0x5a177

One difference to note is that HTTY puts you in a REPL-like environment instead of being a one-shot command like curl.

Hi Mike, please, no need to apologize for the delay. I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this.

These are all great points, especially regarding the signup process and and permissions. I think you have validated some of the concerns that I have had regarding these issues.

I do have delete and rename, but maybe I should pop up a quick intro screen for first-time users to get acquainted with the functionality.

Thanks again and all the best to you.

Mike, wow...thanks for the offer. I re-launched my site as a paid service about a month ago. It is an online text editor for Dropbox. (I guess you can disregard this if you are not a Dropbox user).

I hope you don't mind temporarily shelling out $6, but I would really appreciate it if you could sign up for the service and answer a few questions:

- Is it clear how to sign up for the service on the home page?

- Does the signup/payment workflow feel straightforward?

- Is it clear how to get a refund? Is the process straightforward?

- Does the app feel fast or slow?

Thanks! Very very much appreciated. The site is https://www.textdropapp.com

Using Node has helped me think more in terms of streams because the APIs afford such thinking. PHP has streams but I never thought to use them, and I haven't really seen it done.

Node Streams really help performance in my application where I am proxying API calls from the browser to the Dropbox API. It's much faster to stream the response from Dropbox through to the client rather than request, wait for entire response, then send.

Learning Backbone is a great way to get practice with MVC and the "Observer" pattern if you haven't done it before.

Also it's a much better way of organizing your DOM structure than a bunch of loose jQuery calls.

I'm working on http://www.textdropapp.com

I agree. I don't know about TCP behavior, but this seems really wrong in the sense that it ignores HTTP semantics of GET and POST. I imagine this could cause unintended effects in intermediaries like caching proxies.

I keep 2 plain text files:

1. backlog.txt - a list of all potential ideas and tasks

2. changelog.txt - a list of iterations/versions/milestones

Whenever I have an idea or bug, I add it as a line in backlog.txt When I want to actually work on code, I pick 3-4 tasks that I want to complete and move them to changelog.txt. The number of tasks depends on how much I can do in one or two sittings.

backlog.txt is in a format like this:

* Fix IE9 compatibility

* Refactor CSS

* ... etc

changelog.txt looks like this:

1.1.0 - next release

--------------------

* Fixed IE8 thingy

* SSL encryption enabled

1.0.9 - March 10, 2012

--------------------

* Fixed null-pointer crash

* Catch exception in sendmail.java

* Enabled websockets transport

Keeping everything in plain text helps me from fiddling around too much with the tool, which I am very prone to do. (Meta-bonus, my product is a text editor so I can organize my product with itself.)

I thought myself geeky for making this PDF cheat sheet, but now I see it's perfectly normal to do this sort of thing.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/222781/HTTP%20Status%20Code%20Defini...

Cool. I wanted to do something just like this, except the messages would decay over time.

Euler's identity blew me away when I first learned it a year ago:

e^iπ + 1 = 0

me!

I don't remember ever playing a game this simple that made me start giggling.

You are correct, sir. Equity in this company would be worthless to me, just a token of their appreciation.

You could say that I assumed the general risk of dealing with people, but amirmc is correct that I did not assume any formal business risk. I.e., I did not receive stock options or any other compensation that is normally given to risk-bearing stakeholders.

Yes, the other employees that have beef are taking it up with the CEO. I wasn't a real "CTO" as you one might think. But as far as that small company was concerned, I was responsible technology direction, although I didn't have my own budget for hiring.

I've heard that through the grapevine, and other commenters have concurred, but I've never confirmed it.

Update: according to 11 USC Section 507, wages fall in 3rd place. I am not a lawyer so I may be reading this all wrong, but it goes "administrative expenses", "unsecured claims", then wages up to $4000 (about half of what I'm owed) and earned within 90 days of the bankruptcy filing. It's been about a year since I quit the company, and the wage claim through the labor board has a 3-year statute of limitations. I wonder what would happen if I filed a wage claim on a bankrupt company...

(http://www.lawdog.com/bkrcy/bkmd3.htm#726.)

