about the motivation behind your project but nobody cares, really.

Yes we'll try and improve the content on the homepage to make it more focussed. Though I guarantee if we didn't talk about the motivation we'd have people saying "why did you make another framework?!"

> Still not a substitute for a user manual, even tiny.

I'm not suggesting we've got it perfect by any stretch, but I'm not sure exactly what you're hoping to see? There's also http://ampersandjs.com/learn with some more detail around the various pieces.

Sorry, we just wanted to give the background to the project and why in the post, rather than focussing too heavily on code. There's plenty of API docs for the core components in http://ampersandjs.com

And the clientside code for the example application generated by the cli is here: https://github.com/AmpersandJS/ampersand/tree/master/templat...

Ampersand has evolved out of the client and product work we've done at &yet over the years. So there are a number of client projects with various evolutions of it in production, as well as our own products: http://andbang.com and http://talky.io, and https://otalk.im/

That's true, although many of the core backbone components have been significantly modified/basically completely rewritten, keeping a fair amount of similarity with the backbone APIs but extending them too, for example:

* Views have declarative data bindings for updating your html with model data automatically; out of the box, sensible render and remove methods just work; collection rendering is easy.

* Models have explicitly declared properties and types, as well as evented + cached derived/computed properties. You can access model properties without .get('name') and .set('name', value) and events and things just work.

Funny, I hadn't even thought of that. It comes from &yet (http://andyet.com) :)

It's not made clear from my post, because I felt it was entirely irrelevant to the context of the post itself (which was merely intended as an interesting meander through the thought process and experiments my mind went through over time) but I stripped a number of comments from the screencap wherein the question was in fact answered.

Had I suspected the quality of my team, or my discipline would be under question, I would have left them in :)

Except the question was b==1 && b===2

Arguably the thing that tripped me up for the majority of the time was latching on to the fact that == and === are different, and trying to _always_ satisfy the two conditions, rather than just spotting that I can change the reference to b from within the first valueOf call. I'm not sure how much I'd read into the "if I was more of a mathematician and less of a dumb programmer this would have been solved trivially" argument.

Ooh, I forgot all about prolog!

I worked through the 7 languages in 7 weeks book, and solving a sudoku with prolog blew my mind. I think the first "real" programming I did was a sudoku solver in Excel and VBScript (yeuch).

...free for up to 5 documents.

True! Didn't even think of that.

Exactly. The key challenges for us now are:

- Expand to more platforms, to increase the total market we can hit.

- Improve the product to make it easier for the general market to understand. We are hitting early adopter types pretty well, but the majority struggle because it's a complex problem/product.

- Figure out how to scale the marketing (the really hard bit ;) )

We are listed here: http://www.freeagent.com/developers/goodies which drives some traffic our way.

FreeAgent and our customers have mentioned us on twitter/blogged about us sporadically over the last couple of years.

Don't just wait. We are still working on our Xero integration (I only really started on it last week), and I stuck up http://floatapp.com/xero so we could collect emails of people who wanted to try the beta, and we've got ~70 replies (mostly from accountants) by sharing it on twitter/facebook/linked in/Xero's support forums.

Somebody else just emailed me asking basically the same question, and looking for my advice. My immediate thoughts were:

- Do you need a cofounder immediately, or can you just try and do less. I know that's easier said than done, but scale back your projects into what you think the most important pain/solution is and focus on that, and see if you can get some traction. It will be easier to convince someone else to join you if you can get some traction.

- Similarly: don't look for people to take a big leap, break it into smaller steps. Do you know anyone who would do something for an evening a week. Or hack on something at the weekend. Treat it more as a fun side-project, and people might be more excited about getting involved. Then once they are in, and you have some momentum, try and grow the committment (that's basically what we did).

That's a good idea, we are using Prefinery to collect the form data, and there's limitations on what it can do, but I'll see what I can come up with.

It's not been easy.

It took me a long time to get up the courage to leave my job, and fear of running out of money still paralyses me from time to time.

Fortunately my wife is amazingly supportive, and my cofounder is less paralysed by little details like running out of money than I am and helps me forge-ahead.

Fair play sir, fair play.

Hi everyone,

I didn't post this, but I am the author. Thanks for all the kind words on the post.

As far as Float goes, it currently only works with www.freeagent.com, so if you are a FreeAgent user, feel free to sign up.

I am (as we speak) working on integration with www.xero.com, and there's more detail on that here if you want to try the beta: http://floatapp.com/xero.

All thoughts and feedback on either the post of the product are more than welcome :)

Thanks! Phil

Hi Fabian,

We are currently quite focused on our target marget of FreeAgent customers, and Float is not currently mass-market (yet) but you are right.

We recently released a page, more like you are suggesting, for Xero customers here: http://floatapp.com/xero what do you think?

Hi Alan,

There are a few extra factors at play here,

- Our price is somewhat anchored by the accounting packages we integrate with, but we do intend to try and push that price up eventually (I should add: by adding more powerful features, rather than just hiking it).

- We offer founder plans for people keen to support us (think kickstarter) which works out about 2-3 worth of lifetime value up front, and has really helped us month-to-month.

- I was still working a full-time, then part-time, job for the first 10 months or so. - We were partly incubated for a year or so by my co-founder's web design company, which allowed him to keep drawing a salary from that and gave us an effectively free office. Although we are now both full-time on Float.

- We've spent a number of our weekends this year helping start an incubation space (by literally knocking down walls) which has got us free office space while it's being finished off (http://techcube-ed.tumblr.com/).

- We have raised a tiny amount of money, which obviously helps.

- We live in Scotland which I am sure has a much lower cost of living than London/the Valley.

- I have a _very_ supportive wife who works full-time.

Just launch. Seriously what's the worst that can happen.

I say that like it was easy, it clearly wasn't, but you just have to suck it up and try it.

I think I agree! :) and thanks.