nefarioustim's comments

Hey all,

So I've single-handedly built a progressive web app that's designed to sit somewhere in between traditional ecommerce (like Shopify, Etsy, Ebay etc.) and the social networks that are pushing shop features (like Instagram, Pinterest, and FB Marketplace). Really, it's designed to help makers and "microbusinesses" get their products online and selling quickly, without having to build a website, pay extortionate fees, and navigate the minefield of SEO, SEM, and social media advertising.

I've just launched it and am attempting to attract small merchants from anywhere to sign-up and list a few products. Similarly, I'm trying to ramp up some attention from folks that just want to browse products in an Instagram-like feed.

Ultimately, I'm going to need scale if I really want to start solving the problems I'm setting out to, but I figured showing it off to HN was a good way to start getting thoughts and feedback. :)

Hope you like it.

Seconded.

Having been a Senior Engineering Manager in an Amazon business, I can confirm that the stack ranking process is the single worse treatment of employees I have ever experienced. Furthermore, it is not based on an honest and truthful assessment of individuals, but rather who is best at standing up in a room full of managers across one division and arguing that their developers are better than someone else's, even if they've never met or seen the output of the developers they are arguing against. In fact, I've even seen people judged on the _amount_ of commits they've made (not the quality) and the _amount_ of wiki edits they have published.

It was the single worst employment period of my life, resulting in depression and stress that was off any scale you'd care to mention. I cannot recommend enough that you avoid at all costs.

Isn't it the case that employees who have worked in open plan are likely vote against and employees that have worked in cubicle farms are likely to vote _for_ open plan?

The grass is always greener…

As you can see from the other comments above; the jury is firmly out on that one, but it's still an interesting story considering the "secret" test customer (which Wired UK says was DARPA[1]).

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success

Doesn't work in Chrome 14 or Firefox 6 on my Snow Leopard MBP; just crashes.

This is a great article.

A good portion of my day to day work involves handling JS memory leaks, due to the growing reliance on JS for behaviours, interactions, and application logic (sometimes an over-reliance, IMHO). It's sad that most of the JavaScript developers I interview have no real idea what causes or how to fix leaks. We could really do with making the community more aware of this stuff!

Your point about pragmatism is valid, but in the way that spjwebster speaks about above. JavaScript is just too fragile to depend on for a truly robust application or website.

Lack of JavaScript isn't just about the minor percentage of users that disable, but also about those whose JS resources are blocked or fail to load. What's more, the fact that a single JS error in page can block all other JS from running introduces even more nightmares.

If only one could rely on JavaScript actually running on a client machine.

Obviously this doesn't make you a _bad_ web developer, as such, but I'd question your rationalisation here.

What capability and resources do you need that you haven't already adopted for cross browser support elsewhere?