mildavw

I worked on a cruise ship as an entertainer and can confirm this. Except for the gun part. We had lifeboat assignments and had drills each cycle before the passengers arrived. We were trained on getting people in, not what to do once in the water.

I love Weebly for quick and dirty sites that I can hand off to a non-techie to fill in the content.

For example: http://mhsp75th.weebly.com

It's very fast to get something decent looking that has forms (and easy access to the data) and payments and layouts for desktop and mobile.

I live, and bike commute year round, in a bike-friendly city (Portland, OR). I don't attribute my pleasant ride to bike infrastructure but rather to the work the city did in the late 60's to fight urban sprawl with a thing called the "urban growth boundary." It stopped farmland around the city from being turned into subdivisions which forced people to fill in and maintain the older neighborhoods close to downtown. My 5 mile commute to downtown is through quiet, nice neighborhood streets, no special bike infrastructure needed.

Note that Portland is investing in bike infrastructure now, and it makes certain crossings easier, but I think the bikers came first, not the infrastructure.

Cucumber is part of our workflow and, although I don't have a control for this comparison, I think it makes us more efficient. Our product owners write in Gherkin (non-technical != illiterate btw) and can essentially throw the feature files over the wall and any dev can pick it up and get to work. Now, there is conversation around every feature but sometimes only at estimation time.

Our POs also use git (non-technical != vcs illiterate) so we have a history of who wrote/modified what spec when.

Also, we have an additional simple layer of abstraction between feature steps and the actual tests. Most of our step definitions are three line methods that make calls to a ui driver that knows the details of our ui; or to a "given" driver that knows the details of our database/models. This ensures that there is only one place where anyone will implement, say, a user logging in.

  Given(/^I am a logged in user$/) do
    given.a_logged_in_user
  end

while elsewhere there might be

  Given(/^I have signed in$/) do
     given.a_logged_in_user
  end

If the log in process changes, we just edit the given driver.

We generally only write golden path features. Edge cases are handled with lower level testing.

Our feature files stick to specifying business value rather than ui implementation. For example, we don't do this:

  Given I visit the homepage
  When I enter "children's bikes" in the search field
  And I hit the submit button
  Then I am on the results page
  And I see a fieldset with a legend "Children's Bikes"
  And I see a table containing "Huffy Sprite"

We would write it like:

  Given I search for a specific product category
  Then I see the search term I used
  And the results of the search

When a dev needs to work on an app they haven't touched in 6 months, it's nice for them to read feature files like this to get up to speed on what the app is actually supposed to do. Then can then dig into the ui and given drivers to see how it does it.

There is additional infrastructure and PO training involved, but overall, I'd say cucumber improves clarity and communication on our team.

Here's one for free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6203196

I don't have it in front of me, but I recall the fine print on my policy stating that if they cover you, they will only bring your income up to 60% of your salary. If you are receiving other benefits, like social security disability, they subtract that from the payout.

It's inevitable that the rich/powerful will use it against each other too. I guarantee that because of Snowden's actions, the next presidential election will see campaigns treating electronic communication as untrustworthy and will have new strategies/policies for communicating sensitive information. Accusations of illegal snooping will be made to sway public opinion.

Eventually, someone will actually get caught with their hand in the NSA's cookie jar.

Once you have the endpoints, you can return any data you can get your hands on; map with route, transit options, bike paths, turn-by-turn, etc.

And yes, instead of generic directions "From I-5: take exit 999..." you can have a link that gives specific directions from where the view actually is.

Here's an idea that has been on my list for years that is doable in a short time but I just haven't gotten around to it:

Build a URL shortener for directions to physical addresses. Huh?

1) get a domain, say http://right.to (I'll give that to you if you build this)

2) Users can register a nickname and location:

daves_house

123 Main St, City CA, 90210

3) When someone requests http://right.to/daves_house the page uses HTML5 to get the requestor's location and responds with a map with a route (and turn by turn directions if you wish) from where the requestor is at that moment, to the address that is registered. The directions come from Google or Bing maps or any other open directions API that your back-end fetches.

The value is that I (your customer) will have a URL that I can always give to people for directions to my house or business no matter where they are.

Bonus points: A phone app that sends SMS or email messages containing the URL http://right.to/p/xxxxx.yyyyy where xxxxx and yyyyy are not previously registered nicknames but rather encoded lat/long of the sender. Huh?

1) I launch the app on my phone. It gets my GPS coordinates and creates the encoded xxxxx, yyyyy. It opens my SMS interface with a pre-populated message: "I'm right here: http://right.co/p/xxxxx.yyyyy"

2) I enter the recipients for the text and hit send.

3) Each recipient, when they click on the link, gets located through their browser and shown directions from wherever they are, to wherever I am.

value: With a few clicks I just sent a bunch of people directions from them to me without knowing where I am, or where they are. Or maybe I tweeted that. Every viewer gets a custom route right to me.

