Viewing profile — samlev

It's nice to see a company thinking about the bigger picture again - instead of "How can we manufacture the one device that dominates the market", they're aiming for "How can we ma…

I've started writing a "learn to program" book, focusing on presenting a very low barrier to entry. What I need is feedback as I go from a few people of different levels of skill f…

I know PHP is horrible, but I use it, and so do thousands of other people. Until there is something else where you can deploy a prototype by dragging a single file onto a server wi…

I've been reading HN for a while, and thinking about start ups/business ideas for longer. One thing that keeps showing up are these 'sexy start ups' which seem to be make-or-break …

Open Source. Sure, you don't get paid for it directly, but it can get your name noticed, and show people that you can code. Either contribute to an existing project, or start your …

Markov chain generator seeded off existing comments?

Going freelance isn't in itself a poor decision. Quitting a paying job without a steady stream of work already lined up is. Start trying to build a customer base on the side. Once …

One more reason why software patents are a toxic idea that should really just go away.

Yeah, I stumbled on to the payment plans. I'm not certain about the price points you've set there - it would ultimately depend on who your target audience is, and if they would be …

I tend to have... Opinions... about project and task management software. I'll be happy to give it a go and pass on any thoughts/suggestions/problems that I have through the 'feedb…

Simple question that I ask because I'm curious. What do you use to try to explain technical ideas to non-technical people? Mine is most commonly a car analogy - not that I know muc…

The short answer is "You get what you pay for". There are plenty of 'cheap' contractors who get as many jobs as possible, churning out bad code that kind of does the job. Most of t…

You could probably hire a free-lancer to get most of this stuff going for you (there are plenty of sites around for hiring people to do small jobs). Ultimately, though, you should …

Your first step is to look at a few simple tools that could give you ways to get perceived (and actual) speed-ups. These are your low hanging fruit, before spending time (and money…

I have used: Trac, Redmine, Basecamp, Trello, FeatureZen, ActiveCollab, and a few others (including in-house trackers that I helped to build). They vary wildly from far too technic…

As tempting as it might be, no. I would never do this. Not only is there an issue about professional trust, but it's a vulnerability that you're deliberately building into a system…

Cool, but I couldn't close the java 'ScreenLeap' dialog without using chrome's task manager to kill the java plugin. (I'm running Ubuntu 11.10, and chrome 16.0 if that helps) Also,…

In terms of commercial experience (i.e. stuff I've been paid for) I've been working for about 5-6 years now. Most of the commercial stuff that I worked on was private/backend stuff…

Clickables: My website: http://www.samuellevy.com Open Source project: http://www.samuellevy.com/mico EDIT: My Resume, because that's probably important, too: http://bit.ly/wnOV2Q …

First thing's first: I'm not looking for work right now. Second thing's second: I'm not looking for back-patting, or false sincerity. I'm asking for honest opinions from people who…

Every time I hear the term "kill-switch", it instantly lowers my opinion of the developer. Something about it just irks me.

I have seen some rather shady people, who would probably pay for this type of thing, but those people are very, very unlikely to be offering a real, viable alternative.

You could probably use/utilise the services which let you run code (like http://codepad.org/ ). Not perfect, but it would let you do the job of "executing code" without needing any…