I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for yourself blend. A lot.
The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand the topic better. It's win-win.
I read a little way into the article to see whether he'd explain the lack of axis labels or just how the graph maps to anything real. Nope.
The article is reasonable but the loops just annoyed me too much.
I had the same thought at the first glance at the loopy graph, but decided to take off my nerd hat and put on my "I'm listening to a business guy" hat. I think this is something we tech people tend to get hung up on too much... snickering at the slightly misused technical jargon and other similar errors (like this graph) that business people make and then not being able to hear what the person is actually saying.
Any non-technical, non-mathmatical person would look at that graph and say "yeah, you go around in circles for a while and then finally get things worked out" and I actually thought this was a pretty good post otherwise.
"He was saying a real startup trajectory might look something more like this" (emphasis mine)
When we're graphing trajectories, not functions, loops are certainly allowed (see e.g. phase diagrams[1]). Still, without labeled axis those graphs are pretty much meaningless, so I treat them more like an conceptual illustration.
1. A write-a-document test. I was given a fairly simple (contrived) scenario over the phone and was asked to write specs and a deployment plan with a deadline of an hour.
2. A programming test. Again, a description given over the phone and someone available to answer questions if I had them. After delivery, there was a followup programming task to extend it from a client app to a web app. It took about 8 hours in total.
Provided you're willing to put in the time (and I was), it seemed to be an excellent way of judging whether I could really do the work they needed me to.
I went to the site, and I had to watch the video twice before I got it.
Ok, it's a not really a social network like Facebook (that's what I immediately think when I hear social network). It's more like Reddit or Digg, but with the comments embedded in whatever page you're looking at. Am I right?
A few comments:
1. That video isn't really helping your cause. The fact that it's the only source of information about Weblerr combined with the fact that I had to watch it twice to have any idea what it was is a problem. The video goes for 1:17, and there's literally only 5 seconds of it that tells me anything.
2. With so little information about it, I'm not going to hand over my details. I have questions - do I have to download anything? What browsers does it work with? Does it tie into any other social networks? Do sites have to support it before I can comment on them? What does the UI really look like? etc.
3. You have the very serious disadvantage that you're competing against established competitors (Reddit/Digg/Twitter) that have thousands or millions of users.
In general, probably a nice idea, but you're really just embedding Reddit/Digg/Twitter into the original page. I'm sure there are plugins that'll do that for Firefox and Chrome already.
The screens are a bit hit and miss for me. The alarm clock, music player, and bottom half of the home screen (messages) are beautiful. The top half of the home screen (weather and time) is horrible. The others - meh.
It gives you something you can quickly search for: hit <incremental search keyboard shortcut> followed by "i" twice and you're there. Do the same with a single-character name, and you hit any time that character appears anywhere.
I personally find the doubling awkward, and with modern editors I use semantic searching much more than raw text scans so the benefit of doubling is marginal, but there is at least one sensible reason you might choose to do it.
Sure you could, but while you're busy trying to find the exact combination of spacing and punctuation that starts the loop you want, and then manually looking through the loop to find every further reference to the same variable, the guy who called it "ii" and found it with the first four keystrokes is already being productive.
As I said before, it's probably not as useful with modern IDEs that have semantic search capabilities, but there is a genuine reason some people prefer the "ii" style.
Looks good - nice idea, but I had a couple of problems using it... I think it's still a bit buggy:
1. Doesn't seem to work in Chrome? I get no results no matter what I do.
2. Checking the checkbox next to "International" or "All country extensions" should select all the checkboxes in that section IMO. It feels like it's not doing anything.
3. After playing for a bit in Firefox, it disabled the individual and country extensions so I couldn't select them individually.
4. If my word doesn't match any valid domain, I get an error telling me I need to select a country extension.
That said, if you can iron out the bugs, this could be useful :)
Update: you may want to refresh the page and try again. I fixed a Javascript issue a few minutes after posting this thread. You may have the old JS in cache (I've modified the URL to avoid any cache issue)
What version of Chrome and FF do you use?
1. Not tested on Opera, Chrome or IE 7/6 yet
2. In FF 3+ and IE 8, selecting a group (such as International or All country extensions) selects all the individual extensions.
3. Did you choose a restriction such as price of known registrar. Only in this case extensions will be disabled (extensions that are more expensive than your price, or that do not have a "known" registrar)
4. Do you mean you added an extension in your word, like google.com? Could you send em the exact words you tried? feedback@domain-generator.us. You should be able to enter any word, and click on Search as long as you selected at least 1 extension.
1. No worries - Chrome is "5.0.342.2 dev", and FF is 3.5.8
2. Yep, it's working for me in FF now. Still not in Chrome, btw.
3. Yes, I did. That'd be it - my bad. Maybe something hinting that that's why? As a suggestion, perhaps a number in parentheses in each tab? e.g. "Restrictions (1)" if I've selected one restriction? Just an idea :)
4. I can't reproduce this now! Maybe the JS update fixed it?
2. Thanks for the suggestions. I added the number of restrictions and suggestions. The alert also suggest that some extensions are disabled because of the restrictions.
seriously, the first thing such a site need is a ton of users. and you'll get them faster by removing the obstrusive ads. then it should be rather easy to monetize the site -- doesn't even have to be google adwords...
I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for yourself blend. A lot.
The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand the topic better. It's win-win.