What about entrepreneurs starting a business that is not yet profitable? Is that something the government doesn't care about or are the numbers just too small?
Not true. If you work for yourself and you're losing money and you get polled by the CPS, you would rightly report that you are self-employed, and you would be counted as working.
I have an application set up with Devise handling authentication for me and Devise allows me to create multiple accounts with the same email address. Considering how commonly used Devise is for setting up a site with Ruby on Rails, this is a huge open hole for a lot of websites who might not appreciate multiple user accounts tied to the same email.
http://www.taprootfoundation.org/ - If you live in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles this could be an option, as well as the sort of model for finding ways to help in your community. Although this is focused on nonprofit work not government work, I don't see why it wouldn't be just as rewarding.
Wouldn't these sorts of issues be solved more easily if the Gemfile listed specific versions of the gem dependencies? I don't like the idea of allowing a Rails app to just download whatever is the most recent version of a gem for this exact reason.
You can specify gem versions in a Gemfile. It's a good idea when you lock down an app and don't plan to update it regularly. This blog post is concerned with the larger issue of starting new projects and finding that certain integrations require specific tweaks that are often not well known and may be temporary. Rails and its gem ecosystem evolves constantly.
My top priority when working on a side project is to work on something meaningful to me in ways that a full time job don't allow. Both on the technology side of getting to use tools I don't use full time, and working for non-profits or other organizations that would not have the ability to hire someone like me full time.
Thanks for the link to Calagator. I have been looking for any sort of open source alternative to meetup and had not found anything. I really don't understand why there isn't anything comparable that is open source already. I've seen a few other software as a service companies that basically just mimic meetup's business model, but I am especially interested in seeing an open source alternative to meetup.
Installing software on a VPS is close enough to "putting a little skin in the game" and having any sort of social marketing strategy of your own takes real effort even if someone is not getting paid for doing it. The only compelling reasons for using meetup seem to be the marketing association to the meetup name and that there isn't any other comparable software that is primarily focused on face to face meetings.
It seems to me like meetup has its hands full with the magnitude of hosting so many organizations and having a smaller install base from an open source project would eliminate the scaling complexity and allow an open source project to not only compete as a cheaper alternative, but also innovate in ways meetup can't. There are so many features that I don't understand why meetup hasn't built into their site, especially since they are making money from every organization that is hosted on their site.
There are so many other methods of advertizing outside of Meetup that I don't think that using Meetup is the greatest marketing tool ever. If I were trying to organize a group of people, I don't know that I would especially want to target other people who already use meetup for other meetings. I would rather recruit on the basis of whatever the focus of the organization is. There is a lot of scarcity of meetups outside of major cities too. It is sort of like Craigslist in that regard. I think it would be especially compelling to launch a site around a given community and use that brand to promote meetings, sort of like how people use ravelry to communicate with fellow knitters.
I recently bought a $200 samsung netbook that is perfectly usable in bright sunlight with sun-glasses on. Try it in a store with a sunny corner if you don't believe me, it's the NF310 and I'm not making it up.
I haven't seen the latest MBA yet, but the prev generation turns into a perfect mirror under the same lighting conditions.
Is it just because of the screen size or is the material different somehow? I'm actually toying with the idea of buying one to take with me on the road where the 15" colossus is just impractical...
