johnorourke

Nice idea, but seems to lack timezone awareness, which puts me off completely.

Maybe that's being developed, but the American date format with no timezone being described as "English textual" (say what?!) seems to be ignoring all the standards for date and time (eg. RFC3339[1]), yet other parts of the docs clearly show awareness of RFCs!

If you're pushing events to people, presumably you know exactly when they're going to happen, but with this API you're saying "here's an event, just pick your own timezone!"

Nice idea though, it'll be interesting to see how it develops.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339

It sounds like you have a specific case of this which caused some problems, what was it?

Airbase.

We have not done poorly. Atall. "no-code" is a whole movement now - it's the modern day COBOL. See: * Airbase (imagine circa 1998 Microsoft Access but on the web and with integrations) * Infinityapp.com * Monday.com (easily recreate your business processes and types of data, and integrate with other systems) * Asana * ....dozens more.

Then add the universal integration tools: * IFTTT * Zapier * Tray * ...and many more

Basically we're now "post-app"... a non-technical user can go to a SaaS product, follow a tutorial, create something representing their business, and link it to other best-in-class products for accounting, warehousing, shipping, e-commerce, etc.

Don't be ashamed. We've a long way to go for sure, but we've come a long way, baby.

+1 for jq. It is so useful for mucking about with API responses. I used it to write a bash script that acts as a NAGIOS plugin for spotting changes in our Digital Ocean server and DNS configs - curl to pull from the API, jq to strip out the bits we don't care for, and sed to put actual newlines in instead of \n. We had Cisco as a customer, and infrastructure change-monitoring was one of their infosec team's requirements... that was part of our solution.

> I think ultimately it comes down to how one implements their GTD system

In "Perfect Time-Based Productivity"[1], Francis Wade pulls this idea apart and discusses how you can create a system that is suited to the time-demands you currently have. eg. the system a CEO with days full of meetings needs is different to the postal worker whose time demands are fairly clear and dictated by someone else. The real gold in this book though, is about how you need a "trusted system" - ie. we all have multiple channels (work email, IMs, personal email, phone(s), family, colleagues, ...) creating demands on our time, and we each need a system suited to our own mind and our own siutation for remembering and organising those demands, which nobody else has permission to add to.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23600431-perfect-time-ba...

I do like this. Premature optimisation and over-eager application of DRY / SOLID are problems in software - sure, if you had 20 types of cookie all following the same recipe, abstract it. In his old codinghorror blog, Jeff Atwood suggested the rule of 3 times - the second time you do something, make a mental note, and only on the third time, generalise it.

My usual view of recipes is poor - I always see them being something like this: 1. blophicate the chicken for 5 minutes or until soft (I made up that word but you should be a good enough cook to have some idea what it means) 2. coat with a paste made from the garlic, herbs and butter (you did know you should've made that earlier, right?) 3. now add them to the fat you've been heating up for the past ten minutes (come on, surely you had that ready?) 4. serve on a bed of hand-soaked cous cous, which you prepared yesterday using this mini recipe: 4a. ...

Business processes have everything to do with architecture. You've said it yourself:

"Data comes from some place and then gets processed and displayed or consumed."

If you don't factor in who that data comes from and why, and who's consuming it and why, then you don't have all the information you need to be a good architect.

There are better ways than iframing for test/dev - eg. Fiddler, Selenium

Magento2 discussion on this, including a contributed module to work around it by overriding the built in cookie management: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/26377

"Show me the way to Arm Morello, tralala la la la la la..."

Whatever you do, don't end up spending 6 months building something and miss out on 6 months of comission-free sales.

Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time be better spent on increasing sales?

(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to tinker with?)

There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product run by a few developers.

[1] https://freewebstore.com/

This is novel and interesting, and could be used on a micro scale (say a group of friends who regularly split dinner bills) or macro. How would you solve the issue of losing data and nodes (through corruption, hardware failure, etc), or people being offline? I suspect if it grew, people would offer "hosted nodes", where they keep your data and stay online for transactions 24x7, in return for taking that transaction fee... so, like a bank!

Shout out for simplesamlphp, which confusingly comes as two projects: simplesamlephp/simplesamlphp (a full web application which can implement SP or IdP), and simplesamlephp/saml2, a library of components for parsing and building SAML messages. I just used the library, which meant building a lot of the logic around what to actually do with the messages, but once you've learned the protocol inside out, it's easy to use ( as ever, the code IS the documentation!) but has a few limitations - because it was built to support a specific application. One very handy feature (relating to others' commenting about SPs that can't parse metadata) is the metadata parsing.

You were probably talking to the wrong person: either through research or chat you need to ensure you are talking to someone who has the authority to pay you.

Also hidden in your text is "perhaps even written custom code"... could it be that they got what they actually wanted from you and no longer need you?

Finally - sorry if this sounds harsh - if you've exchanged 75 emails and not made a sale, you need to learn to sell better.

Read "Demonstrating to win" (cheesy title but absolute gold for enterprise solution sales), and "Start with No" by Jim Camp (fantastically logical and easy to use way of negotiating that will appeal to techies)

Good luck!

Don't learn sales, learn people. Reading recs: * the social triggers podcasts by Derek Halpern * Start with No by Jim Camp * Demonstrating to Win (super cheesy title but amazing content)

People have asssumed you're asking "what PM app do you recommend" but you're not - you're asking if engineering managers use one to drive daily activity. Good question :)

Every business works differently, so all PM apps in their default config will match 80% of what you need, for 80% of businesses.

If a manager implements an app without customising it to the business, users will be frustrated, directionless and end up hating the app - see user comments in this thread!