I think you hit the nail there in that I'm really curious on how to solve the social problem in more of a win-win way as you described. I would probably break down and rank the problem like this:

1. Character - how do I carry myself with justice, mercy, and compassion, yet not get pushed around and maintain self-respect? 2. Social - how do I maintain relationships? 3. Financial - how do I get my money?

Thanks very much for your advice and sharing your story, it is really helping me think through this situation.

Thanks for your comment trizk. I think you capture what I mostly feel in my gut. I really do feel like the CEO really believes in the company to a fault. His gift and curse seems to be that of a hyper-visionary; what he sees in the company doesn't jive with my reality of the company. He has expressed remorse for the situation, but at this point he's lost my trust; I now read his remorse as mere bluffing. Not that I believe he was out to maliciously defraud, I just see this as the outcome of poor judgment and incompetence.

You are right, I did assume risk in joining the startup. That was not apparent to me at the time because it was not really communicated, but now I know. Looking back, I see a lot of "I should have known" moments. The lesson is that one should not look to the leaders of the company to look out for their interest.

That is my fear in pushing too hard. I actually do want the company to succeed, but I just don't have the wherewithal to give the company this free loan.

The amount owed me is roughly the same as yours. I have positive cash flow in my personal finances so I'm above water, but if someone gave me that much right now it would almost feel like winning the lottery.

What do you mean when you say you have diversified?

I think you can at least take some credit for telling your employees to look for other jobs.

Our CEO would come into our office and say, "I just had a meeting with a potential investor and he's committed $25k!" He always had our hopes up, but our CFO would paint a different picture. Even our president told me he was starting to pick up work on the side.

There is a 3-year statute of limitations in California on wage claims.

I don't feel good about fighting them over the money. This may sound weird, but I do want the company to succeed. However, I might feel worse if they flat out got away with it. There are several of us employees who are owed back salary and it was very unprofessional and un-courteous for them to keep us on the hook the way they did.

I think it would be a weak move to avoid it completely, but maybe not weak to at least confront them and then show mercy.

But I think you're absolutely right, nobody here can really decide for me.

Thanks, that confirms what's been stewing in my mind.

Thanks for your input tptacek. When I spoke with one of the VP's he also said that there wasn't much I could do to go after the money. But I thought he might be trying to prevent me from doing anything against the company.

What you described about kicking off the bankruptcy process is pretty much how I pictured it. They have implicitly made me an interest-free lender.

One of the hard lessons of life here for me is that I am really hesitant to trust any people in business now. I now understand why unions exist.

I actually did start looking for a job right a little bit before the salary starting coming late. From the time I sent my first official "hey guys I'm looking for a job" email until the time I signed the contract for my next job was about 6 months. The operations of the company started smelling weird to me the longer I was there, plus I felt like I needed to be in a different type of position, so did start looking before things started falling apart.

While I was still getting paid, I didn't want to quit until I had secured a new job. When they were 1 month late with pay, that pretty much drew the line for me so I gave them 1 month notice at that point.

And yes, now I'm regularly updating my resume and keeping my eyes and ears open for other opportunities.

Yes, I agree...GitHub or any text-centric SCM is a very simplistic solution that really only works (and not very well) for metadata in audio projects. These points are good answers to the question, "How is SolidComposer better than using another version control system for my compositions?"

But I guess my gut reaction — which you can take with many grains of salt because I don't do any work in a collaborative music composition situation — is that of "Geez...it's hard enough to get technical people to jump into my version control workflow, how could I get musicians in on this?" (Which I think you already addressed in another comment that your target audience is maybe the overlap of developers/composers.)

I'm reading through your Introducing SolidComposer page and I think it would be helpful if you could condense that down and put it somewhere more accessible (maybe on the front page). I find myself not really wanting to spend time figuring out how the app will help me.

Also, the How Does It Work? section actually does not seem appealing. The first situation seems simple and straightforward, whereas when you talk about SolidComposer complaining about missing dependencies, that starts makes me feel uncomfortable.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful and good luck with the project.

Side note: I recently started playing in a band and one thing I notice is that whenever we get together to practice a particular song, we are always reinventing the song and it never really seems to gel. It's always "How does that part go again? How many measures were we supposed to play that riff?" Could SolidComposer help in that situation?

Cool idea if you are a composer who likes to use version control! I just recently started putting my GarageBand projects in GitHub =)