jonathanstark

This is wild

Wouldn't the NYT or whoever object to someone reposting their articles?

Wow, that's wild

As OP said, these aren't the newspaper articles. They're AI generated stories based off the facts of the events.

Stories like this make me sick to my stomach.

Lots of mistakes made on both sides but hourly billing itself was a major contributor that neither party even mentioned in the postmortem.

FWIW - I think you meant "fake" not fact at the end there.

Dalke,

I see that I have insulted you and for that I am sorry. I doubt that there is much I can say in this medium to undo that damage other than to tell you that it was unintentional.

I really don't see the word "labor" as a slur but I do agree that I didn't use it in the strictest sense. To me, the word "laborer" equates to something like: "someone who is instructed by their employer what to do."

I don't begrudge or judge anyone who is comfortable with such an arrangement. If my words contained a tone of disdain, it's because I've absorbed the frustrations of literally hundreds of people who are not comfortable with such an arrangement.

My book is for folks - usually experts in their field - who are sick of their employers telling them what to do. Sick of being micromanaged, second-guessed, and generally disrespected by clients who have nothing but a checkbook and an opinion.

My impression from your previous comment is that you do not fall into this category, and therefore, my book would be useless to you. In retrospect, I do understand why you took offense and again I apologize for that.

Yours,

Jonathan

Hi! Author here. Thanks for your comment :) I was preparing to answer your questions and then I read that you consider yourself a laborer. If you see yourself as a laboror, my book is definitely not for you. If at some point in the future you start to feel like you've maxed out your annual income and don't know what to do about it, you might want to revisit the idea of ditching hourly billing. Cheers! —J

I've been beta testing Remarq and the time it has saved me more than makes up for the cost.

Very, very nice. Kudos DHG!

@robertnealan Well said.

Having personally worked on responsive redesigns for ew.com, techcrunch.com, and timeinc.com, I know as well as anyone that designing a full scale responsive site can be hard. Really hard.

That said, the hard parts are not the technology or the implementation. Rather, the hard parts are organizational dysfunction, legacy CMS software, integration with non-responsive 3rd party services like ad networks, and so on.

The complete lack of those sorts of challenges in something like a hackathon means that devs are free to design in a way that maybe they can't do at work or for clients. My shock was that given such freedom, they choose to basically ignore mobile.

But what people want at these events is a catchy, flashy demo that wows attendees and that can be tweeted/Facebooked/etc.

And then what? Opened on a mobile phone where the demo doesn't work? Mobile is where people are reading facebook/twitter so if you want to optimize for catchy/flashy for sharing in social media, you should definitely focus on mobile-first.

I'm not saying everyone must ALWAYS design mobile first. I'm saying it should be our default position, like doing layout with css instead of tables.

If you have some reason to ignore mobile (and there are many good ones) then go ahead and make an exception.

My issue with desktop-first in RR is that because of the nature of the situation, there were no good reasons to make that exception.

It doesn't have to be hard. Some visual designs can be hard to do cross device but that's conscious design choice. The implementation is not that hard if you start small and work your way up.

What I said in the article was that most devs should have had time to do both, BUT if they really had to pick one, pick mobile. I'm not saying ignore desktop - I'm saying it's the #2 priority.

I strongly disagree.

Good point about "the screensize they would demo" but in the case of Rails Rumble, the contestants don't demo their work. The judges browse through them on their own on whatever device they like.

Yes, there are certain work products (code, for example) that still can only reasonably be done on desktop/laptop computers. But the list of work products that require a desktop/laptop are dwindling, not growing.

Printers are a good analogy. Look around most any office and note that the number of printers has drastically decreased. This is a sign of work products changing - i.e., people don't need to print out as much stuff on paper to get our jobs done. The same is happening with desktop/laptops now. It's industry specific currently but the trend is clear.

I too wondered that while writing the post, but I can't think of anything about Rails that inherently makes the framework desktop-first.

Hi! I'm the post author. Desktop is dead in the way TV and newspapers are dead. Yes, they're still around but there's no growth. They certainly shouldn't be the main focus for a web developer building a personal site from scratch.

