autalpha

Are you saving the "registered" cookie? If a user is registered, but accessing the site on another browser, there would be no cookie and he/she wouldn't know how to login. What language/framework are you using?

I think it looks great, just a few thoughts (mostly on UX/UI): 1. You probably can do without the <hr> tag separating the head and the rest of the body on the landing page 2. I see a signup button, but not a login/signin for existing user 3. I find the font a bit quirky, but that's just my preference. I try to do non-cursive font for easier reading 4. The about page: a) url is sprint.im/user/about--that's a bit weird as I'd assume it's just sprint.im/about b) shorter paragraphs and make the long paragraphs about "why Sprint.im different" into a list 5. Quick tour page: the bounding box of each step needs some top/bottom padding/margin. They're connected to each other right now. 6. Register page: a) help text for password is "secret salt" I get it, but I think the word salt would be confusing b) I don't like the arrow icon to the left--it's too big and too gaudy as a list icon 7. Just another thought/question for discussion as I am also wondering about this myself. It's a B2B/Saas, I wonder if the fact that it was made by one person should be pin-pointed (on the about page). Most people would prefer that their software is made by a team/group/company. Having a single name as designer/developer takes away that illusion of "faith" and can turn a lot of people away.

I think it's a great project. Congratulations on launching your beta. It's a great step and you should be happy and proud of it. Now just iterate like a machine and I'm sure you'll definitely see some interesting movement. Your space is interesting in that: there's a lot of players, but there isn't a king or someone who basically rule the rest (well, basecamp/jira maybe?), but that means if you focus (which I see that you are) you'll capture some market share that other guys haven't or can't seem to do. Good luck and as always, please update us on each iteration.

-V.

Interesting quote from article:

The hacker ethos is also classically male. "Being concerned with appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous," Marwick said.

"It's more important to have the freedom and the independence to build something for a huge audience."

True story that happened to me: while trying to look up information for a restaurant reservation, I found some security issue that would redirect user to an obscure host name. I think it was an issue of bad DNS setup with their web hosting provider. In any case, being the helpful and detail-oriented web guy, I sent their head quarter's team an email with the detail of what's wrong and a solution that should fix it. I got an email from them the next morning, and since I started my email with "While I was looking up information for a reservation..." the person arranged the reservation for me. So I thought that was that. But after the meal was done, the owner came out and thanked me personally and took care of all our drinks. And since it was a Brewery/restaurant, the beer tasted a bit sweeter :)

I've also sent another email to a small online belt buckle shop to notify them of the insecure way they were setting up Paypal on their site (again, the steps to reproduce the problem and steps to fix it). The owner emailed me back to thanked me as well as taking care of the order personally. You know, most people are just happy that you are giving them some help. Being in the hacking community, I would imagine that everyone is the same here--most of us are (overly) helpful individuals. It's in our genes. So don't fight it and do the nice thing of sending them the steps to reproduce the problem and ways you can fix it. If you feel that you should protect your anonymity, do it. But do notify them :)

If one of these days, when I make an obvious security problem, I would hope, that one of us here would shoot me an email so I can fix it immediately. And I will promise to do the same.

I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.

The sites looks good. Is the signup page (and CC processing) your own or are you using a service? It looks great--congrats!

I completely agree with @auganov. If OP hasn't looked at the map for a while, Asia definitely is HUGE :) Perhaps start with 1 country--the question would then become "How do you reach Vietnam?" or "How do you reach Japan?" Which is much more answerable (even if the answer would be pretty long).

I think Japan is definitely ready. Big cities in China is ready. But since the social classes gap is very wide between the rich and the poor and it may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but majority of the population in countries like China and Vietnam is poor.

Btw, I hear South Korea's internet is much better than what we have here in the US.

As a Vietnamese American, I've always been interested in the Vietnam market since the number of internet user's growth is astounding! The country's literacy level is very high and majority of people are either online or trying to be online daily. But this is more of a developing country and the majority of regular Asian population.

The biggest problems I have with Vietnam and Asian developing countries right now, and this isn't unique to just Vietnam as far as I can tell: 1. The postal system isn't uniform/consistent throughout the country, so there's a real problem in mapping people with a clear home address. 2. Not having a clear home address combined with a lackadaisical sense of infrastructure planning, it's making things like loans and credits and ultimately credit card ownership is very difficult. So online transaction can be difficult. There is a population of Vietnamese population with ATM debit cards, but the commitment and buy-ins with online transactions are still at an early stage. As far as I can tell, most transactions to push money to an online vendor still go through a brick & mortar proxy (go to shop, load up on digital points --> pay with points like old school phone cards) 3. Speed/ownership of private internet connections is also an issue. A lot of the general population are still using the internet from internet cafe. As more and more people are getting personal internet connections at home, this is getting better; but it's a long way from where we are in the US. Imagine the early AOL modem era.

