One downside the post doesn't cover is that these microgems aren't discoverable. You can't do a gem search for them. If these really take off, it'd be neat if there was a section on ruby-toolbox that was dedicated to microgems.
I strongly agree. The learning process takes as long as it takes. What might take one person an hour, could take another person a week. But when it comes to education funding in general, the easy way out is to set a easy to quantify metric and use that as the yardstick
I've been out of the perl world for a few years, but seeing all those familiar terms makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Also I just appreciate the article as an example of open source working.
My plan is to be financially independent from what I love to do. I love coding because it's a medium for me to create something tangible out of nothing. I loved it before I was paid to do it for a living, and I'll love it till I become senile (the plan is to write lolcode when that day finally comes).
That said, I love other things in life as well - friends, family, girlfriend. All these loves are first class citizens and I can't tradeoff on one for another. When forced to choose, I always find a way to compromise. For example, when my girlfriend started grad school, I started working with Intridea (an all remote web and mobile consultancy).
I constantly in the process of finding ways to allow me to code what I want to, and still make money. I like to think of it as a daily and incremental refactoring of my life.
I agree with many of the points brought up. It's strange to me that Facebook would consider a practice that limits the number of eyeballs on their pages. For a social network, the real competitive advantage is the number of users and how engaged they are. While they may make more money in the short term, cutting into the developer ecosystem (healthy as it is now) will cut into their reputation and eventually their bottom line.
On the other hand, I could see them charging just the top 1% of the heaviest API users. In that case, it would fit Michael's cases for when charging for an API is ok.
At my last startup Outspokes, our product was an embeddable JS-widget. While we did load jQuery after initializing the widget, we still used basic Javascript to load the initial widget (think bookmarklet-like code). Because so much of our app was written in JS, we put more effort into structuring models and creating tests for our widget. This was pre-backbone days, so we built out a set of conventions for ourselves.
I agree that jQuery is almost like a superset of JS, and it hides a lot of the nastiness of some day-to-day chores. But it's still good to understand the underlying JS that powers jQuery.
3 books that I helped me tie my daily work back to more abstract computer science concepts are:
- Ruby Best Practices
- Javascript, the Good Parts
- Higher Order Perl
I recommend picking these up after you've done work in the languages they're about. They assume that you're already comfortable with the language, but then go back to show how that language uses CS concepts. They highlight how functional programming, and other classic introductory CS concepts, but stays practical. None of them are long reads, and there are clear take aways that make you better at programming.
I especially liked the Ruby Hoedown, and Magic Ruby conferences because they were free admission. All you had to do was convince your company to pay for travel and lodging. The quality of talks and technical skills of people who went to those conferences were definitely not lacking
I saw the link to Office and Company in Pasadena. The rates are a bit steep for me at $325/month. I've also been to Blank Spaces in Santa Monica. Are there any folks out near Caltech that be interested in sharing a space or just working together? I usually work at home now and I wouldn't want to do co-working everyday of the week; I find I focus better outside an office environment. But I think spending a day or 2 every week with fellow developers and designers sounds fun and interesting. Ping me if you like the idea of part-time coworking.
Yes. I'm in Old Town Pasadena but it's hard to justify that rate. There's enough coffeeshops around here, and it's unclear whether the space has a "community" or if it's just freelancers.
What's your email? I'm interested in setting up some sort of part-time thing, especially if there's a few others around.
jch@whatcodecraves. I misspoke about Blank Space's location. Glad to hear that you guys are opening up in Santa Monica though. Ideally, I'd want to do something within walking or biking distance.
This looks really slick. avk and I were were planning on building bug tracking features into Outspokes, but we've stopped work on that project. Our original goal was to have a JS widget for teams to collaborate on their sites. Hopefully you guys keep it up and build out what we didn't finish. Let me know if you guys want any feedback or any help.
Yeah that's exactly what this is. We have a JS widget that let's you log and manage bugs right from your site so can do things like tagging and annotating dom nodes.
Also feedback is DEFINITELY appreciated, we'd love to hear anything you can throw our way. Also let me know if you want a beta account and I can email you a link.
