davidvanleeuwen

These days there are great tools to measure everything that occurs in your site. Clicks, reading time, loading times, errors and so forth. And we care about the video content on our websites in the same way… right?

If you have an MP4 on your site. Please let me know if this is something for you and/or if you need help integrating.

8 years of building the space, projects and other stuff :(

Awesome! Thanks for posting. Just ordered it.

In our situation, which is a relatively small company, it's used to keep people energized, focused and well... happy. Without it, we had regular team meetings where people talked about frustrations they had (and it exploded at times).

I don't think having it around as way to fire someone is the right approach.

Although we try to stay away from "creating a process" for everything, we've gradually implemented a way for people to give feedback more organically. The thing is, it's not the tool, form or questions you hand out - it's how people use them and think about them.

Over a period of time we started using Impraise (impraise.com), although it's not the best tool - it helps people to force to take the time and leave there current mindset to focus on something like giving feedback (on an equal base, because some people are just very good at giving feedback and keep on talking, while others are struggling and need to write it down). Every quarter, you review 2 other people. People read it, interpret it and carry on. However, I sit down with them after everyone has filled in the questions on Impraise (which are not the default ones, but they're pretty straightforward, like: "how good is the quality of your colleague's work?"). This information is used as a base to allow me to ask even more questions, like: "do you agree with this statement?" or "what could you do to improve this situation this colleague is describing?”. The result of this conversation are 4 things:

1. self reflection,

2. setting personal goals (which is mostly one of the things from the self reflection, getting more focus/attention than other things, which is not shared within the team),

3. create and/or help out with team goals, something we should improve as a team and shared within the team,

4. feedback on the process itself.

These results are written down as notes and then reflected on the next time we sit down.

We have some other tools, methods and things in place to have more of a continuous feedback loop - but it remains a living thing, rather than a set in stone method. If you have questions, you're always welcome to contact me :-)

Well, using it manually is just cumbersome. API Gateway is not specifically designed for Lambda, so it has lots of settings which you would think are just default for building your API. Using it through Cloudformation or Serverless is way easier.

After multiple side projects with Lambda (e.g. image processing services), we finally implemented it on larger scale. Initially we started out without any framework or tool to help, because there we pretty much non-existent at that time. We created our own tool, and used Swagger a lot for working with API gateway (because it is really bad to work with). Over time everything smoothened out and really worked nicely (except for API Gateway though). Nowadays we have everything in Terraform and Serverless templates, which really makes your life easier if you're going to build your complete infrastructure on top of AWS Lambda and other AWS APIs. There are still a bunch of quarks you have to work with, but at the end of the line: it works and you don't have to worry much about scaling.

I'm not allowed to give you any numbers; here's an old blogpost about Sketch Cloud: https://awkward.co/blog/building-sketch-cloud-without-server... (however, this isn't accurate anymore). For this use-case, concurrent executions for image uploads is a big deal (a regular Sketch document can easily exist out of 100 images). But basically the complete API runs on Lambda.

Running other languages on Lambda can be easily done and can be pretty fast, because you simply use node to spawn a process (Serverless has lots of examples of that).

Let me know if you have any specific questions :-)

Hope this helps.

Hey hackers, I’m David from Awkward, the company that created Beam. Happy to answer any questions and please post any feedback you have.

Happy redditting ;-)

Sorry to hear. I think it's admiring to see how you tried to build a product, but lack of selling/marketing always creates a bump in the road to a successful product.

We're currently using Slack. It supports both IRC and XMPP, has a webinterface and bouncers. It also gives you more detailed stats about the users, has integrations with other services and so on: https://slack.com/r/024fus8f-02566qu1 (shameless referral link.. k, thx, bye).

Hehe, awesome :P Thanks for the post.

Aw man, awesome stuff. Searching, revisions... those things are really helpful.

I'm still hoping that POST notifications / webhooks will be introduced soon. That will definitely make the web a better place.

Wow, this is really helpful. I think we will definitely use Recurly (as it is the only service, that doesn't look like crap).

Apparently FlowApp uses Recurly too. So it is possible to make this look nice :)

I understand that it's a hard thing to do and it might not be as interesting as the US market. But what is interesting is that the payment/bank industry is far behind on what people want. You guys, Stripe and BankSimple are a good example of changing that.