I don't disagree that the market is huge and there are countries and locations that are ready: South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia etc. But the big market you're looking at are still made up of low to middle Asian population, which is getting ready but not there yet in term of online-marketing ready. FYI, a lot of successful services for Vietnam right now are mostly free or supported by ad revenue.

These are just a few of my personal thoughts though. Perhaps someone else with more solid data on Asia would really be insightful for everyone.

If I understand your question correctly, it's "How would one go about implementing their own analytic engine?" I have looked into this question recently and here's what I know so far (not 100% sure of course as I'm still looking into it)

Getting Basic Info: 1) 1x1 pixel method which request a 1 pixel image from your server which will pass the requesting client's info. A lot of people use this method because it's fairly simple and cross browser. 2) (I assume) guys like sharethis/addthis etc, request a javascript on your server which would pass all the client's information to the server per that request Tracking things like mouse movement, page area etc would most likely require a more customize javascript that will send data to server via ajax/page unload etc.

Storing Data: Because the data you will be collecting for analytic is HUGE. Think much bigger than HUGE. You'll need a real big-boy set up like a Distributed Storage/Database system. Most of the big guys use their own. Here is where you will need to read up on key/value databases like Cassandra or Hadoop etc.

Anyone with much more experiences and wiser thoughts, please do share and correct me as I am still learning about this. Good luck and thank you.

Ditto on the design and the mismatching of icons and messages. Those slides don't really seem to help your case here. But I'm also concerned with the language usages ("Stop hiring like an amateur!") can be a bit too forward, assuming and jarring. Maybe that's the "slick" way of talking that I am not used to.

I don't know why, but I always get a good chuckle or two from reading or watching Linus' materials.

what blogging platform are you using for casualgirlgamer.com?

I honestly don't know perhaps instinct. I see a need and I feel that if I set out to solve that need, people would want it. Who knows, but I need to believe that what I am doing is going to work. I will validate it soon with an MVP and we will revisit this question again when that time comes. I hope you and I can have that discussion again then.

Thank you for your support.

Soon enough, my friend. I'll be back in another month. I'm going commando (the Vietcong style, not the nude style of course) for the next month hopefully. When that time comes, I would love to get your support.

Once again, thank you for your kind words and encouragements.

I think the word "ever" denotes too much absolution. Sure, never say never (arrgh! Beiber); Obama definitely isn't a hacker in software, but he definitely hacked the ways presidential campaign are done for a long time. Now that I think about it, most elected officials ARE Hacker in some way as they have:

1) build a product (their image) 2) build a product (themselves) 3) deal with competitors 4) innovate with new messages 5) change the ways certain things are done etc.

Also, might be elected, but probably never "electerd" :)

what are you using for your credit card processing page (order page)?

What kind of programming languages/stack are you more familiar with? Usually, Wordpress should really fit all your blogging needs. It's easy and has a lot of SEO tools to go with it.

But as I am not at all comfortable with Wordpress' issues that surfaced a while back: upgrade, security etc., so I plan to use one of the Django blog platform. But that means I'm not blogging at all, but worrying more about how to have the blog installed.

There seems to always be a trade off. But one thing is for sure, you should choose to install Wordpress or any chosen bloggin platform on your domain rather than having it redirect to another domain... like blogger, wordpress.com etc.

Good luck and good writing.

I actually have this debate with myself every time I think that I am close to the point of deploying my work (heh, that's another story). But every time I do the calculation, I just don't get how AWS would be more beneficial to me vs sticking with Linode. AWS' pricing would be much more than Linode's model. So for a while, I think I am set on this resolve:

Using Linode for my app and host static files on S3 and maybe another cloud provider like Rackspace for failover in case the clouds go down.

I am hoping that I would have a luxury problem once my app is doing well. When I have that kind of traction, it's a different story. But until then, it's more logical to stick with a VPS.

By the way, are you making updates to your production site frequently? Your carousel isn't working correctly yet.

I know you use django (from another post I think). Have you thought about using social network login? I used django-allauth and it has been working very well for me. Good luck!

Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate your story. Reading it reminds me a lot about some of the "wild" decisions I've made along the way.

I was also my family's black sheep. My story is different I suppose (briefly): I left full time scholarship to study arts--I went to Florida with $500 my brother lent me. I didn't have money for food so I ate Starbuck's left over pastries for the first 2 weeks. I ended up taking 6 courses that first semester and worked 2 jobs to support myself. It was tough time but it was the most lucid time in my life.

