zeemonkee

56 ms·

1. 151.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   > It was the classy, exclusive social network Exclusive maybe, I'd stop short of referring to Ivy League students as classy ;-)
2. 152.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   One way would be the same thing you do with "forgot my password" links. You enter your email address, a link with a random activation key gets mailed to you, click on the link in your email client and get logged back in. The activation key
3. 153.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   My current favourite for quick prototyping is Flask. A minimal Flask app is just a few lines of Python, plus some sensible defaults, which is great when you just want to throw something up quickly as proof of concept. There's a set of handy
4. 154.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   Given the past behaviour of Gizmodo they don't evoke great sympathy. You don't need to be a jerk to wish failure upon an unethical company. That said there are other members of the Gawker family I enjoy from time to time and wish no ill-wil
5. 155.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   It's also pretty easy using Scala with Play if you do decide to switch at some point.
6. 156.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   Document, comment appropriately and write tests. The engineer in question might be yourself, six months or a year later, and you will have completely forgotten what you were doing back then.
7. 157.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   Probably more due to the huge grant Greenland gets from Denmark. Which, of course, is in the EU. I'm not the biggest fan of the EU but the Telegraph has consistently been anti-EU. This article however is shameless in not even mentioning the
8. 158.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   That's a very good point; I'm very much that way myself, and more so every year. Part of it is cynicism from being at the bottom of a pecking order that puts the braying salesman and architypal PHB at the top and consistently having advice
9. 159.▲
   by zeemonkee 16y ago

   When building something for a startup the rule of thumb is to use the tools you know best. Your priority is to build something quickly, that you can show to potential customers or investors, not to learn a new tool. For that you can do a we
10. 160.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Sure. But high cost of living means higher salaries for your developers too. I've turned down numerous jobs because they're London based (and won't do remote). It's just not worth the drop in income. And frankly, London isn't California. It
11. 161.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    I'm not sure London is the best place in the UK for a startup. Office and accomodation rent is among the highest in Europe. And in just about every other respect it's an insanely expensive place to live. Unless your clientiele requires you
12. 162.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Flatland for form processing. Formencode is a more mature, if not as easy/flexible to use alternative. Nose or py.test for testing. Other template engines would be e.g. Mako and Genshi. Lamson for email handling.
13. 163.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Of course not. If I smoke, for example, I have a higher chance of getting cancer than if don't smoke; if I eat pizza all the day long instead of salad and don't exercise, I have a higher chance of becoming obese. However I may also never to
14. 164.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    > searching for a malicious virus that somehow makes us obese or some other obscure reason is just overcomplicating the issue. Either there is a malicious virus contributing in some way to obesity, or there is not. Let the scientific ev
15. 165.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Or alternatively, they learn from the problems of older frameworks, and can bring a fresh approach without having to worry so much about backward compatibility.
16. 166.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Good developers should also understand product development and marketing, basic UI principles, and good software design. Obviously you are more than the sum of the tools you use. That said, it's expected of developers that they continually
17. 167.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    So an average web developer is expected to know (for example) PHP|Ruby|Python, one or more frameworks, SQL, one or more RDBMS, linux, bash + sed|awk|grep etc, memcached, nginx, apache, SSL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Jquery or other framework,
18. 168.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Where does that leave web developers ? Sharecroppers on the Facebook platform ? Doesn't sound like a very interesting long-term career.
19. 169.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    I agree with what the OP is saying about Scotland, which is a crying shame, because Scotland was once what Silicon Valley is now - a hotbed of new ideas, entrepreneurs, and technological innovation. Many of my friends here who work in IT ar
20. 170.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Not sure I agree 100% with the list (banks ? eBay ?) but much of the complexity in sites for larger companies is due to design-by-committee - a number of stakeholders/clients/managers have to have their bikeshedding input and the end result
21. 171.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    The problem with auth is that it was designed before model inheritance was available, hence the crappy get_profile() hack. A better solution (with hindsight) would be a base abstract UserBase model with a bunch of useful features (e.g. pass
22. 172.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    I really hope you let these morons know why you turned them down.
23. 173.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    I find Django slightly unusual compared to other frameworks in that it has many CMS like qualities, such as predefined user/permission models and the admin (not surprising, given its origins). Rails, Pylons, CodeIgniter, etc. provide you wi
24. 174.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    http://whatsmycallsign.appspot.com/ When you're on the phone and you need to spell your name, address etc. It will print out the international call sign (Alpha, Delta, Lima etc). Took me about 30 mins or so, running on Google App Engine b
25. 175.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    supervisord is also quite nice for managing processes. You can restart individual processes through the supervisorctl command, e.g. "supervisorctl restart my-gunicorn-process". This can easily be rolled into a fabric command.
26. 176.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Maybe something like the "Feedback" tab you see on many sites now. A "We're hiring" tab. The hiring company signs up & pays the fee and is then provided with a JavaScript tag to embed in their web page. This of course can be customized
27. 177.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    Thanks for the article. The bit about media-driven scare stories rings true.
28. 178.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    I think its popularity derives more from the fun of seeing people humiliated and their dreams crushed, unfortunately.
29. 179.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    That's true. With the recent government cutbacks and slashing of quangos that might (hopefully) change. More than money though would be a better startup community - or communities - all over the UK, which is up to us, I suppose. One assumes
30. 180.▲
    by zeemonkee 16y ago

    The article mentions the Victorian times - you don't need to go that far back - Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Clive Sinclair come to mind, although that was the 1980s. But why haven't there been any huge new successes in the last decade or s