adyus

That's a very sensitive area to be heading into. Any assumptions you might try to make will find themselves with counter-examples quite often.

A better direction to move in might be to minimize gender differences as much as possible (although that's hard for marketing to stomach).

I mean, would one try not to recommend pants for girls or skirts for boys (kilts)? It's tricky...

It gives a glimpse into the lives of actors one wouldn't otherwise see in the same image, while making them appear more human and approachable.

Overrated? Maybe.

This does look very interesting. Do you have any stats available, or is everything too new?

I'm just wondering if a developer could make a decent monthly living by working 40hrs/week on different projects.

Also, what happens if one of these projects wants to break out and go for VC money? Is each contributor's stake a legally binding "share" of the app?

Lastly, who owns the idea, in a legal sense? Would Assembly receive all revenue and distribute it, in which case it's logical that it would receive all ownership of ideas?

The interesting thing is that they would accept pull requests (presumably from the devs they offered that "restricted" access), but might not share the profits from charging for atom.io.

Food for thought.

Don't forget the Target credit card leak. Possibly worst of all because it ahem targeted physical credit and debit cards.

This is just an un-researched hunch, but I believe that for the small average sums transacted at McDonalds, the merchant (or the bank) takes on the fraud risk. Thus, they instantly approve your transaction, as long as the number of fraudulent transactions never overshadow the convenience of instant payment and short queues. That's why they don't ask for a signature under $20 in some places.

This is truly awesome.

I was looking at how the ideas behind Kandan (A Hipchat clone) and appear.in can be combined for remote work, and I came up with what Sqwiggle already does for $9/head :|

Too late to the game, I guess.

Completely agree. But we still haven't figured out what that hard skill floor is for web developers.

Heck, we can't even decide what a web developer actually does, as opposed to a web designer, or "growth hacker", or UI/UX "expert", or back-end programmer.

How can we set a minimum when we can't clearly define the task beforehand?

This is more of a question for the startup that Nathan was applying to:

Given it took Nathan a reasonably small amount of time to research and learn the correct answer, what disqualifies him from being (or quickly becoming) a skilled developer for your startup?

In other words, what's the minimum skill and knowledge level you'd accept, given that the applicant know how to learn the rest? Is that level arbitrary?

This kind of post reminds me why I'm still in this community. Thank you for sharing your experience.

True, feelings sell best, business goals second to that. I guess it all comes down to having the leeway to 'fire' the wrong clients.

Sidenote: I noticed your blog mentions Vero Beach, FL. I'll be in the Palm Beach area in February, it'd be great to meet someone else in the SoFL startup scene!

As usual, a very useful and thought-out reply. Thanks for taking the time.

As soon as I get over the typical impostor syndrome and realize I have a lot to share in a newsletter, I'll follow your advice :) 'Tis true, "do stuff, tell people" is still the best advice.

One thing I'm still struggling with is how to explain and justify the (otherwise normal but perceived as) high cost of web development to a crowd that's anything but tech savvy. How do you justify your consulting fee? "Everybody charges that" doesn't sit well with me...

Although, I do see a point in making them do the math to figure out how much more they'd make by paying me, but I'm bearish on how many small business owners would actually do so.

Maybe I'm still thinking too small...

I've been following your advice and newsletters, and I get great value from them.

However, one thing that I still haven't figured out is this: how would I find say, that small insurance company in Kansas who has $100k to spend on a solution I could offer to their problem? Where would I begin to look? Cold-contacting seems unscalable.

I know networking goes a long way toward such contacts, but it can't be just that. Is there a way to search for clients that's between cold-calling and a personal network contact?

Have you taken a look at http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-ipad-app-is-live-chimpad...

Be prepared for more of the same in Romania. Just like most of Eastern Europe, lovely place to visit, horrible place to live long-term.

That being said, hit me up if you're in Bucharest :)

I was under the impression (hearsay) that the Big Two carriers at least (FedEx, UPS) do not appreciate having their prices directly compared and contrasted.

Is offering this service only for international shipments a way to get around that?

I had the idea a while back, it's great to see it implemented so well!

One suggestion though, the fact that use cases are wide open could stifle growth. I'd suggest a few different landing pages you could A/B test, each covering a very specific use case.

You could have one page explain that you can save your parking spot and share it with others. Another for sharing a meetup location. Another for saving your favorite locations. Yet another (where you may win big) would be easy location saving for photo and film location scouting.

The solution proposed seems interesting, but still requires an account with a third party, in this case the feed reader (if not online, a downloaded native app).

Given the nature of self-updating browsers and devices being permanently with or around users, I suggest something else.

Let me follow whoever I want without creating an account, store these preferences in localStorage, then use it to build a news feed on the home page, just like a logged in user.

Then, unobtrusively suggest other features that can only be made available to signed up users, due to technical constraints.

(No, notifications are not such features; a browser extension that checks localStorage and raises browser notifications a la Chrome should be enough for non-logged in users).

Aye aye, coupled with Modernizr, it should solve (most) use cases.

Alas, I was suffering from TLDR syndrome. I will definitely give Snap a try, along with seeing if it plays well with Raphael for graceful degradation for older browsers.

Without knowing this fact about Raphael, I was about to reply to another comment prematurely. I was going to complain that having the same author as Raphael doesn't explain why Snap.js exists, instead of a better version of Raphael.

Thank you.

What resources can you recommend for learning AngularJS and CoffeeScript at the same time? I had the same inkling, and I'm intrigued that you found it foolish. Why is that?

I think this direction can better be described as reaching toward a "native" experience, such as on mobile devices. You see this in Windows 8's full screen apps, they tend to be isolated containers, even though some are written using web technologies.

Unfortunately, too much of human society is based on printed matter.

Take shipping a box, for example. You'd still need to print a label. There's currently no way that I know of to associate that particular box to the place it's supposed to go otherwise.

Disclaimer: I'm building http://ezsend.it to help people avoid the post office lines, and it would be a useless endeavor without printers :)

Yes, but there may be some non-dev designers that do not yet know how to set it up, or haven't heard of Grunt.

I wonder if the onset of Retina-like displays would remove some of the issues with antialiasing when rotating bitmap images. I'm tired of looking at the digital world straight on.

I'm currently working on http://ezsend.it but this sounds like something fun and somewhat related.

It would be great if it also offered public transit directions. One could then market it to businesses as a replacement for the static map on their contact page.

Let's keep in touch once I'm done with ezsend.it

Have you considered using hunch.com to help with this?

Having a text box for pasting addresses is a great idea. I also wanted to use location services to pre-fill the sender's address and show the closest drop off locations or mailboxes.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd like to get as much of it as I can, so I'd appreciate any word spreading about ezsend.it :)

That's exactly why I'm building it, and why I'll be focusing on the easiest and fastest possible user experience. Things like reverse geocoding to pre-fill addresses, the least amount of inputs, etc.

Now, do you think the time savings would be worth x amount of money to you? In other words, would you be willing to pay for the convenience?

Hey everyone, I'm working on making the easiest alternative to standing in line at the post office or UPS counter.

I'm curious if the launch page is clear and compelling enough to generate interest. What could I change to improve it?