davcro

I don't think protesting these companies is a good long term solution. We need a protect DNS act or anti-censorship bill. Big tech has more money and power than hollywood. They should lobby more aggressively.

davcro

15년 전discuss

I agree. I'm a 37s fanboy. Web tech has made a quantum leap in the last year. The difference between rails 3.1 and rails 2.8 is huge. Not to mention html5, css3 and new javascript libraries such as backbone-js. These are game changers. Adapting them means a rewrite.

davcro

15년 전discuss

DHH's Twitter suggests otherwise. He talks about the joy of starting from scratch developing with rails/master. Can't link to it because I'm on a phone.

davcro

15년 전discuss

I am surprised, I thought 37s was against rewrites.

davcro

15년 전discuss

Happy to see that Salesforce is releasing its own apps on Heroku. It shows they are serious about using the platform as it is, instead of turning it into something enterprisey.

davcro

15년 전discuss

I really enjoyed reading this. Especially the section about bravery, "the opposite of fear is initiative not courage". Well said. I'm leaving today for a big wall climbing trip and trying to prepare myself mentally for the intense fear that I feel high on the wall. Sometimes that fear will shut me down and I stop climbing even though I'm safe. When this happens I have to keep moving and keep making decisions.

davcro

15년 전discuss

Also living off Facebook apps from 07. Biggest downside is having too much free time and working alone. Right now im studying for the MCAT

davcro

15년 전discuss

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products.

Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment.

Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS.

In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.

davcro

15년 전discuss

Last night I visited my uncle, a 50 year old rancher in Eastern Colorado. He wanted to show me videos of him calf-roping with a rodeo celebrity. I was very surprised when he brought out a Samsung Galaxy Tablet. This man is extremely computer illiterate and prides himself on ignoring modern technology. But wow did he love that tablet. He used it for everything (doesn't own a computer).

This incident convinced me that non-iPad tablets have a fighting chance. I'd like to see this exercise done again in one year. I believe non-iPads will gain more traction.

davcro

15년 전discuss

  Y'all don't know my struggle 
  Y'all can't match my hustle
  You can't catch my hustle
  You can't fathom my love dude
  Lock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summers
  That's a different world like Kree Summers
  I deserve to do these numbers

  - Kanye West, Spaceship

davcro

15년 전discuss

About $10k a month from an old Facebook quiz app. I haven't touched the codebase or worked on said app in 8 months.

davcro

15년 전discuss

Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.

davcro

16년 전discuss

They should highlight this to new viewers, I was about to complain about the lack of scrolling.

davcro

16년 전discuss

This doesn't work at scale. The IO performance with LVM is terrible. I lost a lot of money trying to implement this. Percona wrote Xtrabackup as a replacement for LVM.

Documentation:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm-...

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup-op...

davcro

16년 전discuss

They do. I think Heroku is the best thing for new apps / developers. You can launch your app for free. Your app would have to be rather successful (and hopefully profitable) to outgrow their free database plan.

davcro

16년 전discuss

I can't imagine life without RDS. I'm a solo developer responsible for a large web app. Before RDS I hosted MySQL on dedicated hardware from Softlayer. I had a dedicated box for the master, one for the slave, and another for storing backups. The DB was about 100GB which made backing up a total nightmare. Mysqldump was too slow, I ended up having to use xtrabackup from Percona. Anyhow it got to the point were I was spending over 50% of my time maintaining the database instead of doing productive things, like building new features for my app.

Then I switched to RDS. I instantly fell in love with snapshots. I love that you can backup your database while it is hot. Sometimes, before doing a scary migration or query I'll take a snapshot just in case. I love that.

Even more amazing is the ability to scale up/down while the database is live. When I was with Softlayer and I needed to migrate to new machines there was always downtime and I always had to pay for both the new machine and the old machine for a small duration of time. Thus migrating would cost a couple grand in lost revenue and servers expenses, not to mention my Friday and Saturday night.

davcro

16년 전discuss

Your's truly just applied to be a beta user. The product looks awesome. I would love to try it with my app.

davcro

16년 전discuss

I also like to cache resources as JSON and then render them into a template with Ajax.

davcro

16년 전discuss

I started building a new app and was bummed when I discovered Chrome didn't support the Html5 File API. The next day Chrome 6 was released along with said API support. Now the canary version includes WebGL support. These guys are moving FAST. IE9 doesn't stand a chance.

davcro

16년 전discuss

> The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000

Wow. New title suggestion: "Working at Goldman Sachs will earn you enough money to found a startup with zero revenue."

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