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MrMatt

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Working on bouldr.net in the small amount of free time I have - other wise working at Fudge or climbing rocks.

http://twitter.com/bouldrmatt

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Yeah, that'd be expected (release of IP etc) however, if you're doing this out of a sense of duty to your ex-colleagues, and the business / management have shown a lack of respect for you up to this point, then I wouldn't be surprised if you see scapegoating.

My point was more that I've seen lots of problems attributed to the last engineer out of the door in the places I've worked. If liability isn't taken care of (sometimes there is a separate contract for liability & scope of work apart from the attribution of IP), and you're doing work to "do the right thing" then it may well be a case of "no good deed goes unpunished".

Be careful if you decide to do this. If you help out & don't have a consulting agreement / contract in place + the correct insurance, etc... then you may find yourself on the hook for any problems that can be pinned on the work you do after you leave.

Been in this exact situation myself a couple of times - one instance that has stuck with me was when >300 sites crashed within around 5 minutes of each other due to a time-sensitive bug.

This was my first job out of University, so I had the unpleasant pleasure of seeing both sides of the coin; my manager panicked, but the senior developer didn't. I got roped into a pointless panic-driven hunt for viruses / corrupted installs / whatever by my manager (at one point we were analysing the assembly code in DOS debug, for some reason), while the senior dev calmly reverse-engineered the crash conditions, reproduced the problem and found the root (a negative index into an empty array, written by the MD of the company).

It was on that weekend I decided to renege on my old panicky habits, and become the calm center of reason in the face of a crisis.

Icon Sets 16 years ago

Could you trim the number from the beginning of the title - the HN guidelines specifically guard against this sort of title:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

I find climbing requires absolute concentration - it fills your consciousness to the point that you can only really think about the problem or route you're currently working, which is pleasant when it displaces all of the other things you've got in the back of your mind as a programmer.

I suppose this is a similar to developing a drinking problem, but far healthier.

I wasn't looking to threadjack here, but thanks for the feedback :) I'll have a think about that - the app did originally just get climbs in your locality from the web service, but I changed to the cache-only due to coverage problems. I'll see if I can come up with a hybrid.

I second your experience in getting traction for outdoor sports apps/sites.

My own site, Bouldr, has had a bit of traction, but nothing significant, and monetizing seems to be a really tough problem in this field. Our FB page has > 17K fans, and there are a few thousand registered users on the site, but it's got to the stage that I'm not really sure if I should continue the app (I'm going to for the time being, but the thought of closing up has crossed my mind more often recently). Dr. Topo closed for similar reasons.

Anyhow, if you like, I'll Tweet and post on our FB page about your app - hopefully you'll have more success than me :)

OK, so I get that a patent allows an inventor to protect their invention from exploitation, but I don't understand why a patent is transferrable - surely the idea is to allow an inventor to license the patent so that even if they couldn't realise a commercial product with their idea, they could allow others to do so, and still get something in return.

I could sympathise if Mirror Worlds were the originators of the patent, but as they bought it, then I get the impression that the whole thing stinks.

Nope - I've read before that to move teams at Google, all you need do is say so, and you can move to whichever other project you want to - no questions asked. Not sure how any of the less interesting projects get done, but that's just what I've heard.

Mercurial over Git 16 years ago

This seems to be less about Mercurial vs Git, and more Jon Chu vs Git.

Although I haven't used Mercurial, all of the issues he brings up I found really easy to solve when I started using Git (~2 years ago). The number and quality of online resources has only improved since then.

Branching was a pain for me when using SVN - far too much hassle to keep on top of it all; All branches are visible to everyone and merging between them was slow.

With Git, branching is simple and really fast. It can also be done in such a way as to prevent your own personal development and feature branches from making it back into the central repo.

I've also found that cherry picking commits between branches and squishing small commits help me maintain the cleanliness of our repos (At no point in the history of our central repo is there half of a new feature or fix).

[dead] 16 years ago

Only one of those screenshots is from the iPhone.