This idea was inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093261 wherein I discovered that an app I wanted to build already existed, so I tweaked it a little (directions instead of just locations).

*edits for spelling and formatting

Hospice - helping people navigate their own impending death gave me some perspective. I did it for a few years in my early 30s and had both elderly patients and some younger than I. Pretty intense but the training was great, I was highly valued by the patients and their families, and it really made me think about not wasting the time I have on the planet, however long that should last.

I was a musician at the time and, like you, thought, "I should do something with my days since I have so much free time."

I would skip the auto-validation and let the user hit the always-enabled "Confirm Donation of $xx" button to validate the form. Tried and true and catches the auto-fill cases.

My first one was $12 piece of melamine sitting on a cheap desk and 4 monitor boxes. And yeah, it wasn't much different than the version I have now. I leave mine up, but others, who move them up and down, do appreciate the electric motors.

I've been standing all day for three years. It takes a few months to get your legs used to it. Our office has 20 of these:

http://www.ergodepot.com/Ergo_Depot_adjustable_desk_AD127HD_...

There are a few exercise balls and aerons around that people occasionally use. I have a footstool that I rest one leg on as I lean forward on the desk. The other footstool is for pairing with a developer who is much shorter:

http://pimen.to/office-desk.JPG

Congrats! We built contractor finders for several cities/states as contract work. E.g. https://energyupgradeca.org/county/los_angeles/vendors#h-v=2... This is not our focus so we haven't pursued more like this, but I wanted to give you a heads up for potential partnerships. Governments like to put construction workers to work, especially doing environmentally friendly stuff.

I have a weekend project that is in "private beta" (still a few weekends from launch) that combines computer generated art and one-off T-shirts. I've been working with http://printaura.com/.

I like the idea of coding up adapters so we can switch fulfillment providers if we needed to.

I've worked 40-50 hours/week at an adjustable stand-up desk for three years now. No chair. I rarely move the desk from it's highest setting. I do get tired on a rare occasion and sit in a recliner with my laptop on my lap.

At age 32 I sold those that had still had any resale value. Recycled most of the rest, and hung on to three with nostalgic value.

Lately, we've been using the incredibly poorly named Ruby ORM Sequel.

Since, in our office, SQL rhymes with "equal," Sequel rhymes with either "seek well" or "neck will".

Oi.

Agreed. It depends a lot on the team and the project. Our team of six devs had stand-ups every 90 minutes all day every day for 9 months when were all touching the same app. It was appropriate and we got a lot done. When the nature of our work changed, we switched back to a daily stand-up.

We hired a guy who had recently finished 7 years in the clink. After he got out he was freelancing in a shared office space. Worked with other devs there whom we hired or knew. They vouched for him.

He's a great dev, good friend, recently finished a PhD while working full time for us. We'd have been stupid not to hire him for the mistake he made a decade ago.

Don't hide your record.

Network and you get work.

Cool! Are you printing and shipping these yourself or do you have a fulfillment partner/service?

Interesting. Thanks for the detailed response. I guess I can always naively assert that traders would figure out how to manage that bit of risk (that more of their trades would execute than they really wanted) but your explanation makes sense. Fastest order wins and, yes, that is arbitrary. Imperfect, but it keeps the market relatively efficient.

Yes, I am admittedly absolutely naive to the inner workings of the market.

So what would happen in the press conference case? You would make your move based on the news knowing that sometime in the next 10 minutes it would be executed. No one else has any advantage so they can't necessarily get it done quicker. The value of short term moves is reduced, so everyone plays with a longer view.

To make shenangins more obvious, what if 1 minute were the maximum resolution that any trade could happen? Say, every order gets a random number of seconds between 0 and 60 added to it before it is executed. Or even longer. What would happen if everyone gets 10 minutes to digest any news?

Survey: Do you depend on RubyGems for every deploy? Or do you have your own gem server? Or cache them at some point earlier in your pipeline?

We rely on RubyGems and had a meeting yesterday about changing that when one of the gems we use had a version just disappear.

I'm surprised too. It's baffling that none of the big boxes are competitive online yet.

So Amazon will take out Wal-Mart?

Not without a fight! I know a couple of developers who recently signed on with Wal-Mart.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-29/why-wal-mart...

I'm not joking, but my point is lost in some confusion, so I'll add this caveat:

If your audience does shop at Walmart, or knows people who do, then pointing out Walmart's jaw dropping numbers will not be a good device for illuminating the importance of market validation. In fact it could encourage them carry on with the potentially mistaken assumption that the entire planet's needs/problems are the same as their own.

It depends on your audience of course. I probably wouldn't point that out in rural areas, where Walmart has more penetration.