A lot of expensive work done around Central Park. Not surprising considering there is probably a high demand and higher income residents for that area.
I threw this together so quickly that I didnt honestly do much benchmarking. I will be trying to improve performance as much as I can. It does only pull high res photos from Bing. Which in itself, takes around 1 minute over CURL (longer if it gets hung up on a heavy file). The image processing takes another minute or two usually.
I agree that it needs to be tweaked a bit so the images align better. It doesnt handle portrait oriented images very well.
I think as programmers, sometimes we fail to realize that just because something is simple to us doesnt mean it is to everybody else. The reason I put this together is because whenever I saw these types of images posted somewhere, non-technical people would reply saying they wish they had a way to do it themselves.
There werent many technical challenges honestly. The lessons I learned were more about finding something people want and delivering it quickly with the minimum features. Now I can tweak and iterate and try the more challenging aspects.
I think the concern was more that the functions you are toggling will likely interact with other functions you are toggling. So if you toggle one on but forget to toggle the other, then you could end up with undesirable results.
The benefit of using an ORM is that if you did want to change the type of database, most of your code would be able to go unchanged (theoretically). If you did switch, you should be able to just change a config file to let the ORM know which database you are now using. The ORM will then run the correct underlying queries.
This usually comes with a hit to performance though. Raw queries are generally quite a bit faster. So if you dont plan on changing databases on a project, it might be beneficial to skip the ORM where possible.
The ORM also doesnt help you with migrating the records from one database type to another. So if you already have established records that is a separate issue.
Sorry for the late response. I cant recall anything that I missed from NotePad++. Once I was all set up in ST2 (which was super quick thanks to the package installer), everything felt the similar.
People hold conversations while doing other tasks all the time. It's perfectly normal to have conversations while driving, doing dishes, eating, reading the newspaper, watching tv, etc. It's not impossible to be interested in a conversation and doing something else.
I made the switch from Notepad++ to Sublime Text recently. Sublime Text feels quite a bit more polished and was easier to get it setup to fit my needs. Definitely recommend giving it a try.
-No mention if international addresses are okay.
-Seems a little expensive.
-Needs more examples of cards.
-Would be nice if it pings you by email a few days before the card prints/sends so you can add your own personal message.