There is a reason for part time programming jobs not to be common: in most case, you want the work to be finished as soon as possible.
Part time makes sens as an employer for jobs that require constant presence and not much context to be executed (think of a cashier, for example). Then you can fill a full time with multiple part time workers.
But for jobs like programming, part time makes less sense.
From what I saw while trying to ride these bikes, I would bet that each bike costs less than 80$ to manufacture. They are very low quality, with no gears.
It might be even lower than that. My guess is that the electronic is the most expensive part.
I do start new projects with Django all the time. It's very efficient and not too complex. Really a good fit for most site and it excels at creating APIs too.
It really pleases me to finally see a big credible player tackling the REST orthodoxy. They state very well why REST APIs are not working well for mobile.
Notably:
"Fetching complicated object graphs require multiple round trips between the client and server to render single views. For mobile applications operating in variable network conditions, these multiple roundtrips are highly undesirable."
Now, I'm wondering how they manage to make the computation of the responses on the server side no too expensive. It seems clear that there is a risk in such a system to define queries that pull way too more data at once. Also, the question of pagination comes to mind. How can you handle that efficiently?
Same impression (from Brussels, Belgium). + as a freelancer, it's actually quite possible to get rates in Brussels that are around 80% of what you can get in California (500€/day is totally possible).
For the record, for the rent of a 1 bedroom appartment in SF, you can get a 240 square meters house in the center of Brussels.
If your experience of programming becomes worthless after 10 years, then you probably did not focus on the good skills. I don't see how learning how low level hardware works, some time tried languages (C for example), data structures, networking details, debugging protocols of all kinds, structuring programs, working in teams and so on and so forth... could become worthless.
For the idea that parents and older programmers have different priorities, that may be true, but you downplay experience way too much. That said, trying to find 150% dedicated younglings, that don't spend a lot of time on side projects and just enjoying life is not that easy either
Another alternative, which is not in private beta but offers the same kind of ease for editing is http://checkthis.com. Disclaimer: I work there.
That said, checkthis is not distraction free. It's more about getting easily a beautiful page on the web, with good social network integrations and a possible instant feedback through the comment pane on the right of your page.
(And regarding some comments not so far, we are supporting Unicode quite well, we have lots of page in Russian for example).
With all this talk about how the good days of the app store are over, it is good to see a relatively unknown company making it. I also noticed that a big part of the Apple selection for the end of the year is made by indie developers, like Super Hexagon, Letterpress or the education stuff from l'Escapadou, which means that they will probably make a lot of money.
With talent and flair, it is still possible to do it. Easy success for trivial apps is over but what Apple did to remove the barriers to entry for indies still makes the app store very interesting.