vineet

My problem with such buttons is actually something slightly different: I often notice that on webpages that it looks like the page is interesting and I want to follow similar work, but I don't know how much noise is on the person's twitter account (as opposed to the person's projects). ...I would like to see the most recent tweets show up when I hover over the button.

I think your conversion went up because users were able to easily see a demo of the product.

I personally think that the tour (of your homepage) does is not much useful otherwise - it just goes through all the elements one by one, the graphic design of the tours interferes with the design of the page, and the large amount of text in the tours makes it hard to understand whats different with the information in the tours.

I would love to see you try a couple of things and let us know how the conversion rate changed (it will also help us know the best practices when using your service):

- try the tours with a similar theme as the site (as is currently the case), but do more to separate them - perhaps by adding rounded corners, more shadows, or changing what are the main colors in the tour.

- try reducing the text in the tours.

- try putting in content in the tours that is different from the current site content - perhaps by grouping the features on the site and your tours introduce them as groups, or perhaps by focusing your tours on the benefits (as opposed to the features).

Perhaps more responsible was the person who decided that development work happened on the production database.

I wonder what would happen if you spend as much time on marketing as you spent on development. I am not sure which would be the best: perhaps blog posts, facebook activity, small ads, or guest posts on different sites.

Or, what if you spent as much time on 'biz dev' as you spent on development. Perhaps talking to some music communities online and having them link to you guys in exchange for highlighting their music or providing some service to them.

I am not saying that the above would work. I likely would have had similar biases as you. But as I grow up as an entrepreneur I am beginning to realize all the hats that I need to wear (and that when I get lucky one of these hats makes a huge difference).

It seems that the delay is in the variance in the length of the different jobs. Having slow jobs is generally not a good idea, and I can imagine that they are happening for uncommon tasks.

When you are running a 100+ servers it seems like a simple answer would be to think about these uncommon tasks differently. Options would be for prioritizing them differently, showing different UI indicators, and also wanting them happening on a separate set of machines.

Doing these would mean that an intelligent routing mechanism would not have as much use. Am I wrong here?

I do believe that Heroku should document such problems of theirs more clearly, so that we know what challenges that we are facing as we develop applications, but in this particular case, it seems that they do have the right plumbing, and that they just need to be used differently.

I think IntelliJ is definitely better than Eclipse - feature wise.

However, it is really hard to beat free. I think the numbers show that 7 of 8 Java developers use Eclipse. This also means that third party providers are more likely to build on top of Eclipse.

The fact that IntelliJ has built a large user base only goes to show how good a product they are.

Yeah, IntelliJ has recently launched an open source version... But I am a little reluctant to use it given the strong Ecosystem around Eclipse.

(Disclaimer: I build plugins for Eclipse)

So, basically to take advantage of Emacs/Vi you need to just restrict yourself to Lisp?

I would hands down pick the right language for a project and then the editor.

(I am actually a Vi guy, but switch to an IDE for any project that involves more than just me)

Great idea, nicely executed.

It seems that the price estimates are only for the flight costs (and not for lodging costs) - I was confused about this a little.

I would love to see something similar for lodging costs as well.

Just an idea: How about you make it one step more interesting, if the purchaser executes certain milestones within a certain time period, the price will be free and instead equity only? (Otherwise they would need to return the domain back to you)

Ideally the milestones would not be development oriented (given that you seem to be a designer).

> yes it's hard to articulate to your non-tech friends why they should spend $36/year on this.

Actually, I am a tech person, and I like to support App.net. I have not yet seen a reason to use the service.

> ...it's becoming a pretty positive place to hang out, and most of the people I care about listening to are there.

Ok. This is genuinely the first benefit I have heard about using it. Great. Please elaborate more. (I say this as someone looking for reasons to support App.net.)

Yeah, we did not like the autoplay part and the hypnotic effects.

Awesome. I guess I now have fewer fears integrating it into our site.

For our company we experimented with using about a dozen animated GIFs - but found them to be a little hard to deal with. We replaced them with 2-3 short videos and were happier.

Now these product tours might be a good thing to add.

There have been other tools that do this, but I like the simplicity and cleanliness of settings this one up.

I remember some of the other tools required a server access, which was great in that they allows us to do a lot of things, but as a potential user I needed to make sure that they have a business and would be around for when I needed it.

The problem that I have had with some of the jquery plugins that do similar is that I had to worry about customizing the plugins with my site's theme. With bootstrap plugins I hope that the plugins just look good with the bootstrap customizations that I have done.

