unfoldedorigami

Just submitted a pull request to auto-increment the ordered list numbering so it doesn't repeat 1. over and over.

https://github.com/mrcoles/markdown-css/pull/4

"High Fidelity Visualization" is an interesting term they've tried to coin, but I've had enough experience to know that just because you come into a meeting with a mock or prototype, doesn't necessarily make it a "nuclear" weapon that lets you build automatic consensus. When I'm presenting to a room filled with talented people, I would hope they would be smart enough to see through such a gimmick.

My favorite thing to come out of this article is the quote by William Gibson, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed."

What's fascinating to me is that because it prevented the surrounding communities from growing at the expense of Kalamazoo, those districts invested even more in their schools and education infrastructure to compete with the city with The Promise. I would have predicted the exact opposite. Super interesting.

LTE

Congratulations Mailgun. You guys deserve it.

Calm down. I never said you thought design was easy.

"What I'm worried about is that non-technical people will skim this article and think that design is easier than coding."

I didn't skim your comment. Also, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4398788

I think you nailed my issue. Based on the thoughtfulness of his response to Shipper, I'm pretty sure that his recommendation is not a statement about the lack of depth in the design field. The problem I have is packaging.

I agree with the commenter's initial point that learning any amount of programming will help a non-technical person to understand and better contribute to a technical startup or organization significantly. What I'm worried about is that non-technical people will skim this article and think that design is easier than coding. There's a rabbit hole in every discipline and my experience has been that the attributes that makes someone a decent programmer are usually the same attributes that makes someone a decent designer. In fact, I'd go as far to say that the attributes that make anyone decent at anything are usually the same for anything else.

So if you "want to learn to code" and for some reason cannot, then I'm going to bet you have other issues that prevents you from doing so, which is the sentiment Dan Shipper (the original comment this poster was responding to) basically attributed to "false constraints."

I guess the argument comes down to believing that coding (like most people believe about design) requires some innate talent to be able to do it. And while I believe that might be the case to be great at it, I truly do believe almost everyone should be able to learn to code (or design) if they truly want it enough.

Like with anything, I prefer people not to go into a field if they're not passionate about it. Don't code if you're not into it. And don't come into design because it's Plan B. Code because you love it. Design because you can't get enough of it. If you're non-technical and your passionate about wanting to build technical things, then you really only have one avenue for that outlet if you can't somehow convince others to help build those things for you and that's learn it the hard way.

I'm not sold on doing this at the commit level, but we have been using Pull Requests on Github in this fashion for Wufoo and SurveyMonkey. We start with an initial commit to start the branch for a new feature and then immediately initiate a Pull Request. That pull request contains a list of items that need to be done for the feature and as it gets developed you can see how commits are working towards making that pull request ready. This also helps tremendously with code reviews because you can do them as the feature is being developed.

What's nice about this method for us is that you can just look at the list of active pull requests for a project and see what features are in active development and get an easy way to drill down into the progress of each.

I guess you could call it Pull Request Driven Development.

10 employees. 3 full time support people, but everyone actually does support.

Oh no, Joe! We actually might still be here when you come. Please still let us know what you're schedule will be when you're down here. We'd love to see you and pay you back for all the hospitality you showed us when we visited Mountain View!

Wufoo has payment integration in their forms. http://wufoo.com/payments/

Barbados. Nice.

We actually documented the process as we were creating it and we're hoping to put up a blog post in the future showing off the behind the scenes creation of it, because we know a lot of people would be interested. So, yeah, look out for it.

Why would their agreements with current web apps not survive the transition?

For what it's worth, here's a bit more information. There are tax and legal reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweepstakes

"Because of their potential for abuse, sweepstakes are heavily regulated in many countries. The U.S., Canada, and individual U.S. states all have laws covering sweepstakes, resulting in special rules depending on where the entrant lives. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission exercises some authority over sweepstakes promotion and sweepstakes scams in the United States."

While this isn't a sweepstakes, the same comission also oversees rules and laws about contests and have equally annoying restrictions. Obviously, we would love the talent and potential of the international community to work on this.

If you like to program and own medieval weaponry, this one's for you. Best of luck to everyone!

Actually, it turned out that the complaints coming from Linux users about Flash being used in Wufoo in the early prototype was disproportionate to the future demographics of our actual customers and so it honestly didn't make any difference in terms of our revenue today based on our current application usage. I think Linux users account for less than 2% of our user base.

In retrospect, a good number of those complaints came from Reddit users when we were just getting out the door. Our startup was only a few weeks old then and I have to say that the feedback felt overwhelming.

In the end, the decision to remove Flash in the builder was a good one because it resulted in a much simpler interface that was easier to use, but to say that it should have been obvious or that it really mattered, would be overstating it.

Congrats to Dropbox, Posterous, DailyBooth and Wufoo!

Best. Ever.

You're right in that creating a a form in Wufoo is only the beginning. At that point, you can start sharing the link to the form or embedding it on a web page to start collecting data, leads or even payments. You can do all this from our Code Manager: http://wufoo.com/docs/code-manager/

Built into every form is also the ability to subscribe to the incoming data in real time to your email inbox, mobile device via SMS or your RSS Newsreader.

We also have a robust report building feature that can help you visualize and export your data so you can better understand the information you've collected.

You can learn more about all these different steps in our other video tutorials at http://wufoo.com/docs/getting-started/

Hi pclark, while our physical presence and interactions are limited because we're not in the valley, we're easy to get a hold of...just send a message through Wufoo's contact form. We do our best to answer anyone interested in what we're doing to the best of our abilities.

Chris, one of the founders, is colorblind and so we're able to always get some initial testing and feedback from him.

Maybe you should have read all the way through.

It's too bad those bags are so ugly. Maybe the last one I might consider carrying around. And, of course, it's the most expensive. Great.

We've been lucky enough to be able to use Dropbox in our work environment and it's been invaluable in keeping our team organized and on the same page. This is one of the few applications I truly love and hope all is going well with them.

We're actually writing about this in a future article about some of our productivity experiments.

Of all the books and research we've read, these are the ones we've found the most useful information from and influenced a large part of our redesign at Wufoo :

Call to Action http://www.calltoactionbook.com/ (how to think about landing pages and navigation)

Landing Page Optimization http://landingpageoptimizationbook.com/ (best technical book on how to measure landing pages, do not buy SEO books, they're all terrible and rehash what you see on most blogs)

Word of Mouth Marketing http://wordofmouthbook.com/ (sometimes great marketing has nothing to do with what you do on the web)

Made to Stick http://www.madetostick.com/ (just a great read on how you should shape your copy and ideas so they have maximum sticking power)