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futureminton Ask HN: What's the Purpose of Hacker News to You?

HN has a good combination of content selection and comments. I've honestly never seen such high quality commenting on articles. I generally find about half of the links on the front-page interesting, and the comments are always lucid. If the link is garbage, somebody always points out the errors in the link in an intelligent way, not an annoying way (like /.).

futureminton Apple Profiles Twitter

The only advantage I get from using OS X for development is that we can install all of the server's services on a developer's laptop alongside Photoshop and their text editor of choice.

Getting *NIX services running under windows is more difficult than on OS X. Having a uniform environment for development and the servers really helps speed development.

TextMate is pretty nice, I used to use it, but switched to Carbon Emacs (GNU Emacs) a year ago and haven't looked back since.

But outside of that, OS X has some annoying usability issues that bother me just as much as Windows, and just as much as KDE & Gnome (they're just different issues).

Any reasonably skilled developer should be able to be productive using any OS, as they should be able to customize it at will (this would be one aspect of a "reasonable skilled developer").

futureminton You got your Erlang in my Ruby

We're using Nanite on a project for delivering e-mails in the background (for now). We have bigger plans for it, but its pretty easy to get running once you get RabbitMQ going.

It has also been running really well in production, though no real load to speak of yet. However, we also run an ejabberd server which has been bullet proof, as are most erlang servers of decent maturity.

Being able to run any number of agents and have them be load balanced with Nanite out of the box, and also add and remove agents from the system flexibly and at will is great.

futureminton Poll: What proportion of start-ups/non-start-ups use automated unit tests/TDD?

We have tests for both Rails and front-end javascript. Not 100% coverage, but all of the critical code is covered. TDD is used to develop the more complicated domain specific features that we need to make sure are correct.

We also create tests to cover bugs to prevent regressions.