madewulf

Very interesting, thanks !

This project has been inspired by a Hacks/Hackers meeting in Brussels. After the meeting, I looked after interesting data sets and found out that it was not easy to find population pyramids for every country in the world, while the needed data was available on one UN website.

There a lots of interesting points to see in there :

- one can easily spot the future public retirement plans problem in Europe (with more and more elderly people ). See here for example : http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Belgium&year=2050

- I am still wondering what is happening in countries like Qatar in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Qatar&year=2010) How come there are so many more men than women ?

- Near 1950 in Europe, you can spot the "dent" made by WW2 in the population, plus the baby boom. Example : http://populationpyramid.net/?country=France&year=1950

- It is already interesting to compare the shape of the pyramid for countries like Afghanistan in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Afghanistan&year=2...) VS the US in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=United_States_of_Ameri...). One can easily see the difference in development, to say the least.

And so on...

There is a site for that: http://mytechne.com/

You will also be able to say something nice about your Operating Systems and Text Editors.

I can agree with the definition of the problem, but I am not convinced that you can find a technical solution to it.

Currently the only information on the site is : "Skills is a tool for identifying expertise and passion in developers."

I honestly doubt you can do that in an automated way, but hey, we'll see.

I would totally disagree with you on that. If you use only the IOC controller for injecting your classes, maybe, Spring is not bloated, but also, its usefulness is not that great. But as soon as you begin to enter the wonderful spring-mvc world (which is the standard way to handle web apps using Spring), bloat is all around.

Take a look for example at the family of spring MVC controllers (http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/spr...) : before doing any development, should you have to study such a family to know which controller should fit everyone of your use cases ? That, for me is the very definition of bloat.

Furthermore, the documentation is terrible, IMHO. That said, I have been spoiled by months of Django development, maybe it is not that bad according to Java Standards.

More generally, the main problem with Java is the emphasis on architecture astronautism, not the language itself, which is ok, if not very powerful (no function as first class objects, really ? ).

The problem with frameworks like Play, or Symfony in PHP world is that they only play catchup to frameworks like ROR and Django and since they started way later, they still lack the polish.

As long as it costs money and is not open source, this will never become hip amongst the cool guys.

If I get it right, the main advantage of this is over google calendar is that you tag events and then see piecharts describing how you time was spent. If I am right, I would strongly advise to talk about the charts in the video, since the video is not that readable and is not putting the emphasis on this.

I saw your application last week and I did not understand at the time what was the point over Google calendar.

Processing in java is a really nice project and it would be really nice to be able to run processing visualization in the browser without having to run java applets, but the current lack of support for Internet Explorer (I do not know if it would even be possible to realize, BTW) is really preventing me to invest too much time in it. I have been using Raphael.js instead.

I think that you are right about the fact that kids will not stumble into programming if they are not searching for it.

On the other hand, they have lots of reasons to search about programming (think of the mandatory techie present in most TV shows) and there are really nice tools to learn these days. I am thinking for example of Scratch, an MIT project devoted to learn programming to kids http://scratch.mit.edu/.

So resources are there and there are lots of spark that could ignite kids interest into programming but the real problem, I think, is not availability or interest, but the availability of "funnier" and "easier" things to do on a computer : social networks, downpour of games (when I was a kid, getting 2 games a year was a tremendous boon. Today, my nephew has access to more games than he could ever dream to play).

This has been in fact described quite well by PG in his essay : The acceleration of addictiveness http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

Great article from an experienced guy. My two favourite advices :

- "No project is ever simple" : when somebody asks you to solve a simple problem, it really often turns out to be bigger than foreseen.

- "Set a duration of how long you think it should take to solve a problem" : do not spend too much time thinking alone on a problem before searching for help, either on internet or by your colleagues/peers.

It does not change the point that they want to keep their talented staff at the lowest possible price....

IMHO, and in my region (Belgium), this is completely unrealistic. In most companies, the goal is to keep you happy with the lowest possible salary. Consequently, you have to ask for raises, and see it as a negotiation. The error would be to think that management has your best interest at heart. They don't, they have the business best interest at heart, which is only normal.

For me, you usually don't earn what you deserve, but what you negotiated.

Then it is really interesting. I have a few possible use cases in mind :

- we are hosting a little software load balancer for web services and it definitely does not need more than that

- thanks to the web service api of Amazon, it is relatively easy to set automated recovery plans, and the idea is very attractive, but until now I was detterred by the price.

- for small web applications with low bandwith, the price is good. For reserved instances, for one year, you pay 54$ up front, then 87.6$ for usage for the whole year, for a total of 141.6. That's a lot less than renting a server at linode.com for a year (~220$).

It seems there is no local storage included in the price.

I did not try, but that probably means complicated settings, which is a pity, since while the price could probably appeal to people launching side projects at minimal costs, like me, being a side project also means that not much time can be devoted to sysadminery.

I really like the fact that you did not try to create yet another social network and just exploited the existing social graph of twitter to make the connections. I totally agree with thehodge about the fact that a natural extension would be to use also the facebook social graph to offer a beter ux.

That said, the site seems a bit too dependent on twitter. I just added an "unlinked person", meaning somebody without twitter account and it seems impossible to add a picture or an url for those persons.

The UI is very nice, except maybe for the intrusive tag at the top left. It is too big IMHO

Finally, as this is a "startup review", is assume you wish to make money with this. Do you plan to do it with referees fees from Amazon for the sales of book ?