jorgenhorstink

The municipality of Baarle-Hertog is much fun. Turtles all the way down…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog

Is my understanding of ES6 classes wrong, or is the first migration rule in paragraph 3.1 missing the static keyword?

I'd think it should be:

  // ES5
  C.m3 = function(p3) { B4; }
  // ES6
  class C {
    ...
    static m3(p3) { B4; }
  }

A couple of months ago I watched a short video about how we got our cycling lanes. I think it provides some interesting context on why we built our cycling infrastructure. If you like this topic, you'll like the video...

https://youtu.be/XuBdf9jYj7o

Am I the only one who thinks it is odd to fake an employee? It just feels dishonest and utterly wrong to me.

"...and approximately 82,000 people are homeless on any given night." [1]

82,000 homeless on a population of 9,818,605 [2]; 0.835%

I just compared it to the 2012 stats for The Netherlands (highest homeless count in 2012).

27,300 homeless [3] on a population of 16,779,575 [4]; 0.163%

That was a bit surprising to me. It looks like there are 5 times more homeless per capita in LA than in The Netherlands...

[1] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California [3] http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/themas/bevolking/publicaties/ar... [4] http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLNL&PA=...

They released a short video [1]. It reminds me of video made in 1999 where a Dutch reporter asked people if they have a mobile phone [2]. The majority responded with: no, I don't need it, I have a phone at home, I have an answering machine, etc.

I'm wondering if Google Glass and similar products will change the future the way mobile phones did back in the '90 and early '00. What do you think?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZtNO2OnSqY [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u0RQk2Z1-o

I offer a cheap plan for monthly payment (the product is very low margin, especially compared to the large players in the market where one would easily pay at least 75e per month for the same functionality), a small discount if you're willing to commit for one year, and even a bigger discount if you're willing to commit for two years.

In the beginning we need cash flow, cash is king. So we hope lots of people buy the 2-year-deal. We are not trying to trick anyone. And I want an easy product, not a complicated one with different kind of support levels etc. No, I target a very specific audience, where there is no room for feature differentiation, imho. But who knows, this is just my feeling right now, we might change the offers in the future.

As I said in another comment, I haven't tested in IE entirely. Going to buy a windows laptop today :). I don't know MoneyBird that well (except for the invoicing part), so I can't tell you exactly. What I do know is, we have streamlined the entire process of sending invoices and reminders. We take a fundamental different approach to MoneyBird.

I am glad you are a happy customer of MoneyBird. This tells me there is at least a market of 1 person ;) I am quite surprised you can tell from only a couple of screenshots, MoneyMonk is a limited clone.

Of course there are similarities, giving the fact we target the same audience. But I really think we have a different kind of product. This sort of competition is only a good thing. It keeps us all motivated to make the best software for our customers. In the end it is the customer who wins.

You're totally right. It was a little presumptuous. You know the saying: "Assumption is the mother of all..."? From an autistic, mathematical point of view you are right, but if I look into the stats of my Google Analytics, I see less then 4.1% Dutch. If I take into account that especially Dutch people would click on a link ending with .nl, I think I may assume the percentage of Dutch HN readers is even low.

What I meant of course is: most of the people cannot read it. So, lets trigger them to judge the design, just by its design. This gave me a lot of new insights I want to thank everyone for :)

Well, it actually does. Where classical accountancy software (Unit4, Exact, etc.) focusses on the ledger aspect, making it hardly impossible for human beings to use the software, we take a different approach.

We thought: what is accounting about? It is about registering financial facts. That's what we actually do. We optimized the user interface for normal human beings registering financial facts. We are then able to derive the entire accountancy fundament with double entries, ledgers, etc.

Suppose one transfers 100 euro from their bank book to the cash book. This should be registered using a cross post (don't know if this is the correct term). No human being (freelancer) understands this. But if they can select: oh, this was a cash withdrawal, Money Monk knows how to register the financial facts.

