adelevie

Optimizing for happiness will bode very well for Fandalism.

As a Ruby hacker, Mirah would be great for Android development. The toolchain for this is a bit immature, so a big thank you to all those participating in the hackathon to bring this reality one step closer.

Disagree. If this makes a DevOps person's on-call experience slightly less unpleasant, $10 is a steal.

I love it when I spend time writing open source software that people use for free. If a business uses it and earns money because of it, I'm even more delighted.

If you choose to put something creative out into the ether, you should have the expectation that if it's good there are going to be copies and other derivations. If you can't stomach this or can't afford legal counsel to enforce your IP, keep your creative works off the Internet.

The world is a better place because of "unsolicited collaboration".

Between your edits and this reply, there's a lot to chew on, but I'll focus on one point which leaves me dumbfounded:

> also hints at this being RPC-over-HTTP more than REST (which is fine, as long as it's called correctly).

In any context, documenting every function is good practice.

Hey masklinn, I'm totally receptive to constructive criticism like this, so can you make it even more constructive? :)

I've seen many "RESTful" APIs with this structure:

GET / => index

GET /<id> => show

GET /?someparams=someattrs => filtered index

POST / (with encoded params) => create

PUT /<id> (with encoded params) => update

DELETE /<id> => delete

If you made a Rails scaffold, and got rid of any of the POST, PUT, and DELETE actions, and then added some basic filtering to GET "/", you would have a nearly identical API as generated and documented by Restivus.

I've started a small experiment in self-documenting REST APIs.

It's a quick and dirty Ruby gem that exposes CSV data with RESTful endpoints (read-only for now) with a pretty docs page that automagically gives you:

1. Example code

2. Documentation for every single function

3. Human readable requests/responses

Automatic generation of client SDKs is a big TODO.

If you're still interested, check out http://github.com/adelevie/restivus.

Relevant to this discussion is pg's essay on "schlep blindness"[0]:

> The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

Hone in on the schleps you typically avoid and be totally honest with yourself why you're not doing something.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

If it's that difficult for you to stop eating pizza etc., then perhaps you should think twice about the author's point.

Maybe I wasn't a self-respecting hacker when I first signed up for Gmail.

I prefer to not risk missing emails (from switching addresses to non-Gmail) me over the "hacker way".

One of Parse's founders follows the repo for a Ruby script for applying[1]. </reddit_starstruck>

[1] https://github.com/albertovilla/aparse

If lack of a monthly fee made some sense in the early days of Instapaper, it makes plenty of sense now that Apple has "Reading List" installed on millions of Macs and iOS devices.

Can't you both be right?

ok?

So there is high demand for iOS apps (the "business people" are clamoring for them) and "50%" of the project (the backend) is a total PITA. This is the recipe for Parse/Stackmob/Cloudmine/etc for ruling the world.

Github + Issues

Create something that a potential client could actually find useful for his/her projects. If that something solves a problem a decent number of people are facing, quality leads will reach you without you even trying.

I wrote a Ruby gem[1] because it was a fun project. It was in a problem domain that interested me. A developer found the gem, saw that it would be useful for his project, and soon became my first client.

I tried the "MVP for $500" approach a few months back[2]. It generated some solid leads, but none of the projects were remotely as fun or as interesting as my current one. It's certainly doable to compete based on some perfect balance of price vs. quality, but I've found it's much more rewarding (mentally and financially) to compete by being the #1 expert of some piece of software a client wants to use.

Further reading:

Ruby dev Giles Bowkett wrote a pretty good blog post on lead generation for freelancers, http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to....

[1] https://github.com/adelevie/parse_resource

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2685010

You could use Parse.com.

This is incredibly encouraging: http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23codeyear

"The password field is handled differently than the others; it is encrypted on the server and never returned to any client request."

https://www.parse.com/docs/rest#users

If a "BaaS" for a web app sounds appealing, try http://github.com/adelevie/parse_resource.

It lets you use Parse in a Ruby/Rails app with a very ActiveRecord-y API. By using it, your web app gets the following for free: documented REST API, documented iOS and Android SDKs, and the guy who helped scale Scribd is your DBA.

I've been using parse_resource to make some throwaway apps, and I'm currently "dog-fooding" it for a production app. I've found that the schema-lessness and zero-db-admin makes prototyping a snap.

I'm fairly active in developing it, and would really like some feedback, feature requests, and contributors.

$2,000 Macbook, $800 chair, no one bats an eyelash.

$2,800 to learn the skills that justify the Macbook and chair, and it's offensive.

Haha. I thought you were being facetious until I saw it on your about page. Now I'm not sure what to think :/

I remember when SeatGeek presented at TechCrunch Disrupt(?) in 2009, pg took issue at the fact that they didn't use their ticket price data to arbitrage the secondary ticket market. Does Pricenomics use its data to arbitrage any markets, and if not, why should the same criticism not apply?

All that aside, Pricenomics looks compelling. Hopefully it will substantially increase the efficiency of second hand "stuff" markets.

The Facebook app for Android does a decent job with pull to refresh.

I think his use of the word "torrent" (which he admittedly does not fully understand) was a proxy for "watch this video without paying for it." I doubt he understands seeding--and even if he does, you can simply turn seeding off.

BTW, to whoever downvoted enneff's reply: this seems senseless. I asked for a polite explanation, he gave one, and it's an interesting point of view (even though many of us may disagree with it).

To whoever downvoted, I'd like to read a polite explanation why.

I checked out the link and found it a little sparse and details. What does it mean to sell a link? I think you need a lot more info on the landing and about pages.

So if you bought it and exhausted your download limit, just torrent it. Or just buy and torrent it in the first place to save a little extra for Louis.

Last summer I had some issues getting OAuth working with the Twitter API for Android apps. I ended up using the signpost library. I posted my results with instructions here: https://github.com/adelevie/AndroidOAuth. Maybe it will help you.