I set up an old iPad Air to show https://www.codemancer.com/ for the last two years. It's got a clock, weather, and appointments and is readable from across the room. I've also run into crashes from Safari, which I resolved by automatically refreshing the page once an hour.
After getting tired of constantly searching github and phabricator, I built a small tool that would open git repositories, files, branches, and commits in the browser.
This is an easier approach for getting content onto a CDN. All you have to do is upload the files to the dashboard, and you are ready to go. The system provides you the markup to put in your code to use the css or js file.
AirCSS can be used alongside Cloudflare, but if someone wants an easy to use CDN that isn't limited to using Cloudflare DNS (like if they want to use nsone or another DNS provider), they can use AirCSS to easily get their files on a CDN.
"If the project is behind schedule, Gigster just assigns more developers to it or fires under-performing ones so it gets done on time." - Somebody hasn't read Mythical Man-Month.
Just a bad guideline worded badly. I'd say this is far from the core value of what the service provides. I'd rather just hear:
"Quality products are guaranteed because of our extensive experience and knowledge of making these projects work with many dynamic circumstances." Ambiguous, sure, but that should be a good thing. Let's hear that they're constantly evolving and working around new challenges, and applying experience and learning from all the data points they have to tackle existing / mundane issues. The core should be just that.
Hi! We don't assign more people blindly. But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel? We are engineers ourselves and are certainly careful to not just load up a bunch of devs on a project. We've done that before and it was painful :) Thanks for the feedback!
> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?
There's a difference between "if a developer gets sick or has to travel" and "if a project is behind schedule". (Though if the first happens late in the project, the problems with trying to backfill with an developer with no prior connection to the project at the late date are similar to trying to stack on more staff when a project is already behind schedule, and pose similar risks of delaying rather than accelerate delivery even further than accepting the cost of the loss.)
>> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?
I think that's sort of the point. You do whatever any other engineering team does when faced with the same challenges. The question is what is Gigster doing differently that allows you to achieve consistent on-time, on-budget results? Because if you have that formula, you could probably make a lot more money just consulting with existing dev shops on how to implement it.
Their FAQ answers your question. They are planning to simply eat any project budget overrun, aiming for growth rather than profit.
YOU SOUND TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
HOW CAN YOU DO IT THIS CHEAP?
Agencies and development shops have a lot of overhead
& are fundamentally lifestyle business, meaning that
their focus is profits. Gigster is venture-backed so our
focus is growth & customer satisfaction. We’d have a
referral from you than your money. Profits come later
when we are at scale.
Translation: we're burning other people's money so we can underbid anyone and build a customer book. Of course, at some point someone is going to want the business to be profitable and then, hey presto, you're a dev shop like all the other dev shops.
I'm disappointed in YC for funding this; I think it's destructive to the hacker economy/ecosystem. Excerpting a comment from a thread last year re: Marc Andressen's complaints about startup burn rates that applies:
---------
I find it very hard not to get angry at these posts...
...One of the biggest problems facing my company right now is dealing with all of the venture-funded idiots coming after my customers, market and employees without so much as a hint of a viable business model. They outspend us on marketing 1000-to-1 and they offer to serve our clients essentially for free, apparently just to be able to win a logo for the "traction" slide in their deck in the hope that they will have enough proof points to get them their next hit of venture money.
I know that nearly all of them are going to vaporize eventually, but in the meantime they completely poison the well for all of us who are trying to do what Andressen, Wilson and the rest pretend they want startups to be doing - creating sustainable businesses in sustainable markets.
can confirm, used to be angry but I stopped fighting it and just went with the flow. In fact it drove me out of the lower consumer market and forced me to go higher up in the ladder and make more money and deal with less clients who in turn were frustrated with the VC backed solutions.
Unsustainable business models backed by a sugar daddy offering even more commoditization taking spoiled and angry users out of the market? Fine with me if you believe in free lunches, but somebody is paying for it, and cash is a finite resource so.
I can definitely understand the anger and that was my initial reaction last year but then I just stopped giving a damn. I stopped caring. I don't have to take this client and offer them deep discounts to match "free". I realized I rarely have to do anything. I can simply choose to wait for the next bus which won't be crammed with ton of people fighting over seats. I am so much happier and profitable as a result.
Will this attract 'cheap' customers? As a potential customer I think I prefer the idea of a company that profits by the standard of doing my work, rather than a referral standard I have no control over.
Ha, exactly, except that too good to be true usually is. I have a hard time believing the "low ball high volume" strategy is going to lead to well-executed projects.
I think the actual strategy is push idea guys into sharing equities so they get both some money for the initial investment and make it big on equity with relatively low risk if the project succeeds.
From another pov they are vc to idea guys, only instead of giving the money for equity they give the product for equity.
With the difference that they also get paid for it!
Thanks. I had an idea similar to this while working at a larger company. I wanted to start a tiger team to follow startup technically. Leveraging the employer name we could have vetted them to increase our success ratio and be sure both of the business idea as part of the vetting and of the technical side. Sadly this project would only have netted millions and the previous company wouldn't touch anything under billions.
Go figure. They prefer to acquire company after they hit success for top dollar and run them on the ground instead of actually fostering innovation.
> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?
I don't know what that means. Those both seem like silly reasons to add more devs to a project.
Unless you're talking about long term sickness (like cancer) or travelling around the world for a few months, but that's not really the expected usages of those phrases.
> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?
- don't run a skeleton crew dev team unless you are ready to handle the risks,
- better project management upfront to cater for this risk - maybe allow customer to choose risk tolerance upfront like some fintech companies do and
- include some internal reward mechanism for over delivery so you can better manage resources.
There are prob a ton more but these are the 3 that popped into my head. Apps don't solve problems but good business models behind apps do. Sort that out 1st.
It's not linear but the math works out - managed right, and up to a point, projects get faster with more people. The management part is hard but that's where our platform comes in.
This is actually not how the math works out. The book referenced is a classic of computer science literature and goes into quite a bit of detail about why the math doesn't work out this way.
Disclosure: I'm working on a video delivery network company called Dendrio (www.dendr.io).
You're pretty spot on about AWS. Storage is super cheap, but data transfer can be really expensive. Also, depending on your users' habits, you'll likely want a CDN to serve your files, especially if you want to serve international markets, and I can tell you that most CDNs are very expensive for video hosting. Third party hosting like Youtube and Vimeo have limits for how you can use them which are easy to go over while full-service video hosting/analytics/monetization like Brightcove and Ooyala will cost you a house.
Shameless self-promotion: you should check us out at dendr.io. We're working on a peer to peer CDN that runs on top of your existing hosting provider (whether you do it yourself, or a CDN) to decrease your costs and give you other benefits. Feel free to email me at "albert@" our domain.
Brainfuck is just a set of symbols that map to the actions a Turing machine can make. I believe that the symbols themselves were chosen to make it difficult to read and write much like Whitespace. As for Turing machines, I'm sure there are programming books about them but I'm pretty sure their point is about studying computational theory rather than practical use.
