robinwarren

"Unfortunately, the rate of change is incredibly large for Internet-facing applications. Intranet-facing applications are left behind. As browsers evolve, which they do rapidly, unpredictably and without compromise[1] a disparity grows until you need two browsers."

This could be an argument for buying in cloud services (which you expect to be updated and maintained as technology evolves) rather than building solutions internally. Not always an option but where it is this seems like a good argument to buy rather than build, and if possible buy from a company which seems keen to move with the times and allow you to upgrade your browser in future without fear of breaking something

Slight nitpick made better by an xkcd link

http://what-if.xkcd.com/48/

Strangely the sun is yet to set on the Empire.

It's good to see people getting what an MVP should be. In this case it's proving that someone is willing to pay X amount monthly for a specific service. I guess the next thing to prove is that the company can deliver this for less than X monthly.

I assume they've some confidence they can create the technology or they'd have started with that side of things. No doubt there is still risk there but there was probably less there than on the market side of things. Good work.

For anyone interested in a tech specific version of this there is a site http://anyfu.com/ (I'm a fan but not associated).

I believe this model for connecting people for very brief engagements over the internet is an interesting one. With the educational model being pushed by companies like Coursera I could see something like this becoming popular for access to tutors or even peers studying the same subject. For quick help solving a problem there is obviously a problem of getting to sufficient scale in a 2-sided market place. Perhaps google will achieve that. I suppose the risk is becoming the yahoo answers or the expersexchange of the space.

For anyone wondering what this is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop

PHP is on top globally so must feature heavily somewhere. Glad you like it :)

Taunton UK - full-time - Frontend/JS Web dev looking for a challenge

We're Covalent software, a leading supplier of performance management software to the UK public sector (more exciting than it sounds I promise). We're looking for an experienced front-end/JS web developer to join our team. We're migrating the user interface of our software from a Java thick client to the browser and need someone up for a challenge.

To find out more drop me a line robin.warren[at]covalentsoftware.com

I pointed this out to a guy I used to work with when he was creating a bot. I correctly guessed he'd not allowed for the fact someone might spot a player with sub 1 sec response times who always clicked on the exact same pixel etc. He added some random waits in here and then, every now and then you'd hear a flushing sound from his computer as his bot 'went to the toilet'.

The first version of http://jobstractor.com was meant to be an alternative to advertising revenue for bloggers. I worked on it for about 3 or 4 months, built a huge amount of functionality (which no one ever saw) then finally did some market research. I discovered to similar offerings which had gone and failed before me. Contacting the bloggers involved in those generally turned up people who had not made any money from those efforts.

Ultimately I learned the value of doing the research before writing ALL the code. My subsequent project on the same domain was thrown together in a few weekends and evenings, was buggy as hell and put out with the intention of killing it if people didn't like it.

As a manager who hires developers I'd say no. Mainly because any single thing isn't going to be enough to get you a job, or possibly even an interview.

My suggestions:

1. Put up as much of your course work as possible on GitHub. This gives an employer the chance to look at your code, and shows you can use Git.

2. Take on a project to build something. Possibly your course work covers this, I don't know. I'd suggest some simple app/website/gizmo which actually does something. It doesn't have to be unique but should show you can build a larger project without creating a confusing mess.

3. Rinse and repeat. The above would be enough to land you a junior developer job assuming you're actually good enough at the coding. You can always learn more and more, ie security, scalability, design etc. I'd look into any of those if they interest you. Otherwise wait until you need them.

I run a developer jobsite btw, the link is in my profile.

I think Jeff was always very keen not to make it a social network and focus on pure Q&A. Ie there is no ability to follow people/friend them etc which you can do on Quora for example.

enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume hootsuite may well fit that description.

I think there is still a lot of potential in twitter as a platform, specifically for the data they hold. There is a lot of information shared on twitter which previously didn't exist on the internet. It would be shared by people chatting to each other, maybe msning colleagues or emailing links to friends etc. That information suddenly being available is what I think is interesting, and still worthwhile building on.

Back in the day, building a twitter client may have seemed reasonable but ultimately turned out to to be 'snatching coins from in front of a steamroller'. I think if you're building something which is a replacement or improvement on the twitter browser UI you're clearly taking a risk. I don't know that other uses of the data they hold are such a risk. Obviously I could be wrong but for me it's at least on the opposite end of the risk spectrum from twitter clients.

[disclosure, my current side project uses twitter data. It's in my profile if you want a look]

nb, part two here http://www.custom-logic.com/blog/v-motion-project-part-ii-th...

I suppose there is a reason they suggest you 'get out of the building'. But I can't really advise you from personal experience, you probably know what you need to do. Good luck!

You've probably looked already but I think there is a lot of good advice on enterprise sales on the smart bear blog

http://blog.asmartbear.com/

From what I know (mostly reading rather than personal experience) selling the Small business and selling to enterprise are very different and require different approaches. Ie, SEO and a landing page with pricing and sign up vs. a sales team, no pricing anywhere on your site and long sales cycles. You may need to pick whichever one you think you can be most successful with at first and concentrate on that.

I'm hoping that http://jobstractor.com is doing it's bit to disrupt things. I actively try to filter out jobs from recruiters (some improvements to that coming next week actually) and focus on the more word-of-mouth jobs you perhaps wouldn't always find unless you had the right contacts.

I think the things recruiters have in their favour is a big network of job seekers and employers. The lower barrier to publishing a job brought about by social media can I think help disrupt that model. There's a way to go though and I think recruiters will always play some part even if that role changes.

congratulations, it looks very good.

re monetising. I assume you plan to bring out more things to colour? If so you could announce them being available when the app is first opened. Assuming that is most likely to be done by the adult it should avoid worrying people. Make anything which could lead to a purchase happening obvious and make the bright coloured attention grabbing button take the user (possibly the child) to the game.

unless there is a safer/better way to go about it. Good luck!