Thanks :) I would never have thought anyone would actually notice the silly language joke at all... If you happen to know Dutch freelancers who still do their accounting in Excel, you know where to send them to ;)

You're both right. Personally I hate it when I go to a restaurant and they ask me if I want some bread already, or when they ask me if I want ketchup with my fries. Yes, yes, yes, of course. Why they ask? Because when you get the bill, you see 50ct for the ketchup.

I don't like such an experience. This is exactly why I don't differentiate in functionality, but only in price based on the commitment. Our target customers are freelancers, our companies with at most two employees.

We only have one plan: THE AWESOME PLAN. Depending on how long you're willing to commit, you get a discount. I agree the table could point that out a little bit better.

I had never heard of it, but billmonk seems to me more for personal use. MoneyMonk is accounting software targeted to freelancers and people running a company without employees (ZZP is the Dutch abbr), including tax reports etc, creating invoices.

My blog is a little bit rusty (non-existing). Tomorrow I'll put a simple blog online :) http://jorgenhorstink.nl/

And you're living in Utrecht as well I see :) If you want to grab a coffee the other day, drop me an e-mail. My username at gmail...

Thanks! Dunno how I could have missed that one :)

Wauw, that doesn't look pretty indeed. Would help a lot if you could tell me which browser you're using. I haven't tested in IE at all yet. * shame shame

Thanks! Good suggestion. The original design framework (color scheme, font's etc) is made by someone else. That design was absolutely beautiful, but not from a conversion point of view. There were no clear CTA buttons, etc.

The past couple of weeks I've been reading a lot of great articles online, viewed a couple of inspiring TED talks and other video's, and I used that information to build the landing page.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to recap which articles I read, which video's I watched, and I'll write about it in a blogpost.

Hmm, I guess I was wrong you cannot read it ;) The button moves to the header to make sure a Call To Action button is always visible. The CTA in the header disappears if a CTA button on the website is visible.

Good point about the carrousel. I might want to track some events to see if people actually use it. But if it is a long form, doesn't that hurt the experience? On massive long page?

You are actually able to click on the screenshots, but I guess we could make that more clear? Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated!

I love the fantastic book Domain Driven Design written by Eric Evans too. Glad to see it is on DHH's top 5 as well. The concepts of that book (Entity, Value Object, Repository, Aggregate, Aggregate Root) have helped me a lot developing well written software.

I still don't get it why I've seen so few Node.js applications using Application Service layers, Domain Models and Repositories, and instead clog their MVC containers with calls to whatever datastore directly, with no Domain Model at all.

Using techniques like this is slowing down the entire online industry. I would never ever clog my HTML to implement rounded corners in a browser released almost 4 years ago. No matter how many people are still using it. It just feels wrong.

If the entire industry would stop testing and developing for ancient browsers, I'm quite sure people will upgrade their browsers within a couple of months (I understand this is not possible from a business perspective). Companies that still rely on ActiveX components or other proprietary stuff, won't upgrade IE soon anyway, but they might install a browser like Firefox or Google Chrome for daily browsing.

Thanks for your response. I was just trying to explain why I didn't like it so far, and what I'd love to see. Good to hear you guys are moving forward and implementing new features.

I don't think people would like to create brand icons manually. If I get a lot of e-mails from john.doe@ah.nl, why not running a separate Node.js instance trying to locate the favicon (and using it to display the logo) by trying known locations, or parsing the HTML; http://ah.nl/favicon.ico

The name of the brand might be easy to fetch by doing a WHOIS lookup. Just a thought...

Just installed the plugin, but it was a bit of a disappointment and I just uninstalled it again. The plugin was able to recognize exactly two brands: Google and Google+. Wut?

I'm sure it takes a lot of time and dedication to developing the plugin, and I enjoyed reading the article, but this is not what I was expecting to see.

What would be useful to me though is a list of the top X e-mail contacts I received e-mail from and sent e-mail to the last Y days. I regularly have contact with several people from the same company/brand, and I always are using the search bar on top like: "John Doe something I remembered from the specific e-mail I'm looking for".

So basically I'm not that interested in mails I received from a brand, but I'm more interested in e-mails I received from a specific person.

