1. Yup you sell someone's car
2. Probably, I need to sell my car within the next year and it's a hassle to put the pictures online, etc.
3. You guys handle the test drive.
4. Seems good to me.
I actually chose to donate the proceeds of my book The Rapid Rubyist to Watsi. It's been pretty satisfying to know that the money will actually go for something useful! The book has been a success so that is nice too.
Having written a Ruby book I would definitely agree, even though my book was very modest in size it took an order of magnitude more work than I had expected. Coming up with code examples, editing, creating a book cover, not to mention how grueling it can be to write especially after a long day of coding.
I think it has yeah. I haven't driven any traffic there, nor have I promoted the book much at all and it moved up the charts to where it's generally in the top 5 books in it's category, sometimes higher.
Over time it seems to be selling more and more. The first month was pretty slow in sales though.
Yeah I agree. Exposure though is the issue, you'd presumably have to do a lot of self promotion otherwise. Or maybe posting to HN and reddit is enough. Not sure.
I spent most of the last 4 months doing all my front end work in Angular. The biggest problem I for me is that A) there are a lot of nooks an crannys and B) the views end up being pretty ugly.
I've been doing more with Ember recently, and while some things are not as easy, some other important things are much easier. On top of that the views are easy to read. So at least for now I feel like Ember is better for me.
What are you suggesting is a higher performance platform? You may get 2-3 times faster with some other framework but you aren't going to see an order of magnitude increase and you are probably going to be sacrificing ease of development.
Rails isn't the answer to every programming problem, but I don't think that Rails has any more of a scalability issue than any other framework.
The main thing you need to do in order to prevent scaling issues are making sure you aren't making an absurd amount of queries per page request. I once worked on a project that was taking close to 10 seconds at scale. Turns out it was making close to 1000 DB queries per request because they were doing iterative logic and making 3-4 db calls per iteration (which was also being done in the view...) I moved it all into the controller and it was sub 1 second, and had about 80 queries left over. This is actually very common to see in Rails apps, even with some of the more prestigious consultancies out there.
If you avoid doing things that absolutely won't scale you will be fine. Rails has no issues scaling, for 99.9% of the use cases. Regardless of the framework you use you will still have plenty of scaling issues if you have Twitter/Facebook level of success. But again that is a great problem to have.