If you're just starting out with Ruby I strongly recommend the book "Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black. It teaches you Ruby and shows you how Rubyisms work with Rails.
132 karma · joined July 9, 2010
The IRS does not give out much guidance on the definition of "reasonable salary" but has provided guidance on what is /not/ reasonable.
In this case the IRS evaluated the company's return and decided that his salary was less that reasonable and as such they went after him and got him to pay more tax.
This rule does not apply to C Corporations.
I swear I'm not crazy either.. :-)
It will be lame if Verizon has the iPhone 4 and then AT&T gets a new GSM-only iPhone 5 in June.
But once things get more solid for me (and, like you said, I know the code has some long term value), I'm a big fan of building a solid test suite before a full production launch.
I also think it is worth the time to use code coverage tools to find sections that are not being covered. Odds are your test suite only covers 60-80% of the total logic in your app.
That said, a "reliable parcel delivery service in the UK" would be hard to do unless you first start with portions of the UK and not everything. There are quite a few locales in the north that are quite out there and difficult to get to, some requiring one or more ferries etc.
Not saying it can't be done, just not sure if it can be done without substantial investment.
So, "could we do better"? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure that out. It certainly would not be as easy to use as Heroku or easy to deploy. But at a minimum I need to get some other host option set that we can switch over to.
Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message.
I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error rate since every minute is costing us money.
Like an writer or a painter, the best way to learn programming is to learn by doing.
It does help to work with others, so find a friend and work on a project with them and try to learn as much as possible if you can.
Regardless of how you do it, you will be blown away by how much your skills improve after 270 days.
The open API gave them plenty of ideas for functionality and "holes" in their system, and Twitter has made it clear that they need to fill those holes.
The multiple points of entry also showed them that they needed a seamless user experience, which is why they launched their own native Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, launched an iPad app and now relaunched their web interface.
Many of the twitter.com upgrades were built by someone else on some other site first, but it is in Twitter's own interest to use those ideas to get more traffic to twitter.com and ultimately use the traffic to generate revenue.
It is sad to think that Twitter fostered its ecosystem only to strong arm it and chop it down when it was ready to figure out its monetization strategy. But those are the perils of building a business off of someone else's platform.
As a Twitter application developer myself I knew this was a risk, but I have become painfully aware of it over the past few months. I think their current trajectory will eventually kill off a good part of the ecosystem that helped them get to this point.
Some of that is eBay sales transactions, some is merchant account transactions for online stores, and some is recurring billing for a subscription site.
We have had our account frozen several times with substantial amounts of money in it (like a whole month's worth) and had some stressful moments when we were trying to figure out how to get the cash out of there so we could pay our American Express bill on time.
Over the past 5 years we have had numerous designated representatives but all in all they were difficult to connect with and provided little value and I can't recall a single instance where they were able to go above and beyond to help us. (The same also goes for the eBay Powerseller representatives we have had over the years.)
We have had random instances where funds are flagged as being questionable and Paypal seems to be inconsistent. For example, just 2 days ago we sold 2 items on eBay totalling about $2500. Paypal/eBay said the transaction was approved and told us to go ahead and ship it, so we made preparations to do that. The next day they flagged the transaction and told us that unless we could provide proof it had already been shipped the funds were going to be pulled. Our options were to either refund immediately or just wait and see what happened, which is what we are doing. We just need to be careful because they could arbitrarily just take the funds in a state like this and we would be out both the cash and the merchandise.
Ultimately this sort of stuff has driven us to migrate our online stores over to Braintree.
If you are just doing consulting it shouldn't be too bad, just always remember that there is no amount of business you could do with them that would cause them to care about you as a customer.
For someone who has not used Ruby before, it will likely take years to go from 0 to Ruby/Rails "Zen Master". The Ruby language seems simple at first but there are many nuances and powerful methods (such as #inject and #map) that few will master right away.
Also with regards to Rails, there are a lot of "moving parts". Randomly picking something out of the API and expecting to understand it, outside of its context etc., is not the right way to go about this.
Having been learning and working with Rails for several years now, I can tell you that there is must more excellent content now than ever before. And there will soon be plenty of Rails 3 specific books available too.
Can you combine the columns for the ability to build larger boxes? Or use less than 5 columns on the widest site?
I saw it on HN first :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154
I will either listen to just one song on auto repeat or a tiny playlist of < 5 songs on shuffle/repeat. Too many songs and I find that I get distracted when the songs change.
At times I also listen to a "white noise" CD called Holosync that is theoretically supposed to help improve neural connections. I like it just because it is noise and not distracting, but I have no evidence to show that it helps me code or is actually improving my brain function.
I've had multiple days where I made fantastic progress while listening to the Notorious BIG's "Hypnotize" on continuous loop for 12+ hours straight. :-)