271–280 of 288 posts
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Most of my projects are subscription based SaaS web apps specifically aimed for a local (non-US) market. Showing them wouldn’t do you any good because you’d need an account to view the service and it would attract unwanted attention. Contrary to the prevailing HN mentality, I prefer to fly under the radar.
I think he just wants to see screenshots...
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Can you say a little-more about the "sockets"? How do you implement this? I'm not even sure exactly what you mean, do you have an example? It sounds like a fun feature to implement so I'd love to hear more. Thanks
Have a look into websockets. They are used to create an always open connection between the client and server. Meaning your application will not need to continually poll the server for updates.
It works over regular HTTP and has a built in method to tell the server the last seen message (i.e. to allow replaying old messages), and exposes the event type (i.e. the event: field in the event block sent from the server) for use with addEventListener in the browser.
It's supported by all non-MS browsers, and because it works over regular HTTP, it can be polyfilled in IE/Edge using long polling XHR.
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XLS and XLSX are neither clear nor unambiguous and I would take 12 CSV formats over either any day. I actually haven't ever met anyone who seriously had to extract data from XLS/X frequently that didn't revile it for its ambiguities. Not to mention the ways that the application munges the user input prior to saving it, leaving the biggest ambiguity of all, what the heck is ACTUALLY in that cell. EDIT: I will add that…
The single biggest problem is date / time formats. Excel encodes dates and times as floating point numbers. The date / time-ness of a cell is encoded in its format. Some of the formats are hard-coded, some float depending on locale, and some use explicit format-pictures embedded in the styles. But of course there's no guarantee that the user has formatted a cell with a date as a date. Sometimes the user has pasted a…
You'd think when Microsoft came up with their new shiny file formats they'd actually make them new and shiny and good.
But nope.
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So, to follow the diplomatic approach here: Client: "Encrypt our data using the md5 cipher." Consultant: "I will investigate the feasibility of this." ... two days pass ... Consultant: "I have considered your proposal. I believe we should encrypt your data with SHA-256. md5 is insecure, here's several references. SHA-256 is much more secure and more popular. It is a NIST standard, and just as cheap." Client: (probabl…
Ignoring the encryption/hashing problem, what happens if your client is moderately technical and also researches the problem, and finds the same answer in 5 minutes? You look like you're incredibly slow (or over-billing) if it takes you two days to come back. Don't assume your client is an idiot.
I get marketing, developers, content-people, biz-dev, product, higher management, middle-management ... in one room ... and after 2 days we produce a prioritized roadmap on how to move the company forward. Plus: No dead bodies, they actually liked beeing there. Most of the time they can't believe it either. It's fun.
That sounds awful. How do you avoid dead bodies?
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Goulet pens, a favorite in the fountain pen community, includes a tootsie pop with orders. It's super nice of a touch, even for a person who doesn't dig them.
I love Goulet pens and Brian is doing fantastic job.
You know you're supposed to talk about "fake news" in conjunction with some "fringe" website - not a highly esteemed, reputable news agency like The Guardian!
Here are my top 2:
I have a simple motto: I aim to save my clients money. This can work in lots of different ways, shaving a day off development here or there, coming up with cheaper solutions, even outsourcing little tasks to UpWork or automating them via an existing web service.
#2: At the end of each week, I like to send a quick summary email. I got that tip from another freelancer. Even though clients have access to online project management, it gives them additional reassurance and they go into the weekend with a sense that you're doing good work on their behalf.
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tablib[0] is one option for Python. There are quite a few libraries that handle export. Excel files (and other Office) file formats are just zip files containing XML. For a while now, this has been an open standard[1]. [0] https://github.com/kennethreitz/tablib [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
I've found the Python pyexcel library to be the most flexible option to read/write Excel files. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyexcel/0.0.9
I do hardware engineering work for hire and one of the things that always works is having some documentation ready at the first formal meeting. Specifically, I have a skeleton requirements document that I put together from our previous correspondence (there's always a phone call, few emails, etc.) trying to flesh out their project needs. It doesn't matter if this is incomplete, inaccurate, or any other in-word. It sh…
This is always as a solo? Or as a small engineering firm?
WE DOCUMENT OUR API'S