glennericksen

New York, NY (full-time, RoR dev, designer)

FaithStreet (http://www.FaithStreet.com) is a social outreach and member engagement platform for religious communities. Over 11,000 communities have joined in the last 6 months. The problems we're solving are ancient and ready for innovation.

* Full-stack Ruby Engineer: You should possess equal parts talent and determination. You’re a “maker” and a generalist, stoked to execute product vision. Front-end, back-end, you take big problems and turn them into code.

* Designer/Front-end Dev: This isn't an opportunity to just make things pretty or make pretty things (although we'd like some of that too!). Help us think through ways communities can reach and engage members.

Visit http://www.faithstreet.com/jobs or contact jobs@faithstreet.com

In Brooklyn?! o_0

We definitely want to be part of the process for as many people as we can. Pack. Move. Unpack. FaithStreet. Well... something like that.

While we have a huge amount of information regarding churches across the US, only churches that actively manage their profiles are listed in the search results. We've found this results in more useful information for someone looking for a church and provides a better overall look-and-feel.

To join FaithStreet, churches can either claim a pre-made page or add their information Here's an example of what Victory's unclaimed page looks like: http://www.faithstreet.com/church/victory-world-church-norcr...

We use a combination of geospatial features from our database (MongoDB) and linear algebra to compute the distances on a coordinate grid. Admittedly this isn't a flawless approach, and cases like yours reveal some of the weaknesses. Certainly open to suggestions on a better way :)

With regards to ordering of results, it is mostly by distance, with some outliers. Definitely an area we are working on improving.

Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks! Glad to have different viewpoints and still be excited about tech in new places.

I'm pretty sure even the YC application asks you to a describe a time you hacked a non-computer system. Seems reasonable to extrapolate that not all hacking involves "coding", but bending/manipulating/breaking(?) systems to accomplish your goal (in this case, growth) and maximize your return. No reason to disqualify SEO.

Do people burn books online? Is there a correlative action to tossing vilified literature in the fire? The attitude characterized by McCarthy's response to Slaughterhouse-Five retreats from reality to the ideal. As media channels have diversified and the input streams exponentially increased, can I burn something by choosing not to consume it? Obviously we cannot take in everything, but I think the filter bubble, both imposed and self-manufactured, creates a sort of insularity and a disconnection from the broader human experience. If I only read what I like or relate to, it makes me less real.

I've taken a long, meandering road to appreciating TDD/BDD. When I started programming, I looked up to _why and his hacking approach to coding. Sadly, I could not express his brilliance and my code was not just untested and sloppy, but fragile and inundated with smells. As the scale of the projects I develop increases, I've learned to use testing to decrease the potential breakage and to better understand the libraries and features I'm working on. Of course there is an exploratory spike here and there, with tests coming in later to glue it all together, but those are now exceptions to my normal practice. When debugging legacy applications, simply creating test coverage for problem areas goes a long in solidifying the patches. Testing is not fail proof elixir, but it certainly improves my workflow and my product, and those results are hard to argue with.

This idea of taking guides like this and putting them on Github is really powerful and underrated. What could be a static document or perhaps a wiki, becomes a transferrable standard that can reflect the insight of the author and the conversation of the community. Also, the threat of forking means that if you don't keep up with current ethos of your subject, then somebody also can (and probably will). Well done.

For a great dev shop to give something to the community, it is an insightful gesture that speaks to their concern for their users. Rather than shuttering and issuing a 'screw you', they made the business decision to stop actively maintaining, clink beers with their customers, and give it away. How do you not respond with "cheers"?

GitHub is great because you get to use git. I don't think that you can entirely separate them from each other, or craft an argument for the advantages of GitHub without somehow mentioning git. The vulnerability in GitHub clearly matters. It was a potentially explosive issue, but GitHub issued a prompt and appropriate mea culpa, while resolving the problem. Also, it stirred the pot in the Rails community, with many coming up with safeguards against the potential mass assignment vulnerability. Although I disagree with his downplaying of the problem, I certainly don't have plans of going anywhere else, which I think is the spirit of what the author was trying to convey.