techscruggs

Two benefits I see (esp. w/ rails)

1) Quick console start. As rails developers, we spend way too much time waiting for consoles to start. This could save at least an hour out of my month.

2) Dynamically change production logging level. While their are ways to send signals to your process to control the logging level, this seems far more natural. You could easily open up an existing process change the logging level; finish your work; change it back.

Any other ideas for where the would be useful?

Question: They tout MongoDB's "generally fast" read speed. Any idea what this is in relation to? In "fast", are they suggesting that it is faster than a typical RDBMS? If so, does anyone know of any supporting benchmarks or breakdowns of how they accomplish this and to what extent?

Its news to me.

More exiting than the datastore offering itself is that it is going to be SSD backed. I hope this hints at an SSD backed EBS offering in the near future.

I have been using this desk for the past year now and it is awesome.

What I dislike about the authors suggested setup is the fixed height. Often, the initial height that you set the desk to will become uncomfortable. As your body adjusts to using a standing desk, you will probably find that you would prefer something a few inches different from your initial setup. That would be a several hour project with something mount to the wall, but only takes about 15 minutes with these desks.

AcademicWorks has hired two people from posting on HN. We consistently find our best candidates from these threads. I have a memo to post at the first of every month, because we are always looking for talented engineers.

Austin, TX Senior Software Engineer

Use Postgres, Redis, AWS, Ruby 1.9.2 & Rails 3.0 to help college students find scholarships. AcademicWorks is a profitable startup that values work/life balance and career development.

Learn more here: http://www.academicworks.com/rubyist.html

Thanks! I have and love the two Packt books. I'll check out the rest. If end up blogging, let me know. I'm @techscruggs

Wow, I have to ask, what do you think are some of the best resources to pull on for postgres knowledge are? and do you blog/tweet about your postgres work? if so, where?

"High quality, world class text search is a basic prerequisite for a production web app these days"

That is a pretty bold statement, that I can't agree with. The right tool for the job can vary dependent on need. Perhaps you are building your MVP or you have a small ops team or search is an admin function or etc ...

If search is one of the main components of my site, then no, I'd probably not use Postgres for that. On the other hand, out right dismissing it sounds like a recipe for shaving yaks.

AcademicWorks in Austin, Tx

Ruby, Postgres, Redis, AWS, Chef, Rails3.1, Graphite, Resque, the list goes on.

We are funded and exceeding all our projected sales goals.

Come work in an environment where you can love what you do!

http://www.academicworks.com/rubyist.html

What version of chef server are you using? It appears to have been fixed a while again: http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-489 .

Perhaps your issue is not tied to your ruby version: http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-920

Good to know, that does make my concern significantly more trivial.

Have you used Blueprint? I am really interested in it. Honestly, it seems like a bit of magic to me and wonder how well it works and what its limitations are.

That would be a great surprise! I haven't been on the wiki form ~5 months, which does make my opinion a bit dated.

I was a bit confused by the "excellent reference documentation" regarding Chef, as well. The documentation I have read has been out of sync, occasionally contradictory piece-meal. I have yet to find anything more useful than just reading recipes.

I wonder if the author knows of resources other than that book and the wiki.

Agreed on all points.

Guaranteeing the entire installation is "documented and replicable" is huge. Chef/Puppet can become a large part of you disaster recovery plan and increases the "bus number" in ops.

The value in this is immediately apparent after the first time you have had to rebuild a server that you inherited.

I use Chef, but without the server (chef-solo). I have a hard time stomaching the idea of dealing with a Merb application (an abandoned framework) that has some rather complex dependencies (couchdb & rabbitmq). That being said, plenty of peers have told me that they have not experienced any problems with running a Chef server.

Maybe this means I should just fork up the cash for hosted Chef, but I don't see it as a 100$ a month value (I currently have 10 nodes and treat them all as ephemeral).

I do wonder why this is never brought up. Is it not seen as a red flag to anyone else that the core of Chef is built on Merb?

This isn't exactly news, is it? Isn't this the same tactic that ExpertsExchange used to show up in search results while trying to hide the content behind a paywall?

So, this looks a bit bogus. It doesn't look like it is actually google, but glad to know the workaround.

Its no 'yappd', but still very cool!

Spending $20 at themeforest.net is the best investment you could make. Its an interesting concept, but it will be hard for anyone to get past the UI.

Austin, TX

AcademicWorks is a small, funded and rapidly growing startup. We are working with the latest versions of Postgres, Redis, Rails & Ruby to help college students get scholarships. You can learn more here: http://www.academicworks.com/rubyist.html

Between the quality of this editor and the rate at which new (relevant) releases are coming out, I can no longer justify using Textmate.

with oauth access you can push the tweet yourself. Of course, tell them what they will be posting, but you can control the message.

As I suggest in the comments: http://tbbuck.com/building-a-50-dollar-a-month-web-app/#comm...

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Try presenting your users with a paid and viral choice. First oauth them with the promise of the service you are offering. Then present them with the value proposition: "You are about to save X minutes by automatically deleting Y DM's". Then offer them two choices to compensate you for that value: 1) Follow your twitter account & tweet an endorsement (which could be as simple as a variation on the value prop ) or 2) pay you $0.99 for a one time service.

This will allow you to a) measure your funnel, b) advertise without spending any money, c) build an audience, d) use that audience to build a feedback loop and test other ideas, e) make money in a way that seems to align with your users usage habits.

Thoughts?

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What do yall think, could this dog hunt?

I am curious of its success rate. Of those of you who have posted, have you heard from any candidates yet?

I posted 4 hours ago and have had no replies yet. While I don't expect to receive any responses this quickly, I am curious what other people are experiencing.

Crap, my apologies, I obviously skimmed that article as opposed to reading it. mea culpa

With the advent of Homebrew, why would manually compile from source for your local dev environment?

Austin, TX - Ruby Programmer AcademicWorks - Scholarship Management in a SAAS environment.

We are working with a lot of cool technologies: Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.5, HTML 5, Jquery 1.5, Postgres 9.0, Redis 2.0 (yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll be upgrading 2.2 soon), Chef, AWS hosting and the list goes on ...

We are vigilante about getting the bullshit out of the way and doing what it takes to make coding fun.

We value passionate people, but won't sacrifice a healthy work/life balance.

We are an early stage, but funded and have more demand for our product than we thought!

Contact me if you would like to know more: aaron@academicworks.com

Base64 is a two-way hash function