55 karma · joined July 16, 2010
I hope that if this is true, it's a feature that YouTube will copy and not one that will be disabled in the future.
I personally have gone a bit further and only write tests after a successful incarnation of a project (that means customers) that I want to keep developing, or if writing and running the test itself costs me less time then F5'ing a page or mucking around in the rails console.
I have noticed that it's much easier to throw away code that I haven't invested a lot of time in and usually the second time I write it (with tests), I have a much clearer idea of how to implement and test something.
Most of the stuff that is sold is relatively cheap (< 15$), but trust is still a big problem. In my time there, I always wondered if it would be worthwhile for Facebook to facilitate this by for instance handling the payments, but I don't even know if they knew about this kind of stuff happening.
I'm not sure if all of those phones are jailbroken, or if they just use a single iTunes account to synchronise with hundreds of phones.
Sparrow was selling hundreds of copies each day for 25$, they were making a lot of money from it. They probably wouldn't have made 25 million $ like they apparently made with this sale, but it's enough to keep a team of developers happy and productive.
As far as I know, it did not really lift off, but this could be because Facebook overtook Hyves as the most popular social network shortly afterwards.
This basically means that calling Article.find(3) and Comment.where(:article_id => 3).first.article both return the same instance.
It's going to be a tradeoff, either you accept that an exception can occur after sending a '200 OK' status code and possibly resort to javascript to display the error in a nice way, or you'll use the old fashioned way and send the correct response when the full page has loaded.
I'm going to use HTTP Streaming and rely on my tests and Hoptoad to fix errors as soon as they'll occur. I think the performance boost outweighs the consequence of not sending the correct status code when an exception occurs.
The revenue is now back to it's old levels, but it stayed that way for 6-7 months.
We started a program that allowed restaurants to advertise directly with us. Made it very easy to try by not having any contracts and being a lot cheaper than our competitors. We got someone to do sales on a commission-only basis. He was so good (~ 70% of the restaurants he calls become a customer) that he is now a partner.
We also added affiliate links to sites where you can order food online, make reservations, etc.
At the beginning of 2009, our income from AdSense (our main source of income) halved overnight and later dropped to about 25%. We had a little bit of money in the bank, but not enough to survive for more than a few months.
We immediately focussed on finding and developing alternative sources of income and those sources have now become our main sources of income and have enabled us to grow a lot.
Without that crisis, we probably wouldn't have grown as much as we have.
We have a restaurant guide in The Netherlands with a dutch name (eet.nu, translates to eat.now) with a big community of reviewers. We want to expand, so a international name is required.
If we brainstorm about names, it takes up a lot of time and we're never completely satisfied with the results. Naming stuff is hard, and it's even harder if English is not your first language.
After 4-5 hours of waiting, John gave us a list of 14 names (we got 7 bonus names!), and we picked the name HungryJury.com. Registered the .com and twitter account a few minutes ago.
We're pretty satisfied with the service and will probably use it again in the future!