trevorah

React Native is excellent for web teams that are creating a new mobile app. If your team has more experience with React than native iOS/Android, then it's a no-brainer.

However, in my experience you get diminishing returns once your app has passed v1 and your customers expect more after the new-ness wears off. You find yourself spending more and more engineering effort to make your RN app to feel as good as existing mature native-first apps, which is especially frustrating as you are solving problems that native-first app developers never had to solve in the first place. They got the solutions for free with the native sdks.

This plateau of developer effectiveness is hard to get away from as your app becomes so coupled to RN and your team invests so much into RN tooling and skills that it feels like a sunk cost.

I do not envy the Discord apps team.

If that chat has already been created, then going to gitter.im/[org]/[repo] should be enough.

So something a little more formal than chat?

Yeah, we're currently building an irc bridge so that you can use it with your irc client of choice.

Yeah, github enterprise definitely makes sense, and it is something that we will look into.

Chrome's notifications since v28 kinda suck. Browser notifications have always been difficult, and in fact our www.trou.pe native app was originally just a toolbar app to solve this problem.

Good point. The problem with a tier limited by the number of people is that you take away one of the best parts of a free chat service. Being able to freely invite _anyone_ into a conversation really opens up what you can do.

true, but it would be fantastic to merge those two cultures together. Having non technical people involved in open source projects is a good thing, and it is something that we are trying to encourage.

At the moment we have node + express + faye for rest api/streaming. The web front end is currently built with backbone, less and a sprinkling of bootstrap.

@gitchat on twitter for now.

Yeah, that barrier is a tough one to overcome. We've found that having an easy entry point (nothing to install, one click signup etc.) lowers the barrier a bit.

Also having some kind of free tier could always be an advantage over hipchat...

There's always the webapp :)

Dev here! Yeah, we've been making www.trou.pe for while and have just added some github hooks after some user requests. We are just curious to see how far people want github integration to go...

I build web trading apps for banks. Big, big javascript apps that stream prices and handle trades. Not the kind of apps that require shakespearean spam though...

It's meant to interfere with your writing, like a backseat driver interferes with your driving. Your idea of separation is interesting, do you see it as a kind of translator?

Gibberish I guess. Doing a lookahead for letters was how I started, and its kinda interesting to see how it turned out as a quick project. Storing the probabilities for each letter given a string prefix is the limiting factor, and took a bit of effort to get it to reasonable size for a browser. I think using words instead of letters may result in better sentences with the same amount of space though...

Very true. I've just updated it now to handle misses. Its a bit of a ugly hack, but it stops the errors for now. You can check it out here - https://github.com/trevorah/backseat-writer/commit/b749d3154...

Yeah, only listing the top 10 chars to write next results in a few misses. Its also bit of a pain to test a recursive function that uses random numbers.

Good idea. I think waiting for a second would give a little more control to the typist.

Opinions?

Fork it and try it out! https://github.com/trevorah/usernique

Good point. This doesnt sound like a quick fix.

Yep, thats pretty much how it works at the moment (see https://github.com/trevorah/usernique/blob/master/server.js). The issue is that the server is sending out quite a few of these hits to twitter, and twitter is smart enough to start reject requests when things get a bit too much.

Any tips to sort this out? How are things being rate limited?

edit: just realised you meant that twitter/github etc are rate limiting my requests. Bummer.

Very true. This requires a little more work than my current hack. I'll see if there is a whois package for node...

github+heroku baby!

awesome, good find!

just checking the return code on a GET request. src is on github if you're curious. You're right though, looks like the domain lookups need a bit of work.

I've just added the .io and i'll add .com in a bit. Adding in the loop might be a bit much if you're not bothered about certain services - e.g constantly updating the page just because a twitter name cant be found.

Yeah, it's very basic. If you check out the src, you can see that it is vowel, consonant, vowel... Basic, but it kinda works.

Damn, I only just added the reddit check. Looks like I might have to revert that...