Before bootstrap and the like came along, all of us developers were creating web apps just as we do now. They just looked like crap! The CSS frameworks have evolved everything form "ugly" to "boring" which I guess is somewhat of an improvement!
3,343 karma · joined September 12, 2011
Unlike this is the ticking time bomb you have on your back the moment you take on investment. It's now do-or-die and when the money runs out you pretty much have no choice but to liquidate - often the decision isn't even yours to make.
This article mainly applies only to the later. It is exciting when you get a big investor check but it's not the only way. I always encourage friends to think about investments that way - rather than just a free bag of cash!
I write it off a lot of times as social awkwardness - which sometimes comes off as rudeness.
I'd guess if you are jaded it's either that you need to find another company, or perhaps you're in this business for the wrong reasons. Perhaps you were lured by the idea of big salaries or huge IPO payouts that haven't happened? Perhaps the exciting portrayal in movies like the Facebook, etc.
Whatever the case every career has its ups and downs, but getting jaded should not just be accepted as an inevitable fact.
Simply being prepared for emergencies is certainly not crazy. Saving money for an employment emergency seems like the most real threat to most of us. But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.
Once you have that in your pocket you'll be ready to try any of the new js frameworks that are being mentioned here.
I've got old PDAs laying around and when you use them, it can be maddening how slow they are compared to our current expectations. But they do often have some interesting feature that is missing on our modern smartphones. It's fun to play around with them, but when it's time to get to work I put them away.
The other expenses appear to be various other services (slack, support site, logging service, etc). Lot's of 3rd part services to handle stuff.
Obviously it's a lot cheaper if you can do many of these things yourself (run your own support web app, use a free chat service, etc, etc). But we all have to decide what services we want to pay for vs run ourselves - in some cases it is cheaper to not have to spend the time!
Or for some people who worked hard to get up from minimum wage to get to $10/hour. They are now, in a way, demoted back to making minimum wage!
It seems short-sighted and aimed only at huge payouts for the early investors- no consideration or thought of building a brand that people will love 50 years from now. They want their payout NOW!
The bigger surprise to me is that investors would want to fund a dating site - period. The dating site business is somewhat known for being hard to attract investors because of their churn problem due to losing two customers whenever there is a successful match.
It seemed like it was done originally by somebody with bad UX skills - or else it was intentional to piss off older people and let the kids have their own thing..?!
I don't know anything about chargify but even stripe will negotiate with you if you reach a certain volume. Once you start paying tens or hundreds of thousands in fees, those percentage point fractions become a big deal!
If they did do webhooks then you could write one that sent out SMSs though - leave them to do the hard part while cutting them out of the loop!
Also I think it's push notifications, not SMS.
We're also trained as programmers not to reinvent wheels poorly. Or not install a library to do something that is already supported by an existing library you're already using. When you need to do something like, say, open a new browser window, it's not that surprising to find a lot of posts about how to do it with jquery.
I don't find it always bad. As long as you understand that you are using a library, it's ok to go searching for its edges.
As far as a "real" assistant goes, it can be easy to find one if you live in a city with craigslist. You can find someone to hire hourly once in a while, or bring them on full/part time with a salary if you have the means. The payment range is minimum wage up to whatever you want to pay. Whether you want something official where you run payroll, provide health insurance and everything, or just pay someone under the table - there's pretty much going to be a long list of people who will want you to hire them. I've taken out ads before and gotten over 200 responses (Chicago area). When you become directly responsible for other people's financial livelihood it can really change how you think about employment and life in general.
One methodology that I employ is "visibility-based development" where we will save up some super easy tasks that may have a big visual impact. When we need a sprint or two to get some boring clean-up work done, we'll throw in a few of those easy tasks with it. We've had some releases that look like a big, major release but in reality we only spent 1/2 a day on the features that seem big. The rest of the time was under the hood cleanup.
In some cases it's not simply your customers that require the illusion, but the management team as well. If you have a management team that gets uneasy if they don't see new features happening with every release, I highly recommend using this technique.
I certainly would not say that we "strive" to make any feature go away. In some cases, though, a certain feature can actually prevent us from implementing new functionality. It's always a tough decision. We don't want to leave any customers behind, but at the same time we don't want a small minority of customers preventing us from moving forward either.
I don't think these kind of decisions should be left up to a lone developer to make on their own. The developers, sales, support, management and everybody should be working together to understand our customers and what our mission is. It's not easy.
Like I said, I don't really know much about Sails. I was just interested in the idea that ~10 commits per month would be insinuated to be an abandoned project.
I guess we are in a time where our tools are expected to significantly change frequently? It seems like I have a disconnect with this mentality as we're running products where stability (reliability as well as API stability) and solid documentation are more important than constant innovation. I like to see bug fixes or security patches addressed quickly, and perhaps a branch for the next major version. But if there's no major issues then I really don't need to see hundreds of commits happening every month on the current branch.
I don't know, perhaps sails is riddled with unfixed bugs? If not though, judging a project on the number of commits seems somewhat like judging it based on lines of code. Neither of those metrics necessarily indicate quality.
Personally I have never really given moss that much thought, it's just something that is around like grass or dirt. Some people are into watching birds, others find that boring. Moss doesn't seem that interesting to me but I'm sure it can be fascinating if you get into it.