mpiccino

We have a launched web product that was built on drupal. It's pretty and it works but we need to re-architect it in order to scale. The recommendation has been to rebuild it in ruby on rails...

We're bootstrapped and this would be a CTO / technical co-founder type role. We have a technical lead already but could definitely use more help since he is only part time.

Thank you in advance for any help. Sorry if this is something I should already know the answer to...

So... the plain browser experience is okay, but nothing out of the ordinary... I'm not feeling the "social" aspect of it all yet, except for highly sub-par Facebook & Twitter feeds on that right sidebar. And those are too crammed and cluttered to provide a good experience.

I don't want to just use this as a Chrome substitute simple because if I ignore the extra features, it feels essentially the same... I'm not going to give a company so much in terms of data on my activities & potential revenue for so little added value in exchange.

I want to "get" this. But I haven't had my ah-ha moment yet. Will keep trying a bit longer though...

Question on project-based pricing... Is it good to leave a final payment upon completion?

We didn't do that on my project and it was frustrating because there was no incentive at the end to get the final issues sorted out. We could tell that our contractors were burned out and ready to move on, but we needed our project completed as originally planned and it was hard to keep them motivated with no financial upside for them. Especially since, with all the delays, they had already spent more time on the project than they had budgeted for, so they were essentially losing money on the deal.

Yes, we could have agreed to put more money into this and started up a "new" project, but it didn't seem fair to us at that point...

Is it standard in the industry to leave a portion of the cost to be due only upon completion? Because I think that would have helped us, but we didn't know at the outset if it was within our bargaining power to try to get that...

I recently outsourced graphic design and development for my start-up, and definitely made some mistakes... To be sure, these might be unusual for HN readers since my co-founder and I didn't have a tech background, and many of our problems might have been avoided with more technical knowledge on our part.

So I guess the first advice would be, make sure you have sufficient knowledge & information on your side to determine whether advice you're getting is correct.

Make sure it is clear from the beginning who is going to project-manage the process, and if your contractors say they'll do it, make sure to have regular check-ins with the PM. In our case, they said they didn't need us to step in as PMs, but we realized only very late that they weren't really managing their process on their end.

We had huge delays because of this, some egregiously occurring because the graphic designer never gave the developer the right mocks and we only found out during QA.

Finally, I totally agree with the comment above to be really clear about requirements. Do not believe anyone who tells you that they don't need things spec'ed out.

In my experience a clear spec is the only guarantee that things will get done properly and that there is real accountability in the process.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the advice, guys. I'll start with the HTML and CSS then... And then Ruby on Rails?

Thank you. That's awesome advice. Yes, I know it will be difficult and I shouldn't kid myself into thinking I can learn in a short period of time what really takes a decade to learn, but thanks for giving me somewhere to start!

The problem I constantly find with all IE versions is that they render fonts much bigger than other browsers, so they constantly make things crowded and cause items (e.g. the About button on that screen shot) fall to the next time.

It's immensely frustrating.

That's awesome. I hope you don't mind that I linked to it.

That's so interesting. We are definitely self-similar, over and over in the course of our lives. If you could view a person 4-dimensionally (with time as the 4th), then the furthest level of zoom would be the person's entire life, replicating patterns at every instance. Zoom to any shorter time span and you would likely see something different but still similar. Could the narrowest level of zoom be a single thought in a single instance? That it itself probably has fractal-levels of complexity.

Can this be used also for parts of a site that are accessible to registered users only? I'm seeing it work on our homepage, but I can't access the rest of the site.