Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.
I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5 minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?
Thanks. Actually I did everything but the design :-P
"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product."
Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few weeks of learning before that.
"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"
Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the option of renting more for $1/month/IP.
I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.
http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/
Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.
But I'm not the fastest:
http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries
I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5 minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?