I've been planning on learning Love2D / Lua soon, and this looks amazing.
Have you shared it on the Love2D forums yet?
Would it work well for a use case like say, debugging behavior on collision? Like say I fall through a platform, rewind, change a variable, play forwards, fall through, rewind again, etc?
Thanks. I think it would definitely work if the collision code is within the same module, in the same way the current physics, where mario is pulled down by gravity down to the ground and no more. If it's calling out to love.physics, I suspect there will be issues, and I think there can be workarounds, but I cannot say so for 100% until I've tried it thoroughly myself.
I built this prototype to see if it works, I'll be able to take it further. Currently, I don't think I'll be able to use it for development myself because it's API isn't well designed. I built the minimum to emulate Elm's mario example, but a lot more work needs to be done to be used in a proper game where file saving, loading and calling out to the external framework is involved.
Any chance of defining a custom selection key other than ctrl? On my Macbook air, holding the control key with my pinky or thumb while I type is really awkward. Shift would seem more natural, as the pinky finger is already used to using this as a modifier, no?
Hmm, probably. I used to use Shift but the problem was there are languages where they need to use Shift to be able to type more letters (Thai for example), so it wouldn't let them type other languages. I could probably add it as an option though, but you wouldn't be able use capital letters, naturally heh
Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome.
Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more.
People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone actually gets it.
How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sifting through HN posts? I think getting new and quality inventory will be the biggest challenge, that's harder than getting job seekers.
You've basically created a less crappy and niche focused indeed.com:
I started with raw HTML, but wanted to have an interface that wouldn't require FTP-ing / SSH-ing, etc., so I played with a Gist as a datastore (example JSON: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5037450; explanation of how I used it: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5055709), but realized I wanted a little more flexibility. So I quickly hacked together a WordPress template so I could submit entries, where they could be filtered ("featured" and "not featured"), and they'd get cleaned up automatically (14 days on the page for not-featured posts, 1 month for featured posts). So maybe not quiiiite as MVP as I could have gone, but it was a good quick lesson in WordPress hacking. Side note: I'm happy to report that, with caching, WordPress pages can handle HN levels of traffic without a problem.
Initial inventory was a combination of seeing posts on other job boards, poking around at companies I know are remote-friendly, and seeing the "hiring" thread on HN last week. In terms of inventory, I'm hoping to highlight jobs that are already posted at other job boards as well as posting original ones. I'm curious to see how this chicken/egg problem resolves. I have a few thoughts, but we'll see.
Thanks for the encouragement on the UI. I'll keep fiddling with it to see what I can do to make it more legible without killing the spirit of the page.
Had this idea too, glad someone has executed on it so awesomely. I've been eager to get better at Sublime Text, so will start using this.
Two suggestions which I think would be really awesome.
!. The hard part of exercising though is getting your butt to the gym. What if you could sign up for a daily email that keeps you at it, challenging you to take it to the next level, tracks your progress, sets goals and reminds you to make them, etc.
2. It's really abstract to just hit key commands without seeing them actually do something. What if you made small animated gifs for each action your are emulating, maybe even with a full fake editor background? This way, your brain would be tricked further that you are actually performing the action represented by the keyboard shortcut.
What is the VC culture like in Berlin? Are there many VCs, and what kind of companies do they typically invest in?
To me, this is the difference between a good town for bootstrapping and a good town for creating a startup. As it stands, this article seems more like an argument for why Berlin is a great place to bootstrap a company. Which is also great, but different.
This reminds me, whatever happened to Turbogears? Are many people using it? I never really hear people mention using it compared to Django.
I thought long and hard about the "Should I learn Django or Turbogears" question 3 or four years ago, and went with Django. Back then, Django was not yet the "default" answer.
The TG, Pylons, and Zope guys all joined forces under the Pyramid banner a couple of years ago. There are still people developing in each of those three projects (and I think it's largely still maintained), but the definite trend is to Pyramid itself.
This is a silly weekend project I put out last Wednesday night. I presented it at a lightning talk at Minnebar (Barcamp in Minneapolis) and it got a surprisingly warm reception. So thought I'd share it here.
Platform is: Bootstrap, Django, Pinax. Hosting it on webfaction.
And if there are any bakers out there or you are interested, I highly recommend this book by authors here in Minneapolis:
What took the longest for me wasn't the sending of the emails, but the research that went into finding who to email.
This would be the same deal if I was cold calling. And I'm not sure how to automate this, you just have to slog through it. You can only call or email as many people as you can find after all. So that's the bottle neck.
So if the time investment is a wash, then it's really a question of what converts better, not based on bulk. I have a feeling calls will...but I don't have the personal data to prove it yet.
It's interesting you had bad experience with calls though. Were you selling something? Maybe that's the difference.
You can automate it a good deal with a mix of scraping and mturk, but that will result in both e-mails and phone #s, so your choice on what to do with them.
And experience w/ calls--I wouldn't say it was bad experience, it was just better with e-mail--tends to cut to the chase and replies are a better indication of interest. Everyone's selling something--even if you just want to talk to someone about their problems, you're still selling them on the proposition that it would be a more valuable use of their time talking to you than doing something else. And that doesn't make you a bad person, it just doesn't make a difference whether you're asking for money or someone's time.
But yeah, would be very interested to see your results w/ cold calling vs email, if you do two more rounds of e-mails and leave 3 vm messages on your cold calling before giving up, I'll bet you still do better with e-mail. But again, very interested to see your numbers, so very cool experiment!
Part of the trick is I don't even have a demographic or problem statement. I'm trolling for ideas with my lure in the water, sailing in circles. Consequently, 50% response rate would be a miracle. But maybe not for cold calls, we'll see.
Also, the whole buy some adwords and do a landing page thing worked for you? I have had zero luck with this approach. How niche was your idea? It seems like a rare combination where 1) The adwords are affordable, and 2) There is enough search traffic to generate real data.
Not having a demo or problem statement is tough probably? And you might find some great stuff using your lure like you are doing.
But I can't help feel you might have more fun and possibly better effectiveness if go the trite "scratch your own itch" route, or at least focus on demographics you are in or closely related to. You like tshirts? Call tshirt companies and focus on their problems. If you're calling on plumbing companies, great if that's what you're into. But you probably have at least a couple hobby areas you are much more interested in than plumbing. If you like puzzles, calling on game making/puzzle companies with something like "I love the games you are developing!" because you actually like their stuff is likely going to raise your response rates too.
Yeah, Adwords/Facebook/LinkedIn can work. Wasn't too niche. I targeted a pretty wide group, and the survey just asked "What's your biggest problem. A/B/C/D/other" and "How much of a hassel is that problem? Big, medium, small". You want a lot of "big" answers to one of those problems.
My deal is that I already went down the 'scratch your own itch' path, totally ignorant of the customer development approach and got burnt bad. So now I am going extreme opposite. My guess is there is a happy middle ground I need to drift back towards. I'll keep your advice in mind.
All my hobbies are too nerdy, and therefor over-served btw. Except one: sailing. Maybe I should take a harder look at that.
Have you shared it on the Love2D forums yet?
Would it work well for a use case like say, debugging behavior on collision? Like say I fall through a platform, rewind, change a variable, play forwards, fall through, rewind again, etc?