If the product was released differently, it very likely could have been successful. It seems to me that once they got all that VC funding, they were desperate to release something to prove their worth. But, since their product depends on tons of people all using it in a geographically tight area, it crashed and burned. I think had they started releasing at events (ala twitter @ sxsw), they could have had some success.
this is a pretty awesome idea. Maybe I'm just inefficient, but I always find myself spending a stunning amount of time tweaking CSS, refreshing the page, ad nauseum. The only downside I see is that in order to modify your site CSS, it seems you would have to be running this tool, and you wouldn't be able to use your IDE of choice.
Whenever I'm hiring developers (junior through senior) I ask to see any portfolios they might have - github, websites they've built, a zip file of stuff they've written. I don't care what format it comes in. That said, expecting companies to be able to make good hires without having ANY code to look at isn't very realistic. I understand that sometimes people don't have the time / can't share work they do during the course of their job, but it DOES hurt your chances when there is nothing for someone hiring to look at. That said, if you're dedicating all your time to your day job, and presumably you're doing a great job there, then referrals are the way to go. We're always looking for referrals from employees within our company, and have always had the best experience with those hires.
Yep - we recently built a mobile app that utilizes local storage for offline support, with sync functionality for when users are connected again. HTML5 really opens the door for some awesome stuff.
I thought that Apple had requirements that any applications be written in native code, doesn't this break that if it's written in html5? Looking at the github, the entire source is html/js...
I spun up my own SQL Express / Server 2008 instance using the Amazon provided AMI and had my site deployed in about 10 minutes. What exactly is this service doing to make that easier?
No kidding. Restricting candidates who worked with X technology doesn't make any sense. You can't say you're trying to hire the best engineers, while at the same time arbitrarily limiting your pool of applications based on pointless criteria.
Not bad, but I don't think I'd want to use something like this very frequently, as it's fairly intrusive. We typically use Pines Notifications for most of our work. Very flexible.
How is this different from HTC sync? Right now I have my Facebook contacts linked to contacts in my phone, and it pulls in information from their Facebook accounts?
I don't think politicians are nearly as ignorant of the situation as you claim. They know full well what they're doing, however their main objective is to get reelected, so they're going to do things like extend unemployment benefits, because their unemployed constituents will no doubt vote for them come reelection, and the negative consequences are abstract and vague, thus easily dismissed.
It's only a matter of time until the government starts reigning in the internet even more than they already have - and we have idiots like LulzSec to largely thank for it.
The difficulty is that bad developers aren't just inefficient, they can do extensive damage to your project quickly, while also costing you a great deal of money. Paying a developer 4k to write code you have a scrap, while tying up your good developers while they struggle through basic problems.
The challenge is coming up with good criteria to evaluate people on. I feel your pain that oftentimes the criteria has nothing to do with the actual job, but in large part it's a signal that the company isn't worth working for if they don't know what they want.
I disagree. My company is a 100% remote workforce, and identifying standouts isn't terribly difficult. I would argue that the fact that everyone is working remotely makes the entire process much more objective, as you don't fall into the standard judgement traps that are well known in face to face interactions. When I'm trying to decide whether a team member should be moved into a team lead role, I'm evaluating them solely on their communication skills, code quality (by looking at commit history), and their effectiveness during meetings. I don't honestly feel like I miss anything by not having onsite interactions.
I do Crossfit every day. It's quick (a "long" workout might be 20 minutes) and it works. You're always working out with others, who are there to push you and support you. It's incredibly gratifying to accomplish something you've been working towards. And like the article says, you get a nice energy boost.
My absolute favorite breakfast joint does not take CC. The place is packed every day, and consistently gets voted best breakfast in my city. If you provide a good product, customers will put up with a minor inconvenience like walking half a block to the bank to withdraw some cash.
You're already starting to see this. For example, this web app: http://html5photos.appspot.com/ when viewed on recent generation android phones utilizes hints in the markup to trigger the phone camera for uploading. I think we will see this sort of integration continue. Will it be a pain dealing with proprietary markup across browsers? Sure, but it will still be faster than writing multiple native applications.
I think the issue is with Webforms specifically. Webforms abstracts away so much of the way the web works that developers who have spent their careers developing on it never actually understand how the web really works. Concepts like Viewstate hide the realities of web development. The fact that almost all processing takes place on the server-side means they are weak at client-side debugging, etc.
That said, I don't think it's fair to hold the same opinion of ASP.NET MVC developers - as it's essentially the same level of abstraction as Rails.
I agree. Our company builds products for many startups on top of ASP.NET MVC and it can be EXTREMELY difficult wading through the terrible webforms developers to find the developers with a strong core understanding of how the web works. For us we actually focus much of our attention on developers from outside the .NET world, as we've found they are able to wrap their heads around low level javascript much faster, and relatively speaking picking up C# syntax is relatively trivial.
One issue I've run into trying to push from my windows 7 machine to my instance is a "Permission denied(publickey)" error, which I assume is due to a missing SSH key in git for my ec2 instance? Does anyone know how to tell the ec2 alias to use my instance private key when connecting?