Gamification would be awesome candy: statistics and graphs on how fast I'm responding to e-mails I receive, etc.

In the Netherlands the use of cheques is abolished in 2002. We all use internet banking now, using (at least) two-factor authentication, and we are able to transfer money from and to our current or savings accounts. Transferring money to other bank accounts (paying rent, paying to friends etc.) is also very easy.

Most banks also have mobile applications for smartphones making money transfer even easier. I'm able to transfer money to people I've already sent money to, by just using an iPhone app, and a personal pin code. When I loose my phone, I can just block the app, just like what I'd do when I loose my plastic (credit) bank card.

In Holland we also use iDEAL [1], a nation-wide system for online shopping. It works a little bit like OAuth; I provide the webshop the bank I use, the webshop requests a money transfer, the bank creates a unique transaction, the webshop sends me to the bank, bank requests credentials and processes payment, and sends me back to the webshop proving details about the transaction. This system sounds much more secure to me than the credit card paradigm; only using a credit card number, an expiration date and a 'security code'.

I just don't understand why the USA is still using a method so susceptible to fraud.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL

I also prefer this approach. The excellent book 'Domain Driven Design - Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software' by Eric Evans has helped me a lot. I'd write something like:

  <?php
  class AuthController extends Controller {
    public function __construct(Request $request) {
      $this->service = AuthService::getInstance();
    }
    // reflection calls a Module + Action attribute to {module}Controller
    public function login(Request $request) {
      if ($request->getRequestMethod() === WebRequest::POST) {

        if ($this->service->login($request->getAttribute('username'), $request->getAttribute('response')) {
          die('{ "success" : true }');
        } else {
          die('{ "success" : false }');
        }
      }
    }
  }
  class AuthService { // Application Service -> it just defines a clear API, not a Domain Driven Design service
    public function __construct(Session $session) {
      $this->session = $session;
    }

    public function login($username, $response) {
      try {
        $user = User::getRepository()->getByUsername($username);

        return $user->isValidChallengeResponse($this->session->getAttribute('challenge', 'auth'), $response);

      } catch (UserDoesNotExistException $e) { }
      return false;
    }
  }
  class User {
    protected static $repository;
    public static function setRepository(IUserRepository $repository) {
      self::$repository = $repository;
    }
    public function getRepository() {
      return self::$repository;
    }

    // yeah yeah, it is arguably if this belongs as a Domain method of the user…
    public function isValidChallengeResponse($challenge, $response) {
      // and yes, this is very weak challenge response…
      return md5($challenge . $this->getPassword()) === $response;
    }
  }
  ?>

If you're dating a girl, and for some reason you choke during the conversation in a nice little bar. If you really like the girl, you'd ask her for another chance... :)

You have little to loose. You have a no now, and might be able to upgrade it to a yes :)

This is what I always have thought to be a huge problem in RESTful API design of all major companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. It is mainly pull-technology. One has to ask the Facebook-server all the time: get a list of friends, get a list of friends, get a list of friends.

I'd love to see an API model based on events and callback URL's.

pseudo, but you'll get the idea:

http://api.facebook.com/event/on-friend-connect?callback=htt...

IMHO, WebServices should communicate in an evented fashion. If I want to draw an umbrella on myserver if it is going to rain in The Netherlands, I don't want to ask the weather server every X minutes: is it going to rain? is it going to rain? is it going to rain?

No, I want:

http://api.weeronline.nl/event/on-weather-change?location=Ut...

pubhubsubbub solves this issue for RSS feeds, but pubhubsubbub is way too narrow to me. I hope evented API's will become the next big thing, enabling developers to create a whole new bunch of awesome products.

Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)

I released socialpublish.io a week ago. It has an easy to use API for pushing messages to social media platforms. It does not use RSS-feeds like dlvr.it and TwitterFeed, resulting in no delays and more control of what you publish where. Plugin available for WordPress, working on other plugins.

If you've any comments, remarks, suggestions, criticism, I'd love to hear it!