While I did well at the arts school, I didn't end up doing arts after all. I am a web developer now--happy hacking my after-hours projects and chasing dreams. Taking good care of my family is also one of my dreams!

I usually think to myself, people should have ambitions and dreams. But only a real man/woman is willing to lay his/her life down for those dreams.

Same with me here. I switched from using CakePHP to Django and haven't touched any PHP since. I would highly recommend Django.

With that being said, I think while development without a framework "might" feel more lightweight, you will pay for it later when you're maintaining your app. As they always say, you build it once but you have to maintain it forever. I think investing in a framework will most likely pay off in the future even if there is an overhead usually associated with framework.

@martinshen Great job on the site. Congrats. It looks very slick. Here's a few things that could probably help make it even more awesome:

1. Rich text editing capability for description--at least with <p> tag so it can be more readable than just a big block of text. 2. http://upout.com/auth/s_profile and http://upout.com/auth/s_customize don't seem to add the "active" class correctly 3. http://blog.upout.com/ make the logo go back to upout.com rather than the blog root

What are the technologies behind this? Again, good luck!

I'll definitely give that a try next time that excuse comes up.

"I don't imagine you have any questions, so I won't even ask. Good luck, gentlemen. I'll see you in the air. Class dismissed. "

Awesome!

This "we only hire the best in [city name]" truly frustrates me and frankly it is such a big turn off for me. I've interviewed with a few of these, and when it comes to salary negotiation they always give the reason: "we really want you, but the number you give us would create disparity/inequity between the current employees."

Alright, let's look at the word "best." Is there anything better than best? Maybe bestest or most best? Come on, you CANNOT have a team of people where everyone is "the best." If you decided to make an offer to me, that means I am the best then? Everyone's best is different, therefore salary needs to be different for each "best." If I am the best, then what's the problem with me getting what I asked? If you want to give off the hype that you're a "big boy" company then back it up with real big boy money! But oh no, if you work for us, then that means you can use our "awesome" brand to sell yourself later. Like Google or Facebook.

This is exactly like the usual situations: "I have a great idea, could you make this web app for me for free or for 2 small bags of peanuts? It will be the BEST addition to your portfolio." Remember those people?

I know, it is negative. But I get so enraged sometimes thinking about this kind of cliche and messaging some new "startups" are using. If you want to hire the best, then pay top money. You're not Google--get over it!

Just saw Thor last night. That was a very entertaining movie!

Bookmarked... will read later. Thank you for a great find :)

Ooooh. You know what I was thinking? You have a "night" theme on your site. What if, based on the hours of the day, it will switch to "daytime" where there's the sun and green grass etc. It will make "some" people happier and that's all the "personal" feeling you need for now.

I think if it's a good idea, the space will be competitive. If you have passion for the space, give it all you got. When you do that, only good things will come out at the other end.

With that being said, you still have to focus on your execution. If you take care of the smallest details and really worry about the users' experience/flow. It will show through and sure enough you might have that chance to fight with any bigger guy in your space.

Good luck and keep on fighting :)

I did PHP and liked CakePHP when I started out. After I did that I looked into both Ruby/RoR and Python/Django. I ended up liking Django much more than RoR. I do a lot of Javascript at one point and the intriguing thing is, somehow Python felt more natural to me. I DID try Ruby and looked at Rails though. I would recommend just testing things out yourself and see what comes more naturally to you.

One can do a lot of goods with PHP, Ruby and Python and any other languages/frameworks. It's not really the language but what you choose to do with it as well as your experience using it that will make your project. The only way to gain more experience is to start using it.

My feeling is, you want to pick something that will solve all your present problems and future proof. That's going to be difficult. Big solutions are usually a combination of different efforts because there are many different parts of the web development process. I've seen a company that use PHP for ALL their flow including the cron jobs' scripts. Some might say, that's crazy, why not use python or faster languages for backend jobs? But it worked for them up until they hit their bottleneck then they reiterate and revised.

The path toward the "holy grail" for the perfect "solution" is long. Crowd sourcing for this answer will also be difficult because many people have already took that journey and fought their holy war with themselves so they will generally give you their preferences up front.

Sorry for the round about way of saying: I think if you are at a point of asking question of what's out there other than PHP? Then you're at a good transitional stage. Congrats. Now your two (popular) choices are: Ruby/RoR and Python/Django. Go test out two sample projects and make it work from setting up to making it run. See which process you like the most and pick one. I don't think you will go wrong with either choices.

Oh, is there a site that you really like or look up to? Perhaps you can learn about their technology stack and give that a try :P

Again, sorry for the convoluted answer and good luck with your journey toward Web Dev nirvana :)