Anyone know if this update applies to Google Voice? And whether it will now be possible to initiate a standard RTP stream via XMPP? That would make SIP interoperability with Google Voice practical. At the moment it's held back by the fact that Google Voice requires some custom ICE packets to be exchanged on the RTP sockets before it will commence sending RTP. Which means there are no SIP clients that can talk RTP with Google Voice when the call is initiated over XMPP :(.
Yeah you are right about that http://www.abc.net.au/tv/watchnow/?id=doctorwho. But the good thing about Doctor Who in Oz is that the ABC put most of their shows up on their iview platform which means it can be watched online for a week after the broadcast. Handy for me as I always seem to miss the show on tv.
Rails devs are a dime a dozen so unless you are attempting to entice one to join your company you shouldn't pay a high rate. There's no reason you couldn't find a good dev on elance etc. It might take you longer and you might have to start with offering smaller tasks until you find that right dev but it could end up being a quarter the cost.
If I was you AND I was in a rush AND I thought this particular dev may end up being interested in joining forces as a co-founder I'd consider paying him the high rate. Otherwise I'd offshore it.
You really want them to be able to show you some reference sites and get them to talk you through how those sites operate at a high level. If what they saying doesn't make sense then they either don't know what they are talking about or do but aren't good communicators. If what they are saying does make sense then they are more likely to be a good developer.
If I was you I'd also further filter the potential good developers by asking for some sample code either from an open source project or some other means and get a trusted developer you know to give you an opinion on it.
"... get a trusted developer you know to give you an opinion on it"
That's the only way I can see it working. I also suggest in looking around for a test you can hand them, i.e. the FizzBuzz test. If their answer looks the same as your answer they're competent.
I really like your litmus test based on the clarity of a developer's explanations...I will definitely try that.
So for example, discussing the merits of a competitor's site in terms of how they are or are not achieving results in the background is a good start to understanding what the developer may be able to bring to the team?
I know it's been said over and over but why don't all these YC and now YC rejects just get on with it. Build their products, start their businesses and make some money. Why the obsession with being a YC'er and now a not-a-YC'er. Can't they see the whole thing is just a distraction from their already difficult task?! nikcub hit the nail on the head with his comment, it's just a shame YC doesn't lend itself to a plithy title such as "Boo Hoo" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com).
Well having a support group and something structured like weekly meetups to drive the startup forward week to week seems like a good thing to me. I don't think it's so much a YC obsession but an obsession with giving a startup the best possible chance to succeed.
Y Combinator has shown that it adds significant value to the process. Seed funding, access to like-minded entrepreneurs as well as heavy-hitters in both the tech and VC world. Obviously Y Combinator has a brand name associated with it now but the whole incubator concept has proven it is worth it for at least some of the population interested in starting their own companies.
What about HTML5, C++, REST, SQL, IOS, MS-DOS, ASM, CP/M, PDP, VAX? I think you should at least add those to the criteria to make sure you get the right person. I just wish I was qualified enough :(.
Last place I worked had a guy who viewed C as the enemy and would not code in anything put Fortran - it was a production system running a totaliser.
However it's a silly assertion. Unless you need someone to program micro-controllers, devise codecs, do low level memory management etc. etc. understanding C is hardly going to be a mandatory requirement. If you're running a software company building web apps I'd much rather have someone that understands user interfaces and codes in a productive language - C expertise is superfluous.
I have worked professionally with C myself and studied it at uni. However you won't see me volunteering for C work. It's painful to go back to C after C#, Ruby etc.
Didn't really understand what's wrong with msdeploy?
Deploying can't get much easier than clicking a single button in VS.Net... Rolling back IS an issue but it can be mitigated by versioning one's source code and testing the site locally before deploying.
I spent a few years working for BigCo, and the one thing I learned there was an appreciation for rollback scripts.
every single change had to be accompanied by a full and tested rollback script, and given often the deployment was messy (lots of integration/hardware mixes/etc) writing these was difficult and time consuming. ... but, they saved my arse on more than on occasion.
moral of the story: always have a backout plan. Stuff goes wrong. not often, and if you're good, then rarely, but when it does you need a way out.
Back in the day, a company I worked for had a very “manual” deploy process—basically, whoever deployed it (me) had to be sure to follow a 7 step process to the letter, or else Bad Things Would Happen. One time, I accidentally skipped a step or two, and Bad Things were happening, and to make it worse, I couldn't figure out what they were.
There was, however, a working version of the code sitting in the directory alongside this horrifically broken monster. I knew the configs were correct because they had been working not 5 minutes ago, and I hadn't changed them. So I updated a symlink (this was on Linux/Apache, but it would apply on IIS/Windows too), and everything was happy again, though using a slightly older codebase.
If you're one person working alone - then yes a "button push" might work for you. For teams of many people that like to push "panic patches" - that doesn't work out so well.
I'm sure MSDeploy is nice when it works. Serious emphasis on "when it works". I spent an entire evening trying to get MSDeploy to push something from my local machine to my VPS. Conditions: The VPS is remote and not a member of my home-domain, but the path between them is 100% whitelisted in all intermediate firewalls.
How hard can that be?
Evidently very hard. Despite spending the entire evening trying to get them to communicate and push files, it simply didn't happen. In the end I ended up writing my own deployment-system based on source-control, Samba and rsync in Bash. It was easier, it worked and I know why it works.
If that is easier to get working than a "one click" solution, the authors of said solution better get a bigger button. I can't seem to click this one.
Oh, thank goodness. Just yesterday I tried to deploy 6 different apps from the IIS app gallery, with 0 successful deploys. I thought maybe I was starting to go retarded.
Apparently there are some bugs which prevent parameterized deploys from working properly. Also, the documentation for Microsoft.Web.Deployment is very poor.
I've had similar frustrations with msdeploy. Are you initializing the rsync/Bash from your local machine? What are you running on the server to receivie it?
It's all done by a bash-sc
ript on an intermediate linux-shell which has access to source-control (perforce) and the server (via smb). I can post the script later if you are interested.
