d_r

You can. For example, this one by Wacom: http://www.amazon.com/Bamboo-Stylus-for-iPad-CS100K/dp/B004V...

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried it yet. Would be interesting to hear others' feedback.)

Seconded! When I saw the title of this post, I hoped more people would chime in about their experiences outsourcing. At this moment I used one contractor from odesk (for some audio recording) and it went very well (beginner's luck?). Hoping to outsource some artwork soon.

The current situation is somewhat unfair to the indiscrete / non-tech-savvy consumer since they might buy an Android phone without understanding the differences from the iOS ecosystem. At least several of my friends did. "They're about the same right? And this one was $30 cheaper!" And I genuinely feel bad every time this happens.

Note that I of course have no gripes with Android OS/concept itself -- it's a good contender to iOS. My gripe is with the current gouging of consumers by hardware manufacturers/cell phone companies, of the fragmented/poor/outdated hardware coverage in many models, lack of upgrades, et cetera. And don't forget the mandatory "crapware" that carriers pre-install.

This is quite different from buying, say, a Dell/HP PC vs. a Mac -- in both cases do you get a working, upgradeable machine.

While some toys can definitely be attributed as luxury (you don't really need that iPad), I can say that my i7 Macbook Air made me a significantly happier developer. Incredibly fast for everything I do, be it Xcode or Photoshop. Check. Long battery life and lightweight - great for coffee shops. Check. This is one "toy" that actually improved my productivity.

Also, something should be said about efficiency. If you're primarily coding on a slow/old computer where compiles, etc. take longer, you may be wasting precious time. It's worth having the best tools for the job.

You haven't mentioned how your side project is doing. Have you seen reached any milestones/small successes? Is it something you can monetize, like a SaaS website (as staunch wrote below) or perhaps an iPhone app? If you are already spending some free time working on a side project, you're on a great track. What's actually hard is to allocate time to this every single day, since as you noticed, other important things come in the way. A couple of hours here and there likely won't do it, but this doesn't mean you have to go "cold turkey" yet.

In your position, I wouldn't recommend quitting the day job just yet until you have some financial buffer, so you'd need to figure out a revenue stream first. You don't have to passively wait until things get better, but instead focus on shipping some things and perfecting your art.

Finally, your family (and especially your spouse) has to be on board with this, and it will help you immensely. If you're spending those few hours on a computer, they should know that you're working on something and not, say, reading the news. It'll take some time (or achievements) for them to take it seriously, but, again, this will really help you.

Best of luck to you, and don't feel trapped. You have to be genuinely excited and know that you're doing the right thing every day that'll take you to where you want to be.

I remember this as well. Found a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFclEc4sCUo

As a single indie dev, I couldn't agree more. It can be a long road! Games (as opposed to say, utilities) are challenging because of the additional art/sound/creative requirements, IMO. And I think one important reason for why > 1 is better is that two founders can push each other along when times are uncertain (and they often are!)

That said, keeping momentum, coding away, and most of all greatly enjoying the process of creating something will really help you.

Self-learning has worked well for me so far. Within reasonable time, you should be able to do most typical tasks (i.e. within the context of Linux, do things like install new packages from a repo or from source, configure Apache/Nginx/etc., and so on.)

Some things are tougher IMO, like setting up sendmail/e-mail related configuration in general, to make sure your e-mails don't bounce. But that brings me to another point that is valid in 2011 -- fortunately you can "outsource" many tasks to cloud service providers such as Amazon. Definitely know what goes on under the hood, but don't spend precious time maintaining the infrastructure yourself.

If you do hit a point when for some reason the "cloud" solution is too pricy or doesn't scale to your needs, you'll likely be having other (good) problems. In other words, don't worry about that until you're successful, and then hire help if so need be.

Taken within the context of HN audience, this is generally poor advice. I'm not sure why it is being upvoted other than for the discussion itself. Don't scrounge those $9 Netflix dollars, and don't skip your coffee. Don't even spend countless hours lurking on SlickDeals to save twenty bucks here and there. Your time would much, much better spent if you work on increasing your income stream. Work harder and ship your darn iPhone/Android/web/whatever app.

Many of the differences aren't typoes (classified by edit distance) but sound-alikes.

This is a great video. For one, it showcases SJ's confidence in deprecating technologies for the benefit of newer and better things.

It also underscores the importance of being able to translate tech "pieces" into compelling products. I'm an app developer. When reading documentation for the latest release of iOS or Lion SDKs, and seeing all of the new APIs, I feel like a kid with a brand-new box of Legos. The challenge (and art) is in combining these technologies to build something actually catchy.

Love the concept, and a very clean design. I'd make 2-3 haikus more prominent on your landing page in a slightly bigger font and toward the top of the page. Right now this valuable space is taken up by the logo which doesn't add much value/content IMHO.

FWIW (see my post above recommending Air), I also tend to keep 20+ Chrome tabs open at a time, along with Xcode, Photoshop, and occasionally Eclipse. Always snappy. As far as I can tell, it performs better than my previous MBP. It seems like Apple made great strides since the original Air introduction in 2008, turning it from a "toy" expensive computer to a power box for mainstream users and developers alike.

This year, I was upgrading from the 2010 Air (2.13Ghz model) to the newer Air (1.8Ghz model) and was concerned that the Ghz mattered here. It appears that the new processor makes a huge difference, since the benchmarks I ran out of curiosity (GeekBench) indicate a 2x improvement, and the actual use ( say, compiling a huge project in Xcode) is significantly faster.

