I am on the same boat as you are.
However, you can expect people to upgrade from IE6 to IE7, but not IE to FF or Chrome. Think outside of the geekdom - people are used to and happy with IE and do not want to venture out into anything developed by hackers (for them hacker is still a bad word!).
I am planning to make my app IE7 & IE8 friendly (IE6, forget it! I will live with those users giving up on me).
Let's face it. CSS design is a visual art, and not every programmer is good at it. You either have it or don't. I have seen many programmers who do a fine job with CSS.
Your users will tell you whether you are creating something of value for them or not, YC isn't always capable of seeing that! So trust your users, in yourself, and move on!
All 3, dev on Mac, deploy on Linux, and make sure that your app runs on IE6/7/8 - so there you have all three. Though few months back, I had all threee running in VMWare, my storage was in Linux VM, the app server was in Mac, and the desktop app was in Windows VM.
But many times it also depends on what you are developing.
Great point there ...
Suddenly this urge of the whole world to express themselves has made any Reddit too noisy. HN is still nice & clean, and thank God, is not perceived as a social platform. (love PG'c ommment there).
Reading HN is a productive part of my day, I am here to learn something useful and not care about how are you 'feeling' now or what's on your mind!
The unsettling feeling I get when doing a domainname search with any of these folks is: they keep a log of domainnames that are being searched. If something is being searched upon a lot, they themselves prolly will go and buy it. And later sell it to you for a premium price!
I would rather do a whois search from Mac/Linux/Unix) commandline.
Consider Nokia's WRT (Web RunTime) .. they have a JS based SDK (prototype, JQuery).
Join Forum Nokia to learn more about their offering, and their app store is releasing in May. LBS awareness, bground processing, JS/CSS based SDK makes it easier to develop on it. Though Nokia isn't that big in US, but has a bigger reach worldwide than iPhone/Android.
Our app is a rails app too, and I am considering writing my app for Nokia WRT. Apart from WRT, you can also write Symbian OS (C++) native apps, or Java, or Flash (our choice) apps.
Great stuff man... having worked on SAP back in 1857, and now working on Ruby/Rails, it feels good even SAP is waking up. So what if they have skipped a century, I will still get a kick to see a dinosaur walking San Francisco streets!
I can believe you (by your userid)! And I have been there and tried to do that - but got back to hacking, as it is way easier than filmmaking. Filmmaking is freaking difficult - its good to be creative, but making films (real films, not the youtube ones) is not for the faint of the art!
I decided to use my (art, music, film) inclination and combine my CS background to create a venture. Whether I succeed or not, is yet to be seen...
Contact me (from my profile) if you want to learn more...
That's hilarious man.
I did work on ABAP for a few dreaded years of my professional life. And now I am coding in Ruby and Rails.
I feel like I am the oldest man on earth, who has touched a dynosaur and who is on his way to moon for a joyride!
(I don't mean to disparage your coding ability or Prolog). If you have written 800 lines of ruby, you have earned yourself a 6-pack beer, go chill! If it was 800 lines of Prolog, go buy a bottle of Nyquil - you need to rest your mind and body!
Nice article!
Currently this is what consuming most of my thinking about how should I proceed next on my venture. To further iterate on dev cycle or solve the money problem first. And since we are not funded, and now have gone private beta bootstrapping from our own pocket, I think the monetize-first approach seems to be the practical one.
Hey, thats good to know another person on vpsfarm. We are on it too. And I think they provide excellent value for money, esp we spending from our own pocket, definitely its a service I would recommend any DIY kinda guy to bootstrap.
If anyone needs to learn more, send me a mail from my profile, will be happy to tell you what I know. (disclaimer: I don't get paid by vpsfarm for these stmt).
I am not sure what your purpose with this poll, but I don't think the results are indicative of anything. It depends what stage they are in.
We are a startup, bootstrapping with our own money, and went private beta about 2 weeks back, so we are on one VPS, where db, 2 RoR apps, transcoding, blog, mail, queueing server, storage, everything on it. Its far from real scenario, where (hopefully) some day we'll be serving thousands, if not millions, of users.
I am in the same position you are.
I considered DreamHost, SliceHost, and few others and went in for a barebone Linux Xen virtualization hoting at vpsfarm.com. Good enough for me to boot up.
Why I didn't go for Amazon - though I think EC2 provides way more value for what I am trying to do. BUT - their pricing is very confusing and sucks - while companies like slicehost/engineyard give upfront pricing, and they are scalable too (may not be upto EC2 level). For me, the price plays a big role as we are bootstrapping from our own pocket.
EC2 pricing is a huge matrix of upstream, downstream, storage, bunch of other things, which makes it almost impossible to estimate how much you might have to pay! Having said that, I may consider them at a later point of time, where we grow (hopefully) to bigger infrastructure.
Hey, that's very interesting, because I currently am working on a startup idea of my own, and today just about 2 hrs back, I wanted to enter our database with some random content (this is to do with multimedia stuff). And I chose cartoons. Not sure why! I find them creative, amusing, absurd, logic(&physics)-defying, and of course funny! I could have chosen anything though ... I think there is a synergy between hackers, sci-fi and cartoons!
Today I figured there is Greasemonkey, Firebug for IE now. Has anyone tried it? Firebug esp helps me a lot to resolve JS/CSS issues in my web development. If I can do the same on IE, esp to sort out infamous IE CSS issues, that'll be great.