fbuilesv

They also have an amazing blog (http://blog.priceonomics.com/) where they showcase products and nifty stuff they do with them. They use Tumblr for this part of the site but you might as well go for Wordpress or whatever you prefer.

No matter what you choose, you want to separate both parts of your site, and the comparison engine will most likely be a custom solution (Ruby, Python, PHP, doesn't matter).

* The H1B quotas tend to get filled pretty quick, this year they were covered by July (iirc). They start accepting applications on April so try to get that done as soon as possible.

* The expedite fee is almost a "must".

* I've seen a couple of companies adding a "the candidate must be fluent in X language" where X is your native language. They use this to justify the fact that they couldn't hire somebody else. Maybe not ethical but it's something to keep in mind.

Would you care to explain why you think they're not particularly good? You're blaming DHH of being "hand wavy" but I don't see any more depth from your comment.

Although I agree with most of the other things you said, this particular paragraph is not true. Over the last couple of months (starting with http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3194-backstage-an-inside-look... I think) they've published several Basecamp projects showing how they use it. It's not only a write-up either, you can go into the actual BC project and see it's entire history.

Since I've only posted once I don't know if it had something to do with my post or if that's the common occurrence.

1. GitHub.

2. Linus himself wrote it (the kernel previously used BitKeeper but that never got any real traction AFAIK).

Having said that, I think this phrase totally nails it:

"If it's good enough for the Linux kernel, it's good enough for you" is a very convincing argument.

Heroku is a platform that takes care of all the "plumbing" for you, you do a `git push` and your application is instantly running on their servers. They take care of installing all their dependencies and you never have to worry about setting up firewalls, front-end proxies, web servers or anything like that. If you need more capacity you just move a slider and you're done.

With EC2/CE you're doing all the stuff I just described in the last paragraph by hand [0]. It's cheaper and way more flexible but they usually require you to know how all that stuff works. By the way, Heroku runs on EC2, they just abstract all the nasty details for you.

PS: Google Compute Engine is on Limited Preview right now. If you're planning to offer a service that you care about you should consider this.

[0] In theory you can get AMIs that do install all of this for you but you'll usually end up SSHing into the machines and configuring everything to whatever you need.

VPS do need a lot more work (not sure if I'd call it maintenance) than a shared host since you'll be installing everything from zero and after that you're the one in charge of making sure it stays running. But again, even that if preferable to using a shared host.

Having said that, Softlayer has a program called Softlayer Catalyst where they give you $1000/month in hosting expenses, mentoring and some other stuff. You can read more about it and apply here: http://www.softlayer.com/partners/catalyst

I'm pretty sure developers would agree to something like this and Twitter could get some extra money that they're not getting right now.

The specific problem with Grooveshark is that you sign up looking for music and what you get is a music player with a social component on top of it (that you usually weren't expecting).

Everyone can be a hugely successful rock star, programmer or writer but most of the times they're not willing to put the hours in.

The only way to determine if you "have what it takes" (it really is an awful phrase) is to keep trying and see if it sticks. Or to use another overused phrase, "fake it till you make it". This again applies to almost everything, not just programming.

Today you don't need a programmer to setup your online website with a store attached to it (and that could be 100% of your business), imagine what you will be able to achieve in a couple of years by yourself.

Twitter handle was registered, but had never tweeted and looked abandoned. I contacted a friend who works at Twitter and after a bit of investigation was able to get @learndot as well

Is this something that's easy to do? Can it be done if you don't know anyone inside Twitter? I had to settle for something like @myappnameapp instead of @myappname because the username was already taken but had never been used. I'd be interested to learn what are the Twitter policies regarding this.

1. Mixpanel vs. Kissmetrics: Mixpanel gives me a free account that I can use for as long as I want to evaluate all the stuff I can do with it. KM gives me a 14-day trial. I'm the only developer working on this project which means that 14 days is not enough time to implement the changes I need and actually start to see the results. Going with Mixpanel for this one was obvious. I will reach their free 25k data points way before the first month so I have to get a real paid plan or put a banner on my website. In any way, they won already. Even if I wanted to switch to KM for the lower prices, exporting the data I currently have would be a hassle.

2. The New Basecamp: Although they don't offer a free plan anymore, they do have a 60 days trial. They don't really lose much by offering those extra days and after two months I'm already hooked to their service, I know how everything works, and most importantly, they have my projects tied down. The work of those 2 months is already there so even if I don't like the product, I'll probably pay for it so I don't have to export it. Joel Spolsky has a great article that talks about this retention thing (his specific example was with email providers) but I can't find it right now :(

I will be be working on testing what works and what doesn't :)