Bespoking it to the business allows users to do their jobs with minimal interaction AND WITHOUT MICROMANAGEMENT.

Finally, without management buy-in (that's you!), without you actually using the inputs and outputs of it, it will fail - lead by example.

Hope this helps :)

Have you done any research before posting? Read up on LEAN manufacturing, Kanban, and how it evolved into the methods you use today that you think are "new" :)

AREAS -------- Software Quality or Fintech. Don't waste a good team on something like a Kale Smoothie Delivery Service For Beardy Hipsters. Software Quality is a huge, growing issue - we have more and more young/new coders arriving, massively increasing demand for code, and yet no government enforced standards (such as those found in Law, Architecture and Accounting). The industry is suffering the exact same issues that Fred Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, despite all our modern frameworks and IDEs, because we're just doing more stuff with fewer people. Starting points: The Open Group (and TOGAF), ITIL, MinistryofTesting.com

INSPIRATION ------ Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and Grow Rich if you haven't already)

FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS --------------- Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The Lean Startup'

I can't believe there are only 3 Cal Newport mentions in the comments so far!

SMS Backup (Android app) - literally "just works"

Fantastic, a real piece of history! I had the pleasure of a long video chat with "Cap'n Crunch" a while back... the guy has so many quality stories that I sincerely hope he is busy writing an autobiography. I was a wee lad while all the real phreaking fun went on but reading the stories in Hugo Cornwall's "Hackers Handbook" (after it was un-banned by the local library) piqued my interest and pretty soon I was trying to hook up my BBC Micro to an old 300 baud modem and connecting to an X25 PAD at the local university... fun times. I mean f.......u........n........t.......i......+++ATH0 "damn!" re-dial....

Business is hard. Anything of value takes effort and time. Read "The Lean Startup" and "The 4 hour work week". And whatever you do, don't build a website - a website is not a business. Start with eBay, then try something like Shopify once things get better, and spend your money testing ideas and assumptions.

Read "Peopleware". Seriously, every page was written with you in mind.

Next, if you (as developers naturally do) struggle with the idea of management, structure and order, read "The E-Myth Revisited".

Peopleware TL;DR: Good teams are united by a strongly defined purpose (eg. get X defined and tests written by date X), and that is almost NEVER the same as the goals of the business (which is to make money). Don't create internal competition; overtime kills productivity; physical/mental space allows creativity; interruptions are deadly.

The E-Myth TL;DR: Aimed at small business owners, but as a team lead you're effectively running a business, and the rest of the company is your customer. It's a mere 5 hour read... JFDI :)

And if you're feeling really bookish, "The Mythical Man Month" - if you're under 50 this will shock you, because you'll realise that software in 1970 had the exact same problems that we do in 2015.

Here's a different thought for you: owning the software, and being able to sell it and make money, are very different. It requires sales and business skills, money to allow for all that, plus time supporting and installing it. What a shame it would be for you to own 100% of nothing - wouldn't you prefer a small % of something?

Your current employer is already geared up for that. Why not talk to your manager, explain what you have done, and say that you'd like to have some recognition that you've put your spare time into it, but want the company to be able to sell it.

Value is in the ability to deliver intellectual work, not in the work itself, and delivery takes a whole team of different skills.

I work on small projects (from $5k to $50k) and have no formal contracts. My thinking is that:

- the client can afford more expensive lawyers than I can, so regardless of the truth they would be able to wipe me out

- if the client has to read the detail of the contract, it's probably too late to save the relationship anyway

- maintaining the relationship is everything, being honest and open and striving to maintain a service that is genuinely useful to the client, even if you're not always perfect.

I do have a contract with one client but any questions about it have been about the 'spirit' of it, not the detail.

Pricing is everything: if you're too cheap, you'll struggle to deliver and will not meet expectations. Too much, and you'll lose out to your competitors.

Developers could learn from this. I've a few grey hairs, many caused by late nights coding, and I now run a dev team. I wonder if we could really learn from this - for example, looking at the 3rd video in the youtube playlist from the article, looking at the criteria they judge each other on, let's see how transferable they are:

- minimal movement: using clear, concise code, or few commands, to solve a problem

- lack of repeated actions: exactly that. Why did I just look at that same log file 5 times?

- confident use of tools: do I have a set of tools (IDEs, editors, commands) I know intimately?

- awkwardness of actions: can I think several steps ahead in the problem and bring things into line to form the solution?

And so on. This is a raw, unrefined thought and I hope it gets thoroughly pulled apart in any replies.

Simpsons already did it. Well OK, @sanchothefat already did a similar thing using Processing.js over at http://hascanvas.com - bit old now but he had plenty of interesting user contributions over the years.

[humor] tl;dr? Cartoon version here: http://brawlinthefamily.keenspot.com/2012/04/11/400-the-hist...

Me. No-remote, all-round LAMP dev, in Burnley, UK. 30-35K GBP/year.

(Burnley is just north of Manchester, UK, and has a small but growing digital sector)

I run a small E-commerce focused software agency and have grown organically over the past few years. I need a full time no. 2 to boost my existing freelance team after 3 years of growth.

Platform users range from banks and airlines to small shops, and projects range from repairs to support to new builds.

Languages range from PHP to Perl to C#, platforms from Magento to Wordpress to custom built systems.

You'll be given long periods of uninterrupted focused time, while I handle tech support.

Full details and application test here:

http://www.getjohn.co.uk/dev-ops-job-lancashire-north-west/

(please don't post test spoilers - I'm happy to receive queries by email to john at getjohn dot co dot uk!)