r00k

Awesome to hear about your numbers.

Would you mind linking to your most popular application?

Last night I was wondering if Airbnb has the kind of traffic that would make it feasible to buy a condo somewhere popular (downtown Boston, for example) with the goal of renting it full-time.

I'd love to hear from people who've rented out rooms/apartments through Airbnb in a popular area. How was the demand?

Page seems cut off on the bottom "Generally? Well pleased..."

If that is really the end, it could use some padding.

I wrote a post on my blog 4 years ago (!) with lots of examples of profanity in code comments.

It took a half-hour to write and has consistently gotten more traffic than the rest of my blog.

Ah well, give the people what they want: http://codeulate.com/2007/12/fcking-programming/

HN folks: would any of you be interested in a 'Getting Started With Redis' screencast?

Edit: if it were non-free :)

I've paid that much (and more) for watches that did nothing more than tell the current time and date.

Their price seems eminently reasonable to me.

I made this screencast to help newer Rails programmers get their first patch in Rails.

Documentation improvements are a great place to start when you're new, and Rails makes in particularly easy to contribute in this way.

Be extremely frugal (move in with parents if possible), try lots of things, iterate quickly, work your face off.

Good luck!

Unfortunately, they're not able to deliver that feature request immediately.

Well thanks, but I didn't pursue anything with Airbnb (I'm not looking to move to SF right now). But I agree that having an online persona is extremely helpful for landing your next gig.

I went to the actual site without reading the introduction on the blog.

As a user who had no idea what he was about to read, here were my thoughts:

* The tagline below the logo is nearly perfect. Instantly told me what I was looking at.

* Gorgeous design. Love how simple the top section is.

* Plans & Pricing seems too prominent. I know you want me to click there so I can sign up, but ALL I know about the product is what I can guess from the tagline. I think you could remove it entirely (and make the "Next" button in the tour more prominent).

* I didn't really understand what was happening in the "Editing" screenshot. I wished the elements in the shot were labeled somehow.

* When I reached the "Viewing" screenshot, I only knew a change was made because I remembered the original tagline from a previous visit to Umbrella Today. I'm not sure it's clear otherwise.

* Plans & Pricing is gorgeous.

After that, I read the blog post, which gave me a much better overall picture of the product. It's written very well, though I'll admit raising an eyebrow at: "at this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has features that aren’t ready to go live yet?" This feels a little contrived. I think most folks know not to write long-running features in master, and I have little doubt that's how you're doing it at thoughtbot.

Just one guy's thoughts, though I am pretty squarely in your target market.

Anyhow, I'm psyched to see you guys launch this. It's clear you're scratching your own itch, and that's quite promising.

I discovered a handy way of making throwaway classes this afternoon using Class.new. I thought it might be new to others too.

Couldn't you learn this concept, grow as a programmer, and become more hirable in the process?

It seems like you've decided you're not capable of teaching yourself through it.

I switched from Cucumber to Steak for several months and loved it. Getting away from english specification was a BIG win.

However, two weeks ago, I removed Steak entirely, and am now using pure RSpec for my integration tests.

If you look at the heart of Steak [1] you'll see it's nothing more than a couple aliases for existing RSpec methods. 'example' becomes 'scenario', and 'before' becomes 'background'. I'm all for accurate language, but I don't think switching a couple method names really changes anything important here.

Switching from Steak to pure RSpec was simply a matter of a global search and replace, and now I've got one less gem to think about.

[1] https://github.com/cavalle/steak/blob/master/lib/rspec-2/ste...

Hi all. I'm the author of this post.

If you have any feedback or questions, I'll be checking this thread.

When I clicked through to your Wufoo form to sign up for launch notification, the visual change was quite jarring--from soothing green to washed-out grey. It felt very alien. Maybe if you carried over the same green background over it wouldn't have had the same effect.

I know what Wufoo is, and that it'll be safe to give them my email. But your less-savvy customers might wonder where the heck they've bounced to.

Yeah, fair enough, the date is a bit easy to miss. Not my favorite aspect of the theme I'm using.

Sure, it's 81 lines shorter, but I don't know what's going on there, either.

Sure, but I'd imagine most developers have the default controller actions memorized by now (I do). So, this class you're inheriting from does exactly what you're used to. Only now, you don't have repeated controller code and functional tests everywhere. Really, this is an application of the DRY principle to app/controllers.

Hi there! I'm the author. Thanks for your feedback.

> "There is nothing in the post to indicate that the InheritedResources gem is any more state of the art than standard scaffold controllers"

I think you may have missed my point (which, as the author, is probably my fault) :) It's not that inherited_resources controllers do anything better than the standard controllers. It's that each controller does exactly the same thing, but one is 81 lines shorter.

> "The fact that the author uses dateless posts and comments (SEO) does not add to its credibility for me"

There are dates on each post (check the top left). Also, you say credibility goes down because I have comments (which you seem to think are for SEO purposes)? I'm afraid I don't follow at all.

Why does the Customer Service Engineer require a college degree when the Backend Engineer does not?

Amazing that people can complain that an open source tool is too well-documented.

The famous 'build a blog in 15 minutes' was Rails' elevator pitch: intriguing, representative, but by no means a complete picture. You still needed a full reference to get real work done. That's what this is.

Typo: "We make a point of introducing speakers to those who particularly want to them."

I solved a puzzle for ITA. It got me an interview, and made good discussion fodder once I was there.

Call to action should be more obvious--maybe a big red Try It button below the copy. I finished reading and had to look around for how to actually try it out.

Would you talk about what makes you good at sales?

For god's sake man, upgrade those monitors!

You don't actually do development on 17" screen do you?

Reading that essay felt like improving my life.

Fortunately, it was fun.

I love the design of your landing page.

In particular, the graphic of the two iPhones on the right side made it _immediately_ and _compellingly_ clear what you're selling. Nice work.

Some other things I've remembered since posting this.

1. I wrote my solution in lisp, which likely helped quite a bit toward getting me in the door. I imagine my 'not as great' solution had some more leniency being in a hard-to-find-developers language.

2. The problem I solved called for finding the largest rectangle. This was tricky, so I just ignored that and searched for the largest square (yes, I know a square is a rectangle), which helped simplify things greatly. I stated clearly that I was doing this in my solution. I still got an interview so it seems simplifying the problem in this way was acceptable. This lends further proof to my idea that these problems are just an excuse to see some of your code (and prove you like solving problems).

3. After nearly every snippet of code I wrote in the interview, someone asked me: "what's the pathological case for this? What kind of input would cause this to take forever?" It's an interesting question, and clearly something they're quite concerned with (you can't just not respond to a web request for flights if the user happens to enter tricky data). If you're going to interview, it'd be a good idea to get in the habit of asking yourself this question about your code.

One word: tries.

I've tackled one of ITA's puzzles (word rectangle, I think I found a 7x7 in 60-ish seconds). I got through a phone screen and interview, but was ultimately turned down for 'lack of experience.'

If you're trying to get hired at ITA by solving one of these puzzles, here's something to keep in mind: the point of solving a puzzle is to GET A PHONE SCREEN. That's all. Many of these puzzles have no 'perfect solution.' I'd be surprised if any of them do. Instead, they're a proving-ground for your coding chops. So write tests, write comments, and make the code as clear as you can. Provide your best solution, but remember: the point is to write something good enough that they'll pick up the phone and CALL YOU. I spent much too long on my solution before I realized it was already good enough to clear this bar.

If you do get an interview, plan for a full day. You'll get another problem of this nature (though much simpler) at the end of the day, plus the usual salvo of whiteboard coding exercises.