It's the automation which is the key perhaps. People bringing some coding skills to these jobs are able to do more in the same time by automating away a lot of the donkey work. This leaves them to focus their energies on more valuable efforts.

Interesting article. There is another area not mentioned, DevOps where developer skills and approaches are being adopted in operations. People like John Allspaw of Etsy (previously Flickr) have been improving on how operations is handled by treating configuration as code and automating everything they can.

It is interesting to think through what this could mean to other areas (to me at least). Ie what would it mean to be a Sales Hacker, a Customer Support Hacker or even be a Middle Management Hacker. Possibly some of this will turn out to be meaningless but the success of the DevOps movement suggests to me there could be something to at least some of these ideas. Possibly the 'learn to code' movement will result in more cross overs in other domains, who knows.

Covalent Software - http://www.covalentsoftware.com/

Taunton (near Bristol) UK, Java Fulltime

Covalent is the market leader in UK public sector Performance Management, we're a small company (< 40 total, 15 person development team) but growing consistently. Specifically right now we are moving into new markets and hence need to enhance our product to support that. We are also building out new modules to sell into these and our existing markets.

Work would be on our hosted Java (Java 6, soon to be 7) thick client application which talks across the internet to our backend running on SQL Server. Although not following any specific agile methodology we deploy nightly to test and do 4 major releases a year to customers. We use continuous integration (Jenkins) and unit testing as appropriate.

My email address is in my profile, or go via http://www.covalentsoftware.com/company/careers.php

There is an annual 22 mile race held in Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales called Man vs Horse. I was surprised when I first heard about it that there was even any chance a human could win but apparently they have 2 times in recent years. The horses I understand have a check up half way round (11 miles) to make sure they are still safe to race.

Hi, sorry for the slow reply. As mentioned express is a good way to go for getting a website up with node.

Since you asked, my project is over here http://jobstractor.com if you want to take a look. My email is on the site so feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions. I'm planning on writing up my experience and a bit about how I've structured things so some questions might help me think through that.

I must admit that I picked mongodb (+ node) for my latest project for fun. But I then discovered that being able to dump json straight into a datastore without having to create tables etc. first was a great benefit in quickly building something out.

So something I did for fun turned out to be the simplest thing which worked. Only I didn't know that when I did it. I think developers who don't occasionally pick something new for fun on a side project are doomed not to know when that new thing could actually be applicable on a project that matters.

Some sources of free ideas:

http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

http://androidforums.com/application-requests/

http://www.judegomila.com/2012/01/challengeyourself-in-2012-...

I think you're still going to be guessing though. It's good that you recognise that as you should then move to validate that guess work somehow. Good luck!

great idea, and excellent timing as well tbh. The TW Bootstrap look is getting very common out there. My site is built on it and I can see the vanilla TW Bootstrap look ageing very fast.

Haven't seen anyone post this yet (seemed helpful last month) so will jump in with a summary of startup/developer job boards from around the world, most of them are broadly recruiter free:

NB: Max Masnick has a big round up of developer jobs boards here:

http://www.maxmasnick.com/guides/jobs/

======================

World wide:

Github http://jobs.github.com

Jobs Tractor (Developer Jobs - run by me) http://jobstractor.com/

======================

US:

Crunchboard http://www.crunchboard.com/jobs/

Startuply http://www.startuply.com/

YC Company Jobs: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

======================

UK:

CoderStack http://www.coderstack.co.uk/startup-jobs

Mind The Product (Product Management Jobs) http://mindtheproduct.com/jobs/

Work in Startups http://www.workinstartups.com/

Enternships - (Startup Internships) http://www.enternships.com/en/enternships

======================

Germany:

Berlin Startup Jobs http://berlinstartupjobs.com/

======================

Canada:

StartupNorth http://jobs.startupnorth.ca/

As they say "a life without regrets is a life not worth living". I don't know if you could term any of my side projects as startups but that was what was in my mind as I plugged away at them until they failed or fizzled out.

I've no regrets about building those things, I learned a lot and applied that knowledge next time round. I regret certain decisions like spending a beautiful summers weekend working on code no one would use instead of spending it with my friends and family and building something a bit more MVC. But that's how I learn so ultimately to regret it would be to constantly beat myself up.

Had the impact of those decisions been bigger maybe I'd have regrets, I don't know.

I'd suggest one thing if anyone reads this and gets down heartened about their lack of ability to generate early revenue. Whilst looking for revenue as soon as possible certainly makes sense I think you can get momentum to sustain you through the highs/lows in other ways. Certainly looking at usage metrics can help convince you you're moving in the right direction. But most important to me has been trying to move things forward every day. There are days where that's not possible, but the default evening activity is to do even just 30 mins or and hour on my project. Even if things seem a struggle, there's usually something interesting to work on which will make at least a small improvement.

To counter the obvious criticism here, I am aware that this could lead to maintaining optimism working on something which will never generate revenues. You still need to have a plan to generate cash and to test your assumptions about how that will work.

Do whatever exercise works for you. For some it'll be lifting weights in the gym, for others it's something else. I've tried the gym but it didn't really work for me. I enjoy mountain biking, running and for a long time went swimming every lunchtime. Those activities just worked better for me. Someone was suggesting climbing which is another good activity if you want to involve your mind as well as your body.

You'll still get the benefit of being away from your work for a short while, doing something physical and focussing on improving at something else.