A few years ago, someone pointed out to me that Coding is actually a design task. That when you code the answers of how to code something are never obvious.

In contrast, someone putting the bricks down to build a house has a much more defined task. The architects for real world houses were really the only ones doing design and that for 99% of them, they were good at it only when they were essentially designing a house that they had seen most of the parts already built in the past.

While design is not very easy, it is very hard (and way too abstract) to do design^2. Humans are just not very good at it. And that we should be very careful being a software designer or as the OP suggests building a framework without a concrete product built first.

Note: When I mean software designer above, I mean someone trying to spend a large percentage of their development specing out all the details that the coders (i.e. the designers of the software world) should be working on. I am not referring to Graphic Design.

Snip.it was a good service. One replacement is Scoop.it. And they have a revenue model, so they will hopefully not disappear too fast.

I did not feel like some of the examples were single-page sites, but the examples are really good.

As a coder, these definitely help in thinking critically about what can/should be done, and inspire ideas for design.

I am curious to see other interesting examples.

The article talks about the student plan here: https://github.com/edu

Yeah, I like the idea of finding someone to collaborate on a fun project. I did not say this in the post, but I found out about a small offshoot meetup at one of these events - and that has been fun because it was very hands-on.

I like hearing from recruiters - if only to get a sense of what frameworks coders are using these days.

But, attorneys, really?

I was feeling very similarly recently and have been trying to get out of the rut. I found user groups to actually be very helpful. Are there any around you? (Where do you live?)

I actually just posted my experience on this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066944

If your opinion do you see management not wanting documentation? I have generally seen the exact opposite to happen (the managers want documentation, the developers think it is a waste of time).

But, to your point, I would not consider documentation a feature, just like I would not consider making a commit a feature, or talking to other developers as a feature. I think that some form of documentation is necessary (or you will regret it).

The hard question (in my opinion) is what should the documentation contain... I believe that answer involves getting the opinion of a coworker, to get a sense of what is-not/can-not be well explained in the code.

I agree that the problem is that when most people think 'documentation' for software projects, they think of comprehensive documentation - something that is not only very hard to do, but also almost always a bad idea.

I also agree with something that is implied in the article - that documentation should be of multiple types: including wiki and UML, but also unit and integration tests.

The part that I find interesting, is that the above results in three things: Be open to the fact that each documentation type might have diminishing returns, so as developers we should not be religious about just UML or just unit tests, but be make sure to have multiple types of documentation. Realize the obvious that that documentation should not get in the way from the project responding to customer needs (i.e. code base being agile), and therefore the documentation must be ideally as less as possible. And that finally, there needs to be a way to find the right type of documentation when you want it.

I think the last part is a field where there needs to be research. Getting it correct has been one reason why unit tests have worked so effectively. We need more people thinking about this part.

This looks interesting. I like the idea of a Product Idea Validation Tool, but I feel like there are enough sites that let me upload images for users to choose between them.

Perhaps something similar to what the http://survey.io guys do but with survey questions more for an earlier stage might be even more useful.

Different people might be involved with each initiative.

Yeah, sorry, I have little tolerance for government created monopolies that are overly bureaucratic. We actually did have an SBIR for which we needed it.

D&B seems to be a good company, but the DUNS system seems broken and requires payment just to signup for no value being provided.

Try getting the number from here: http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform/displayHomePage.do

You basically tell DnB that you are applying for a US government contract. They are then required to give give you the number within 1 day.

They will tell you that they will revoke your number if you don't enter yourself in some government database within 90 days. You can then enter yourself there (or as happened for us the first time we needed the number, we were just too busy to do that and figured that we would let it expire and deal with the consequences if anyone really needed to use the number).

Looks great. Reminds me a little of Duolingo http://duolingo.com You might want to check them out to get ideas for improving your app.

I think that your best bet is to first understand who is using your project and why. Once there try to find the needs of companies - they are often more likely to pay for your time.

Hmmm... I guess I am worried about the opposite. The fact that lots of people might be working on it and I might be wasting my time.

Perhaps allow partial answers?

I have seen this happen often with StackOverflow. Were a person gives a one line answer to start things off, and then within 30 minutes elaborates the answer to a very detailed one.

Great idea.

As someone who wants a small project to try out a new framework, this seems like a great site to find projects.

It might be helpful to have users flag tasks that they are working on, so that others can get a sense of how many people are currently working on an answer.