I also thought it's somewhat of an overstatement, but having worked on software for the construction industry (for the operators of paving machines and the like), I think we will eventually end up in a situation where most jobs involve computer use.
I sell digital goods so I'm in your target market. There's very little information about the features on your web site. What payment gateways do you support? How does the affiliate scheme work? Do you support discount coupons? There's lots of other questions.
I tried the demo but didn't get far because I had to upload a file. I jumped around the video but that seemed to dwell on very basic stuff.
To summarise, you may have a good product but there should be a lot more information on your site because at the moment I just don't know if it's good or bad.
I'm in a similar situation, but I haven't always been like that. I linked it to stress (in the broadest sense) - very occasionally I get a great night's sleep if I'm completely relaxed and happy. However, eliminating stress to this degree just doesn't seem feasible. My optimum amount of sleep is 8 hours, and even a half hour either way has a very noticeable (negative) effect. However, a lot of the time even sleeping exactly 8 hours doesn't work well. I really wish I could find a solution!
Interestingly, it's a word by word translation of the English phrase so it doesn't make any sense in Russian. I don't know if those reverse engineers would have guessed what it meant.
The exact same thing with the change also happens in New Zealand and it's quite annoying! Now I wonder what could have brought it about in both countries.
Actually, I think Jetbrains RubyMine is a great IDE for Ruby and Rails apps too, so it's not just for Java. I love the Git integration because I haven't found a good Git GUI for Ubuntu.
I always had a rule to do everything inside a transaction. Having to commit a transaction gives you just enough pause to double check what you've done.
I used GWT for a while in 2009-2010, and didn't like it at all. I kept running into things that weren't implemented in its subset of Java. Debugging was a pain. Compilation was excruciatingly slow because of all the variations of the code that always had to be compiled for different browsers (something like 40 seconds for a fairly small project) and development speed in general was slow. Also, IIRC you could only run your project from Eclipse in some sort of an IE6 based container. All in all, it wasn't a pleasant experience at all, and I'm not sure what the benefits are. Writing a web app in Java doesn't count as a benefit for me, especially with so many constraints around it.
I always glance at the link before clicking it because I like to see where it goes so I prefer direct links. However, I'm not particularly worried about bit.ly links.
In theory you could get real time tracking with Mixpanel, but in practice their results seem to be an hour or two behind at least some of the time, so I'm not sure how that compares to bit.ly. It isn't free either.
Good luck, I hope you succeed! I'm in a similar situation, although I have a couple of products bringing in modest revenue. I found that there's always heaps of things to do when you're a solo founder, and it can be overwhelming. Also, things always take longer than you expect.
Would be happy to exchange thoughts (email in the profile).
This is interesting. I'm in the process of getting a merchant account from BNZ in New Zealand, they are a subsidiary of NAB. They are the only option here for billing in USD but at least they have an actual product for it called CurrencySelect and it seems like this is a workable solution and nobody is too confused by it. The fees are pretty high though - starting at 8.1% per transaction and only going down starting from $25K in volume.
And also, Paypal only allows transactions without CVV for US and Canadian accounts, so if you're in another country Paypal + Spreedly isn't an option for recurring billing. Took an hour on the phone with Paypal to find this out.
It's interesting that when you delete the account, you get a page saying "Why not try another great option?" and linking to match.com. I wonder if it did it before the acquisition.
I second this. Even though it took me a while to wrap my head around Backbone.js (I guess more examples would have helped, e.g. of apps using nested models), now that I got it working, it allows me to do a lot with just a little bit of very clean code. CoffeeScript is also awesome for cleaning up your client side code base.
In theory it shouldn't matter whether my security expertise is in-house or I pay some external party to provide it, right? The usual argument for economies of scale also applies - it's beneficial to have the platform provider manage security for the customers. I think the problem is that Heroku's (and most other providers') promise of security is nice in theory, but in practice they carry no responsibility if anything goes wrong.
I agree that it's important to make sure the provider's security policy is sufficient for your needs in the first place, however.
I'm at least pleased with the way they handled the vulnerability. They seem to be making preventative changes for the future which is the main thing.
As much as I'd like everyone to be diligent about security as David suggests, I don't think it's going to happen. Developers aren't security or admin experts but they (me included) want a way to deploy apps without it being a major hassle. Handing off security to the provider is one of the big reason there are > 100K apps on Heroku, and it's a calculated cost/risk tradeoff.
I agree with your points. Not all businesses even have a physical presence or particular location. I'd like to get a report for my business for example, but I'm selling to a global audience (online) and I'm not even in the US, so I can't use this service.
I think the situation in Russia is similar to the US now. We had less than 10% females in computer science when I was at university in the early 2000s.
Are they really? I still have to unplug one of my monitors during Ubuntu install because otherwise it just doesn't work. I also still have issues with setting up dual boot with Windows as the installer can't setup partitions properly (in some cases at least).
I think my main success is that I finally managed to halt my downward spiral of unhappiness. Sold the house and moved to a different city to start a company (it's bringing in a tiny amount but it's a start!), met a great girl, went for two snowboarding trips and finally learned how to do a 360. Learned a whole lot about running a business and everything that entails.
Next year, the most important thing for me is to continue learning how to be happy. Business wise I'd like to find a profitable niche for a software product and grow the revenues.
I didn't read it that way. I think he points out that sometimes you have to come up with a feature that wasn't in your original vision for the product in order to gain initial traction. I think it's a good thing to keep in mind - you don't have to gain traction solely through marketing effort.
Right, I see, that's a good quote. However, seeing as software developers always try to move common code into libraries and reuse it, wasn't it a bit naive to expect web apps to be any different?
I think the problems the article is talking about are more akin to library dependencies in desktop/server development rather than (more extensive) platform dependencies and the complexities of targeting multiple platforms.
There is zero insight in this article as far as I can see. Yes, if you are using someone else's API, it might change. Yes, if you aren't complying with the terms of service, you may have a problem. If you are adding features to someone else's product, then sure, they can implement those features too and make you obsolete.
In addition, I don't see what any of this has to do with the initial premise that the web provided a way of avoiding the complexities of cross-platform development.