kenkam

There are several things I might consider, but this is by no means an exhaustive list:

* Tech fit -- how does this technology solve the business problem? Have you considered how the overall architecture will look like? You might end up splitting them up to several different components each potentially valid to be written in different languages, depending on their nature. Given that, what do you need to achieve? Perhaps a Rails app is fit for purpose if you're writing a proof of concept. Or you might opt for a language that has established libraries for exposing a RESTful interface and write an SPA on top of that. My point is that it really depends on the business problem and how that is tackled.

* Ecosystem -- are there libraries out there that help you do what you need it to do? Will you have to roll your own?

* How will it be maintained? If you're not working for yourself, then you can assume your code will be maintained by someone else. Is the technology chosen accessible for your intended audience? Like you said, if it is a xyz shop, then it might make sense to write it in xyz. If it's a polyglot shop, then perhaps this is less of a consideration.

* What are the development tooling like? IMO this is quite important for my sanity because I dislike using clunky tools.

* How will the code be pushed out to production. Are there established best practices for pushing the code you're written in xys language into production?

* How easy is it to write tests for the language?

Something to also consider is whether it is good for the future. There is an element of YAGNI here, but it's worth considering the longevity of your technical choices and how easy it will be to upgrade.

As a company interviewing candidates, we see the recruitment process much like a conversion funnel for any website: there will be a lot of hits on our spec, some people will apply, of which some will do the telephone interview, of which some will get through to the coding test, and so on.

If OP doesn't want to do a test, then he will just end up as one of the ones that didn't make it through the funnel. This then boils down to whether there are companies out there that will take him on his project's merit or whether OP is desperate for a job.

A couple points I disagree with:

* "My main gripe with coding tests is that they ask me for an investment of my time and resources so that they can gather information about me, but I'm getting nothing back." -- you can potentially progress to the next interview stage, you will refresh your memory on coding tests, etc. There is still something to be gained.

* "I've already expressed interest in their position." -- there is minimal effort required to apply for a job. As an interview we get swamped by CVs that all look equally similar - we often need something to distinguish between these CVs. We have seen a wide range of coding test submissions and from this you can glean how interested the candidate is.

Finally, while the OP's suggestions are sensible, they are not always practical for companies, especially when it scales. We can't afford to be distracted by bringing a candidate into the office and work with us especially if we have multiple candidates. Even if the company decided to bring someone in, and assuming the candidate is capable, it will take them the better of a day to get up to speed and running -- setting up the dev env, getting the source, building it, making sense of the application, making sense of the feature/bugfix, making sense of the coding style, etc. They won't be effective enough to actually check in working code.

Just to add to the above comment: you cannot compare Duke Nukem Forever with Hideo Kojima, who has a proven track record of releasing games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideo_Kojima#Works

He has produced more games than I have written pet programs.

can we please have a NSFW tag

Different people have different ways of working. OP likes to works in sprints. Others might not. YMMV.

| so you'd think they would know almost instantly what they're looking for.

What they are looking for is probably a subset of good startups, ie. your startup can be good but it's not what they are looking for.

To some extent it must be a statistics game for them. The investment they make flying founders out must have a good return for them in terms of potential investments. Since they have been doing it for a while now the numbers must be close to optimal.

Senior as in age? Or senior as in someone who has the experience?

I interpreted it as the latter... although I live in England and when people mention senior I think of people who has experience.

Feels like GoDaddy tried desperately to gain mind-share of ruby/rails developers, realised it was costing more than it was making and hence shutting it down.

I have a similar resolution. I find that I excessively judge others internally (even though I don't voice it) and that places irrational pressure on myself. I judge because of various reasons, but I think mainly to make myself feel that I'm better. This illusion ended when I realised I'm not actually that good at anything. I wonder if I am the only one.

* Don't worry about others judging me

* Don't judge others

I don't see how that article talks about the FB killer. It merely states that it has observed UK teenagers moving away from Facebook and cites various reasons, one of them being parents encouraging the use of FB.

Maybe a FB killer is an app made for parents that persuades them to encourage their kids to use FB?

This is news to me. Each to their own, I guess.

Bit sensational though, it's not just those 3 lines. You'll also have to add the option to the sign up form, bit more overhead in testing, etc.

It's not just 3 lines is what I'm trying to say.

I'm on Windows at work and the scroll bar was visible (when I went there the 2nd time) but either I didn't notice it or I ignored it. In any case I think the content itself just didn't look like it required scrolling. Instead I clicked on the features on the left.

Didn't know I had to scroll down till I read this comment. Maybe a stronger call to action to scroll would be nice.

