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roachsocal

765 karma · joined June 18, 2009

http://scottrocher.com
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roachsocal··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2014)
Blue Bottle Coffee - http://www.bluebottlecoffee.com - Bay Area (remote OK)

You’ll be helping our growing digital team build amazing experiences for lovers of coffee around the world. We craft easy-to-use tools that allow our guests to shop for coffee and merchandise online, learn about brewing coffee at home, and share their coffee-drinking experiences with friends and followers. We also build powerful automated tools that magically help our production teams deliver fresh-roasted coffee to the right person, at the right time. We use the following technologies to make these experiences real:

● Ruby and Rails (latest versions)

● HTML, CSS, and Javascript

● Postgres

● Memcached, Redis, Resque

● Heroku, Cloudinary

Our digital product team is small and thirsty for meaningful collaboration. On a daily basis, you’ll get the chance to work with world-class engineers, designers, and product managers. We build and push new features with confidence using automated testing frameworks to verify our changes and release to production daily.

You’ll have a chance to encounter some or all of the following fun things: online consumer eCommerce experiences, automated tools for manufacturing / production / roasting, recurring billing systems, email marketing, analytics, tools for our quality control team, retail point of sale systems, and mobile applications for iOS and Android.

More details / apply here:

http://www.proven.com/jobs/view/13979

roachsocal··on VirtualBox broken on Ivy Bridge Macbooks after 10.8.2 and Firmware Update
The (annoying, but working) workaround is the following:

I imported my Vagrant-managed Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS VM into a trial copy of Parallels Desktop 8. I then logged into the VM manually using the Parallels VM window using the default Vagrant user / password (vagrant/vagrant) and changed the password for my custom Vagrantfile dev login. Then in Parallels I switched the networking on the VM to Bridge Mode (so I can access it via IP address on my local network).

Remarkably everything in the VM worked and I'm back to coding. Would like to see a quick fix for VirtualBox so I can get back to my Vagrant awesomeness.

roachsocal··on Breaking Bad Inspired 500 / 404 Error Pages
Woah, and you can actually donate. Love it.
roachsocal··on Breaking Bad Inspired 500 / 404 Error Pages
Enjoy tonight's premiere of Season 5! You can also check out the 404 page here: https://tonx.org/404.html
roachsocal··on I want to solve the uploads problem
Also check out http://cdnimag.es/ for the auto-resizer stuff.
roachsocal··on Show HN: Backyard.io - We applied to YC (W12) and need some beta users
I tried in Chrome and the SSL is green and verified (by GoDaddy).
roachsocal··on You Will Totally Work for This Start-Up
My favorite part is the subtle Blackberry notification sounds throughout the video.
roachsocal··on Image manipulation on the fly + CDN = awesome
Right now we're hosting it because it makes setup / integration time very quick. We're considering going open source for those who want to setup a box to do this yourself.

Here's an example of how we use it: We push original high resolution versions of photos/graphics to S3. Then to make a page with smaller, cropped thumbnails, it's as easy as calling for the image through Cloudfront with a special cdnimag.es url. (example integation: http://www.seewhatiwore.com/browse)

You'll notice with a site like Flickr, they generate five fixed sizes and they are locked into those sizes across their site. (example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappensuncle/183689226/sizes/l/...)

With cdnimag.es you can generate variations of the original image (sizes, crops, grayscale, reflection) on the fly without doing anything to the original. All this while still enjoying the caching and performance benefits of a CDN like Cloudfront.

roachsocal··on You need to use social services to understand them
I've worked under too many decision makers who think that placing a Like button on something is a pivotal business model move, or adding a share button will magically make content go 'viral' -- these concepts are best understood by those who practice them, not by those who create a blog or Facebook account as a point of presence.
roachsocal··on Would you leave a 6 figure job to start a company?
Yes I would, I have, and I will.

I always think back to Jeff Bezos's philosophy, which he calls the "Regret Minimization Framework" (see http://bijansabet.com/post/147533511/jeff-bezos-regret-minim...). He basically advises projecting forward to when you're 80 years old. Ask yourself if at that time, would you regret X? This helps you frame your decisions with more of a long term view of your world. Helps you forget about some of the smaller stuff (like financial security).