Your first media query is no media query

What don't you like about this?

This mobile up approach means your responsiveness is dependent on Javascript, which smells funny to me.

Hm... I don't see how a mobile first approach depends on javascript. In my experience, it's quite the opposite, in fact. Mobile first is all about progressive enhancement and starting small. Granted, many web devs build their sites in a way that doesn't work w/o js, but IMHO, this should be the exception not the rule.

Most websites don't live that long, and desktop users still account for the lions share of traffic. If you had to pick one, you'd probably pick desktop. So it makes sense to me to start there.

If designing mobile first meant "build two websites, and the first one you build should be the mobile one" then I might agree with you. But using RWD means that you only need to have one site, and that it will work across mobile and desktop. Because of the was CSS works, it's just way easier to start with a bare bones style for small screens, and use min-width media queries to progressively add more complex styles for screens with more real estate.

I personally find it easier to work backwards towards mobile. But that's just me.

I'm shocked to hear that, but obviously can't argue; your experience is your experience. I teach RWD classes, and without exception, students who have dabbled in RWD have had a really hard time trying to shoehorn a desktop site into a mobile format using RWD principles. It's not impossible but it is really painful. I've worked on responsive sites for some of the biggest publishers in the world and I can't imagine how would could have worked from desktop down to mobile. This is because CSS is much easier to use in an additive fashion, as opposed to subtractive.

Just my two cents.

I <3 PVD. It's a great place to live and work. Affordable living, excellent bars and restaurants, tech and design energy from Brown and RISD, and an active and vibrant geek community (http://www.flickr.com/groups/providencegeeks/). It's really a great place to live.

Big thanks to all of the folks who have supported sanity on this thread. My thoughts here:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonathans-card/the-real-deal/...

Peace, j

The thing that scares me about this idea is the effect it would have on the donor if they didn't see their donation reflected immediately in the feed. Not only is it less exciting, but it potentially opens up questions about where the money is in the meantime.

I will strenuously avoid this turning into anything resembling a bank - it needs to be more like a "take a penny, leave a penny" tray sitting on a Starbucks counter. If someone want to be a jerk and empty the tray into his pocket, so be it. They're just a jerk who I'm sure will get what they deserve in life.

Fingers crossed, j

Jonathan here:

Thanks for your input, and perhaps for paying my bridge toll ;)

You wrote:

"Unfortunately it's one of those things where one anonymous bad egg will ruin it for everyone else. Some way to restrict it to a community with less anonymity would help."

I see where you're coming from, but I believe that A) nobody (with the possible exception of Starbucks) can ruin this, and B) the solution to the bad egg problem is to be more open, not more controlling.

Stay tuned... j

Jonathan here:

The beauty of this is that one person can't ruin the fun for everyone involved. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think people who don't get the concept are in the minority. Their behavior will be overrun 100x by people who do get the concept.

We'll see what happens soon enough... j

Please try both and share your findings with the group.

Jonathan here:

Thank you so much for sharing your story – it really made my day. "Kindness that spreads uncontrollably" perfectly sums up my highest hopes for this experiment.

Best, j

Thanks for your feedback! Your suggestion is a good one and something that I've been considering. It is possible to reload one sbux card from another, so I was thinking about using one for deposit only and dribbling the balance into the purchase card at $20 per hour or similar. I think there's something about this that would ruin the excitement so I'm working on different approach at the moment. Not sure where it'll end up.

Jonathan here:

I see what you're saying, and of course it is possible that some jerk is buying gift cards with the card.

That said, it's worth pointing out that the tweet stream is not real time and it doesn't have every transaction. The card balance is scraped from the sbux site every minute and posted to Twitter if it has changed since the last tweet. When there are multiple transactions in the same minute, the changes get aggregated. This can result in some strange looking numbers.

What I think we're learning here is that if someone wants to reload the card, lots of little transactions over time is better than one big one. Or, perhaps the balance should not be tweeted.

Thoughts? j