Obviously there are a lot of people that seriously want to make this happen. So isn't there a way to help you make this work and organize something to gather information about these subjects per country?

But what is so difficult to make it available in Europe? I don't really grasp what the problems are. And is there any way we Europeans can help, besides saying that we want to use your service.

I'm not an US citizen. I guess that you need a social security number and be an American citizen to open a bank account in the US.

Is it actually possible to start a subsidiary as an European citizen?

It's hard to find out what other startups (from Europe) use for billing. Can anyone give any examples?

I understand that the rules are different and that most of the banks here are probably old-fashion, but isn't there a way to work around al those problems?

See the code at https://github.com/davidvanleeuwen/Anatomy-Pro-Am

This has been a long and busy day. I've received a lot of comments, both positive and negative. I'm not sure what to do with all of these comments.

I saw a lot of questions about where I got my inspiration. Someone built something similar at the Node.JS knockout: http://tinyurl.com/2ch3nes. I started experimenting with PusherApp and NodeJS (I've worked with ape-project.org before doing this). Later on, I attended a developer meeting (http://rotterdamphp.tumblr.com) and they talked about Node.JS and CouchDB. At that same meeting someone pointed out Jeff Kreefmeijer's work and that I'm not the first one to build something like this. But I didn't care and kept on building (because it doesn't matter to me if I'm the first to build it). If you're curious on how I've build this, then you should check out my twitter (@davidvanleeuwen) tomorrow, because I'll submit it on github and will post the link there.

Not yet. I was planning to put it up on the Steam community first and sending and e-mail later on to Valve (and Gabe himself of course).

I'll wait until the (HN) storm has passed first.

But if you could help me out, that will be great. Thanks!

Please use www.davidvanleeuwen.nl and not just davidvanleeuwen.nl - it's a little bug

Never heard of it. But it actually does use the same technique (I use flash as fallback for browsers that doesn't support websockets... well actually, Socket.IO does it all <- love it).

Actually, someone recommended Jeff Kreeftmeijer's work, when I was working on this (an old colleague). I liked the way he did this, so yes... his work was very inspiring.

But most of my inspiration on how to do this came from the Node.JS knockout. Those guys are really awesome.

I'm also working on something similar for a while now, check http://screenr.com/DDk

I used Node.JS, ExpressJS, Socket.IO and CouchDB (I should have used redis actually, but these things were familiar to me). I'm not trying to prove this is the newest, most greatest thing. I'm trying to get an internship at Valve.

Hi guys. Thank you all for supporting me. I'm just reading all of this, because I've been at a meeting for a couple of hours. Server is up again, but I wasn't expecting it to be this huge. I'll make some changes, so please don't blame me if it's down.

I'm just another Dutch student trying his best to graduate. And yes, I did let a few people check the site before I launched it (not only Dutch people). Still, my English isn't the best and thank you guys for pointing that out. I'll change it as soon as possible.

I'll give all comments a closer look soon. Again, I didn't really expect this (otherwise I'll optimized it first and put it on a CDN and stuff). I'll also get into details (specs, technical details etc).

And again, thank you all :-)

Lol, I didn't expect to have so many people on this site. I think the server is going to need a vacation soon.

FF 3.6 (on windows) needs javascript and flash. So that could be the problem. Maybe you could try Chrome/Safari instead.

And the server is having a busy day, because of all of you guys :D Sometimes it resets all connections, not sure why yet.

Leaderboards, progress, achievements... it should all be there.

I'll contact you if I'll be an intern at Valve! Thanks :D

I'm really not sure what kind of data I can use for all the statistics (not sure what kind of data they collect from everyone, except your status and achievements). But I'm hoping to make it somewhat more personal, so you could share it with your friends and stuff.

But I sure can use some help on what kind of data is interesting.

It's something like the 'facebook like' button, but it's more like an experiment for my graduation. I want to become an intern at Valve, that's why I've made this website.

If you have any feedback, please let me now :) Thanks!

Please help me out here guys! Thanks :-)

Btw: you can donate your finger as well on iOS4.2