Some other benchmarks I read before making my purchase: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4528/the-2011-macbook-air-11-1... ("Both the 11 and 13-inch MacBook Air are fast enough to replace your 3 year old MacBook Pro and still deliver better performance. You can even move from a 2010 MacBook Pro to an upgraded MacBook Air and not notice any drop in performance. All of this is thanks to Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU.")

(I have the highest spec 13" model, with the i7 processor.)

I've been using a Macbook Air since last winter, and this year upgraded to the 2011 model (13", highest specs.) I can't stress highly enough how happy it made me as a developer. The Air is light, and so it's easy to bring with me just about anywhere I go. Since the battery lasts for hours, I'm not tied to the wall/AC during coffee shop hacking. And the overall build is solid and makes hacking just that much more pleasant.

My previous laptop was a 15" MBP -- I liked it, but it was a bit too heavy to "take with me every time." As a result, it mostly sat on my desk.

Not specifically about web service APIs, but you might enjoy this talk by Joshua Bloch [1]:

"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch

Thanks for the code from this indie developer!

Something definitely has to be said about having the right environment. If you're around people who are also doing hacking, this will help you immensely, even if they're not working on the same projects as you.

Sadly, very hard to read on my iPhone because the "mobile layout" magic makes the page erratically jump up and down when I scroll.

Perhaps they can try another pattern (now seen on TechCrunch.com). Initially, the logo/header is sized normally. As you scroll down to the point where the header would disappear, it shrinks to a smaller height. Seems weird at first, but makes a whole lot of sense.

Another classic example would be the "tone" sounds you hear when entering digits on a modern cell phone. Completely cosmetic, but probably just makes sense for consumers. And there's just something pleasant about hearing those tones rather than a generic beep (or nothing.)

Thanks! That's a good point, I'm going to have to do that (and perhaps add an option to fade it in gradually.)

Shameless plug. I always have trouble waking up. Since the Mac App Store came out this year, I've been working on a simple alarm clock app called "Mornings" to do just this (play iTunes or custom MP3s). It actually uses AppleScript to tell iTunes what to play for the iTunes option, so it works with whatever is in your playlists. (The "con" to this is that iTunes automatically opens when the alarm clock plays -- unlike other, more fancy apps, that load the playlists from iTunes but roll their own playback behavior.) Or you can just add your own MP3s and the app won't open iTunes.

I haven't posted it on HN before, but I'd be absolutely grateful if anyone tried it out. As a developer I get some promo codes, so here are some codes (hit Featured, then Redeem to grab it. Or if none of them work, e-mail me and I'd be happy to give you one.)

  F7KTWHLM9H7P 
  3XKY3YEJX9EK
  K63HX7WE9X77
  3RX6ENHL34EE
  WY7X3LRMHKPJ
  JFXETAJH3XYP
  XJXNHTXFEF4P

Many restaurants in China do in fact have such a set of buttons at every table. As an added optimization, wait staff there typically use some kind of mobile devices to order food instead of using paper. I haven't seen many other countries, but I'm surprised both of these innovations aren't more prevalent here in the States.

At least no one can say that PayPal is ever lax on security. This vulnerability, if it exists, could be more of an honest developer mistake.

I was recently travelling abroad, and decided to buy Glyphish icons to finish an app I was working on. This proved to be tough. Upon logging in to my PayPal account, I got locked out.

"We want to check with you to make sure that no one has logged in to your account without your permission."

My account now states that it is "limited" and has some drivel about me having to send my driver license/passport/etc. copies to re-enable my account. I understand that this is all in the name of security, but really, I wish they didn't use such heavy-handed one-size-fits-all measures.

I've been there but found that having a debugging console (or generally, using any UI over and over to repro some steps while you're developing) ends up being a huge time sink. It's often much more sensible to invest time into building a unit test to guide your development instead. As a result, now I don't create much debugging UI but try to unit test, which gives me more time/inspiration to build actual UI.

(Borrowing words from the article) Warning sign: During the development, dozens of times, I have to go through step 1 in my UI, select a person, go to step 2, enter an address, select a state, go to step 3, and so on.

If the story is in fact real, I would say the student's "fault" here is in not going a bit farther than "oh my god, I just can't get it to work."

He/she could have written:

(1) What have they tried

(2) What errors were they getting (Compiler errors are ROUGH for someone just starting to code. That trivial missing semicolon can waste hours.)

(3) What ideas they might pursue to get it working

I've taught programming to several friends in the past (and I've also seen many other friends drop out of CS in frustration.) It seems that teaching just how to formulate such questions and walk through "what exactly does not work" is a critical step to CS education that is omitted in curricula out there.

Forgive the noob question, but I would be curious what people use to deploy WSGI applications in the wild. Is apache+daemonized mod_wsgi (possibly running behind nginx) a typical solution? The article mentions gunicorn, which I am likely going to give a try to see how it performs.

I think this is a reference to AOL buying ICQ.

I'm incredibly happy for the team, and hope they made out well. Cocos2D makes iOS game development a pleasure. I remember reading that one of the developers, riq, supports his family mainly on income from people occasionally buying the sample Cocos2D game source code ("Sapus Tongue"). This should be a nice change, especially if it allows him to continue working on the platform.

San Francisco is a beautiful city that for some reason is not incredibly well-kept. I'm not sure if I feel that way because of the not-too-friendly homeless, or the overall look of being worn out in some parts like Market Street.

I'm from New York and frequently travel to China, both of which obviously have "old" spots. For some reason, "old" there for me evokes the feeling of appreciation for history, while the San Francisco "old" makes me sad.