Also in most cases, you can always go back to your cushy job if needed.

roachsocal··on Show Me the Headers
This is fun.
roachsocal··on Pivoting
There's also the danger of pivoting too fast. Don't continually half-ass things without letting them bake and mature. Something's to be said about following through and executing your vision, right?
roachsocal··on Ask HN: What SaaS apps have a great UI ?
BitsyBox Hosted CMS w/API http://www.bitsybox.com
roachsocal··on Douglas Crockford + Chuck Norris = @CrockfordFacts
Doug Crockford made JSON so perfect it is timeless, hence no native Date format. (http://twitter.com/CrockfordFacts/status/10895664527)
roachsocal··on Twitter Isn't What You Think It Is
I think they should take their tagline (What's Happening Now) to the extreme and start to mine the content being shared through The Platform, present it in interesting ways, and sell ads on those pages. Like a crowd-sourced Yahoo.

Another way to make money could be to sell hyper-local ads on their search engine, which should have a high conversion rate if they know your geolocation at the time of search.

roachsocal··on Chatroulette and the Inevitable P*nis
HN stripped the word out completely when I posted it non-censored. I thought it was weird too -- but probably spam protection.
roachsocal··on HN referenced in official Google Tablet UI mocks
In the last static UI mock image, the designer (Glen Murphy) leaves a little tip of hat to Hacker News.
roachsocal··on The iPad is strangely antisocial
Yes but Apple hasn't.
roachsocal··on The iPad is strangely antisocial
I’ve always felt the same way about iTunes. Listening to music, sometimes, is a very social thing. I often find myself tweeting the song I’m listening to, or the lyrics I just heard. iTunes supports none of this.

The iPod (line) – same thing. This is where Zune has done some innovating. In realizing that music is social, they’ve created features that let you temporarily share songs and see what others are listening to.

There’s no technical reasons why Apple would need to leave these features out. Traditionally Apple hasn't fully grasped the power of the open web, much less social.

But things are starting to change. Their acquisition of Lala is a huge deal. I can’t remember them ever acquiring a website — and a VERY social website on top of that. I’m ready for Apple to take these to the next level by injecting social into their products. They should start with the iPod audio player interfaces (iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad). Let us Tweet, Facebook, Copy a Link, Share With A Friend.

roachsocal··on Ask HN: Please review our Startup: Twitalbums.com
I read the name as Twidal Bums.
roachsocal··on Ask HN: How to learn to web dev for real ?
For frontend stuff:

High Performance Web Sites Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (By Steve Souders) http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307

And for an intro to scalability:

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications (By Cal Henderson) http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...

roachsocal··on Please Criticize my Fitness Site that Stores Workout Programs
What is it? What does it do? Why do I need it?

Having a meta title would be a good start to describing the site.

roachsocal··on Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public
Thanks for the feedback about the packages. We'll take all that into account for any future changes to the offering.

The CDN claim is for the serving static images, not for data served through the API. We're offering a PHP client to make it easier to work with our API, but you're welcome to use your own code to connect, download, and parse data if you want.

roachsocal··on Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public
Can you guys try refreshing your cache to grab the CSS changes?
roachsocal··on Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public
Good point. We are, in fact, using Cloud Front. I've updated the paragraph to be more technically accurate (and fixed the typo). Thanks.
roachsocal··on Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public
Thanks for the heads up. We fixed it.
roachsocal··on Our product is self-funded -- should we apply to Winter YC?
We updated the video based on your feedback:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFF16U5jFT4&hd=1

Thanks HN peeps.

roachsocal··on HD Screencast: BitsyBox Integration in Five Minutes
Last week, a few of you asked about how BitsyBox works exactly (especially compared to CushyCMS) -- this is a quick overview. Any feedback is much appreciated. We're currently in beta right now, but considering quitting our day jobs and applying to Winter YC.
roachsocal··on Meet CI Joe: GitHub's new Continuous Integration server
LOVE the name they gave it.
roachsocal··on Our product is self-funded -- should we apply to Winter YC?
This is the feedback we were looking for -- and you're right, the most interest in the concept has, so far, come from site owners looking to take back control of their content. BitsyBox was built with them in mind, but from a developers perspective (that's our background).

We showed the video to just a handful of freelance developers, so we really didn't focus too much on the perspective of the clients.

We're planning to make some changes to the video this weekend. Thanks guys.

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