"JavaScript: The Good Parts" was a great and a very important book back in the day. I am sure it inspired many of the improvements JavaScript has seen since then. But as it has seen these improvements, and as they were many indeed, I am not sure the book is still as relevant as it once was. Or to put it differently: There are many more good parts to JS these days compared to when the book was released :)
FWIW, there is a tiny webapp on the device that you access when you follow the instructions above. You do not need to install anything and it worked perfectly fine for me so far.
Also, you can ssh into the device and even get root access. I have not tried it yet but I guess scp would work as well.
FrOSCon (free and open source software conference) decided to go fully online this year. A lot of talks are in german, but many are in english. See the schedule here: https://programm.froscon.de/2020/
It is so nice to see this on here. I started frab way back for FrOSCon, a german free and open source software conference (which you should totally attend if you can make it!).
I stopped contributing when I stopped organizing FrOSCon, but thankfully Mario, the current maintainer, has picked it up and he does a tremendous job ever since. Also a big thank you to all contributors.
Also, the 5.1 series will not receive any future security fixes now that 6.0 is out.
So you could consider upgrading to 5.2 instead of 6.0. This is just one minor version step so should be less daunting. And 5.2 will receive security updates for a while yet.
Both, the original and asciidoctor, offer a CLI tool to convert asciidoc to different formats (and there is always pandoc). Additionally, asciidoctor aims to integrate with JVM languages courtesy of JRuby. So you have multiple implementations callable (in one way or another) from any language imaginable.
I remember being very intrigued by the article back in the day and I revisited it at least twice to find out if steve ever confirmed what language he was writing about.
Today people seem to take for granted that the NBL was in fact javascript, but I still cannot find any source for this.
Does anyone know more and can point me in the right direction?
> I'm not sure how you feel, dear reader, but my Ruby environments feel like one giant, brittle hack
Of course things are not perfect (and guix may have a few cool ideas), but I think we should keep in mind that both rvm and bundler have been huge improvements.
The hacks people needed to come up with before rvm and bundler existed were an order of a magnitude more brittle.
There is no hype (yet). Crystal as a language is still very much a work in progress.
That is why Amethyst is kind of a big thing. It is not an alternative to rails (again: yet), but as a real world application it may help shape and advance Crystal.
I am also pro-retainer. I look at it this way: If under this agreement you realistically need to spend some time every day (or every other day, or even one day a week) for this client you need to plan ahead for this. And that means you cannot offer full-time work to other clients. So if you turn down other clients and then only sit around waiting for a call that never comes, you are losing money.
A retainer that guarantees your availability and a fixed amount of hours seems to benefit both sides and is not at all unusual in my experience.
One problem with dual-licensing though is that open source contribution becomes unnecessarily hard. Every contributor will have to sign a Contributor License Agreement, that at the very least allows you to dual-license their code. Many CLAs even have the contributor sign over her copyright to you.
Not everyone will be happy to sign something like that. And integrating a pull request on github suddenly becomes a tedious excercise in international copyright law :)
So dual-licensing gives you all the publicity-related and try-before-you-buy advantages of open source. But you will probably miss out on other great aspects, especially community-wise.
I always wanted to try and test this approach, as I am convinced that a lot (most?) of the value in SaaS is in hosting. Operating your own servers is a huge hassle, and many people will gladly pay someone to do it for them.
Also if you open source your code and offer customers a full export of their data you have two advantages over closed source SaaS: Customers do not need to worry about vendor lock-in. And they can depend on being able to continue using your software even in case you ever go out of business.
This is certainly true. Content management systems are a dime a dozen. Locomotive is nice, but others have more developers, features, mindshare, exposure etc. Hard to compete with that.
Still, I believe Locomotive already serves a niche: It is one of the few available ruby on rails cm systems. And it it possible to integrate Locomotive with an existing rails app. That is why I guess their main audience is rails developers who need some content management functionality in their apps. And those do not need hosting.
This is consistent with what they describe in the post: Many people using the open source software, many consulting gigs with developers but only a few hosting customers.
I wonder if a better business model in this case would be some kind of productized service. If access to Didier is a scarce but sought after resource, they might want to try selling support contracts that guarantee a certain amount of Didier's time.