landongn's comments

phone addiction is not the problem, application addiction and products built around addictive loops are the problem.

no, indeed

I can identify with this sentiment completely and fully, as someone with close to 15 years in this industry can be.

It's all just the same as Mary in accounting making spreadsheets, or your boss making powerpoint decks. The fact that our product requires compilers and runtimes and virtual machines is just a footnote. It's just as disposable, most of the time. Why not enjoy it and get rid of the rampant NIH/New-and-Young-Is-Best attitude?

Just build cool shit, and ship it.

PS4 has been doing this for years through PlayStation Now and Gaikai tech. Remote play works phenomenally well, as does PS Now. You should go pick up a trial of the PC app (psnow.com) and try it out for yourself.

it feels a little silly to say this out loud, but I'm convinced that what Steven Wittens is doing on the web is some of the most advanced and incredible stuff I've seen since the original chrome experiments came out. Every time I read something on acko.net I am flush with both envy and wonder at how someone can command a browser with that kind of deftness.

"Just fix the bug, learn whatever you can from it so hopefully you won't do it again"

The baggage associated with bugs is so prevalent that we can't talk about them without a real sense of shame. "Hopefully you won't do it again".

Bugs are just part of the cycle. I completely agree with your assessment that people who can realize that are happier and more productive because they can plan for the probable case.

The real issue is communication, not necessarily budget, as the reason software projects I've been exposed to fail.

A project manager can only get you so far, especially if the team dynamic is rotten or even sub-par.

Management is never really the answer to me, even saying that as a coder who splits time as a manager. At the end of the day, if your team doesn't have the right dynamic -- soft skills or otherwise -- I don't think they've got a great chance of success regardless of how much budget or process you can throw at them.

Credit where credit is due, that was lifted nearly wholesale from codinghorror. Wonder how you do liner notes with Medium. I'm a terrible writer, so the rest of the items I've stolen or otherwise isn't to stand on the shoulders of giants like Atwood, it's to reinforce a point the best way I knew how.

I lifted all of the comments from stackoverflow, too: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...

I'm curious where the egotistical portions were, though. I wanted to at least prefix some of the more "thou shalt" sections toward the end with a disclaimer that they're personal opinions on how I operate.

Glad you liked it, though!

Absolutely true. Shantytowns are a common parallel to big balls of mud, and I think that would hold true for anything that gets constructed.

Welcome! It's something I was working on for a while.

I would absolutely love a resource like this.

Ember, Ember, Ember. Oh, how I love thee.

There are a few types of javascript styles that I've found are pretty common.

- Event Based (jQuery-esq) - Class Based with router (backbone, marionette, et al) - Declarative with routing (Ember, Angular)

Of those, I think the declarative applications tend to build out into easy to maintain systems. State management is easier, extending is easier, and most tend to build easy to digest components that are small and cohesive.

I've found that Ember scratches a number of itches for me when it comes to building out a declarative system. The biggest win for me is the fact that Ember's router is a really, really fantastic bit of engineering. The way that you can build out state into your router and have classes and components that react to those state changes is a super elegant way to develop web applications, for me. Combined with the outlet system for managing complex view trees, and it's a slam dunk.

Ember's system of routes, controllers, and views help me maintain single responsibility principles, because I have a clear definition of what a route does, what a view does, and what a controller does. Things are even easier when you get down to the refactor stage and start moving everything you possibly can into components (which are forward compatible with the upcoming specifications for web components).

The only reservation is that, because the style of MVC that ember follows, the learning curve can be a bit drastic. They've been solidly improving since 1.0 dropped and the wealth of materials out there that are outdated or old (pre RC days) are dropping off of the SERPs pretty rapidly.

Ember's a joy to work with. For 85% of the web applications out there, you probably won't need to venture out of the framework all that much. However, when you DO need to venture out of the framework, it can be a really frustrating experience. The primary example would be integrating something along the lines of D3 or Three.js, or honestly any library that expects to manipulate the DOM directly, as ember's reliance on handlebars is pretty complete. This means that having a view class manage user interaction events really can't be decoupled from the rendering of the view itself, which I feel like is ember's biggest issue right now. Secondarily, there is a personal need for better hooks for view lifecycle events, for providing things like animations / transitions in and out. animated-outlet is a potential solution, but I'd much rather do it the 'ember way' with hooks I can define in my controller classes rather than using a one-size-fits-all style solution (which is what I feel like animated-outlet is).

Don't let these things detract you from really diving into Ember. It's honestly a super refreshing and highly efficient way to build javascript applications. The state management of URLs within the router as well as the very clear and well enforced separation of concerns helps reduce code rot and smells before they even get started. Once you're past the initial learning curve, you'll be shocked at how rapidly you can develop robust, focused applications.

Looks like the vast majority of this is built as a wordpress plugin. You may run into scaling issues due to the massive amounts of overhead within the wp_loop for this to be something sustainable long term.

Looking through the rendered source somewhat confirms this, and puts together a darker picture of sloppy, jQuery riddled javascript flung into whatever context it was needed.

I don't know how this is much better than asana (which is totally free, and quite performant) or tools like Firetask, Things, or any other myriad GTD tools. It's simply slower than those, and that's unfortunate.

Congrats on shipping something. Please take the time to polish it up as your immediate next step.

edit: Yikes. Wordpress isn't as secure as you think it is. things like this:

https://jottlyapp.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=delete&po...

as a direct action within your application isn't such a great idea.

The mental picture of these people, huddled on a bumpy bus, in the middle of the night, being the only regular thing they can look forward to is incredibly saddening.

I wish there was something I could personally do.

Seems straightforward:

- certain combinations of words within phrases score all over the place

- hand those to mechanical turk for human classification

- understand where the results differ from the model

- patch the model where necessary when it breaks down.

The example they gave with the "but..." at the apex of the sentence is difficult primarily because it's ambiguous to what proceeds it. It could be positive or could be negative, especially from a programmatic standpoint.

Really fascinating stuff. Can't wait to see the code.

is the "developers" dig really necessary? MongoDB is fine-- at least until you start seeing significant scale, and even then, it's going to run into the same issues as everything else would if you hit it too hard, too often.

Just because the query language is JSON-esq and has a javascript shell, it's therefore "Javascript" and a target of derision and scorn?