My team works like this with a twist. You merge your own pull request. You have developers, designers, pm's, etc to help review the change. You use them if you need them and you take responsibility for your bugs. We'll drop everything to review someone else's pull, and in turn that happens for your own pulls.
Looks like I submitted too late to catch this live, however, he'll still be answering questions on his profile throughout the month. http://www.levoleague.com/warrenbuffett
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at but it's weird to me too. You never know what lead to that decision (target markets, promotional video production issues, or maybe they just wanted to play off the "girl at home on the phone with friends" archetype) but it is odd.
Mike Bostock is the author of at least three javascript visualization libraries that are in heavy use today. It's safe to say he's got a firm understanding of javascript. While including a var in side a loop doesn't sope the variables to the loop, it is convenient. You'll notice he's careful to assign to all of the variables with each iteration and doesn't use them outside the loop.
The "connivence" taken with some of the other parts of the code (particularly the complicated one liners) I'll raise an eyebrow over, but they show a deep understanding of javascript. However I'm not fond of conciseness over simplicity.
The author glosses over the fact that encoding of special characters in the hash is broken in firefox. As an application there's no way to know if you're getting the data you want or url encoded data. Base64 encoding (with replacing chars like $ which most im and email clients fail to autodetect as being part of the url) seems to be the only bet at the moment. Putting the data in the get request and ignoring it on the server also seems to work well.
Lets not get rude, I've met some of them. They're bright folks using all sorts of technologies. I've seen vim and emacs (though mostly emacs). Their website does have some rough corners but they're working on a 10+ year old codebase and you'll get that as technologies age out. Their product however isn't just their website but instead their service. (The're a social company that isn't about virtual networks but physical ones.) And judging by how they fixed the misunderstanding it's doing pretty good.
The painstaking lengths people go though in honor of Tolkien is amazing. Along those lines I think http://3rin.gs/ deserves a mention, especially as maps are a "visualization" of sorts. I met the author this summer. The attention to detail is staggering.
Know any port knocking as a service companies? If there was a reliable way to get a udp connection between hosts that I didn't have to write myself, I'd be tempted to take this on.
I disagree. Putting aside saved passwords which I admit is a big aside. The browser's usual attack vector is login or session cookies. It will grant users access to the account but it doesn't usually leak any information in itself. However this leaks the, email, username, password, and a myriad of other data. This is compounded by the risk of leaking data in the event of a javascript injection. Usually this would allow the js to steal login cookies or do actions on the site (hopefully anything 'secure' requires an additional password input), but now they can whisk the usernames and passwords off site and elevates the breach to be almost as bad as a database leak.
One of the bigger hurdles I had to deal with at my work at a :BigComapny was getting mongo installed. But even on our older systems I had no trouble with their provided packages. Which you wouldn't think would be notable, but it is. Actually getting the software to run in arguably the most important part.
Just make little things. Backbone is fun, make some little backbone views/models, they'll work perfectly with any other JS you have. Want to try rails? Do another little project in rails. Is it too much? try the next one but only use sinatra. Like javascript? Do your next project in Node.js. (and remember jifasnif!) Felt like you're in callback hell? (remember use flow control and streams!) Try out gevent in python on the next project.
See my point? It doesn't mater what you use as long as you're making things. Pick something and do something. Iteration can only come after you've completed projects. Eventually you'll figure out what you prefer, and even then it wont hold a candle to what you've made.