As an Asian, I can say with some amount of certainty that government official or company executive is viewed by the culture as 'successful'. All the parents I know want their kids to end up in a few industries: medicine, finance (accounting!), and law. It's an Asian thing. If similarities could be drawn, working in these industries in Asia would be comparable to living the American dream in the US.

It's truly a shame that the Korean news pan and label him as a 'failure'. It can only suggest what kind of a culture they have (as well as the majority of Asians). The man is spot on -- he is living a happy life as defined by himself, not anyone else.

Finally, you can argue whether IQ is a suitable metric or not, whether whatever metric should be considered, but the more important question is why is he being labelled as a failure for not turning out the way society expects of a person with high IQ?

The other side of the argument is that the more people that are creating/working with and disseminating/peer reviewing crypto projects, the better we will be educated on crypto collectively.

An example is web technology: plenty people have made plenty html/css/js mistakes in the past but there is also an overwhelming amount of evolving best practices on this topic, no doubt because of the mistakes made before. If all we do is decry crypto is hard, don't roll your own, then no one would be learning anything, and cryptography will be left to the a few select mathematicians and organisations that are referred to with acronyms.

It should be: crypto is hard, learn it and experiment with it, share your thoughts, and don't roll your own for critical applications.

Edit: clarity of argument in my example and grammar

I would very much be interested in the source describing this media-politics marriage dynamic that you mention.

> Not surprising, there is no free speech in France.

I don't see this as a free speech thing. I could argue there's no free speech in X. This kind of thing happens everywhere. People with money has power.

You know Disqus has taken over English when OP asks us to disquss on Hacker News.

Agreed. I will be interested to know what the lessons learned were and perhaps regulation will be the answer specifically for government projects, ie. civil projects similar to aircraft/military software development.

Edit: grammar

Call me a cynic -- here is a well known, renowned software development methodology expert who makes money on giving talks, books, etc. He argues that regulation of the software industry is a solution. Specifically: "I'd be thinking about what languages and processes we should force them to use". He just argued his business case. This makes me take whatever he says with a large pinch of salt.

Also, he makes dramatic points which have little to do with the problem. He describes the challenger problem, where a teacher's life could have been saved -- there were children waiting for that lesson! How is that relevant to what we're dealing with? I think it's a poor analogy only used for dramatic effect.

All this makes me feel the article as insincere and merely cashing in on the bad launch of healthcare.gov.

Missed the party, I'm getting a 503 now.

An awful lot of words to say essentially a) Google has a similar product and a hint of you stole our idea but that's ok, OP likes competition and b) OP has learnt much but won't say what it is (at this point I assume it's because of competitive reasons) and c) he's willing to share some of the insights to the market with Google directly so invalidates my assumption in b).

Regardless of how the blog was written -- this is how I got to know LiveNinja. Kudos for that.

Can't agree more. I can see benefit in asking technical questions (no matter how dumb) because you can educate and communicate one another, not the sort of questions LMGTFY deals with. I wouldn't enjoy working with the person who came up with this site...

It is obvious that this is not an attempt at trying to design a plausible iPhone. It is an attempt to show case his design chops. Unfortunately, I can't give him full marks on his design, I was put off by his "Accidental Gesture Recognition" paragraph. It is a short paragraph of 7 lines, 3 of which are hyphenated.

Pedantry aside, I think the mockups look great.

Another big reason for piloted planes is, seriously now, who here would get on a plane knowing that it was being flown without a pilot.

If it's hard for most of us from varying technological backgrounds to say yes than it's going to be almost impossible to convince the more mature passengers.

This is one of the reasons why all planes look the same (they have the same configuration, low wing with engine below wing) even tho Airbus and Boeing keep churning out concepts. Would you get on a plane that looked even slightly funky?

Not when their second advice is ... give a gift? What's that got to do with UI?

Edit: It's a good idea, great marketing idea, in fact. But when you're advertising ideas to improve UI, I will be quicker to judge...

There's a gap of a millennium between the 18th century and the link you posted. I was taught William the Conqueror of Normandy came and, well, conquered around 1066 and mark the turning point in England's society by the introduction of the Feudal System. If you we're a mere peasant you tended to stay in your village and work the land for the knights/barons. They might not be interested in nationalism at that point.

I couldn't help but notice the highlighting of the website is weird. If you start highlighting somewhere on the text then everything except the paragraph you clicked on will be dimmed, and there is a slight background difference on the actual highlighted text.

Gimmicks like this put me off websites straight away.

This analogy breaks down because Twitter (when they started out) wanted everyone to use their API, they want people to associate their app with their platform (e.g. TweetDeck and TweetBot)

ZenDesk on the other hand cannot be said to do the same.