> Adwords is almost useless at this point, though neither of us has had any prior experience so it could just be us not using the tools to their full potential.
For our B2C company, AdWords turned out to be a stable revenue driver for us. I had little experience in it (I'm a software engineer) and it took about $3k burned over 60 days to really understand how to build a profitable acquisition model using AdWords. I bought a couple books and worked on a bunch of multi-variant testing. I eventually obtained a sustainable and predictable process of obtaining revenue.
Never use AdWords Express, spend about 160 hours minimum of learning how marketing and PPC works, and use only data to drive decisions. ROI comes 4 months later when first starting out. If you're an engineer, AdWords API is a really useful to combine CRM and user data to discover new keywords and personas.
I built https://learnfrontend.com as an effort for me to A) teach people front-end development and B) to quit my consultant job so I can focus on making a difference in people's lives. The site features a news aggregate, videos, articles, goals, and interactive training platform.
The site is built on Symfony 2.5, PHP 5.5.x, Postgres, AngularJS 1.2.x, and SCSS. I use Jenkins for CI, Doctrine2 as the ORM, Redis for session I/O, Composer/Bower for dependency resolution, GitHub for documents, tickets, code reviews (pull requests to my self). HAProxy is on standby for the need to load balance and I have a job on Jenkins to scale up and down to a box if needed. I'm currently adding a Docker/Vagrant setup to I can easily manage dev environments (I don't think I'll do the same for production, we'll see). Stripe handles payments, I bought some cheap SSL cert (Stripe handles PCI info outside the server I/O). New Relic is used to monitor both QA, production and my jenkins deploy box. DNS is handled by GoDaddy. I have a Cron handling the news aggregate refresh, diff logic to populate new articles to a mobile curator app I built, and an approve/deny system that determines which articles are allowed to be propagated to the users. Videos are hosted through a third party service and assets internally are handled stored through S3 with CloudFront URL signing assets.
Although it just released, I have received a large amount of important feedback thats going to dramatically change the site. This includes offering more to the user for free, create more interactive components (my writing is too boring / too technical), and improve the marketing (showing the actual tools). I have some POCs in the works for a simulated IDE on edge Chrome/Firefox (uses WebWorkers to observe stackoverflow-able code w/o crashing browser, ScalaJS and Angular port on ScalaJS as MVC frontend; the experience is very much a level up from CodeAcademy's IDE-tutorial).
I'm also in a transitionary period where I want to build the new tools and reconstruct the existing ones in Scala (using Play as the framework). I have more time than before since I saved a significant amount of money to pursue this (I built v1 part time, 30 hours a week for 6 weeks with 30k lines of code added). The force behind this decision is I want more experience with functional programming while leveraging what I know already (JVM / Java).
One of the critical experiences I've had was actually materializing an idea and shipping it. Failing fast and often is an important strategy that's working for me after launching v1.
TL;DR: Built an e-learning site. I learned from failures. Building next version thats going to be rainbows and shit (thats the plan at least).
TL;DR: I use Angular (or * framework) simply because I can rapidly develop the features and adhere to ALL the requirements. ExtJS doesn't suck, but it typically doesn't fit into scope or doesn't fit all the requirements.
ExtJS is a great way to facilitate development when working with large data sets that involve (as you mentioned) CRUD utilities along with business validation constraints. With that being said, these kind of tools (And KendoUI too IMO) are being stuck inside intranet systems where the custom widgets and tools remain proprietary. No visibility == no hype.
I work exclusively on FE stacks and if the choice is Angular or any other top TODOMC* frameworks, typically that means the requirements don't fit well with ExtJS. Most JS-engine driven apps typically require a responsive implementation (cross platform is a big business trend), ability to incorporate a comprehensive design, and being able to do it within a reasonable amount of time (which is associated with budget).
ExtJS has a ton of overhead (especially browser performance and scalability in SPA sites), a large learning curve (IMO), and requires a ton of time to implement custom designs. This doesn't mean there aren't great tutorials or start kits, but its not something you can master within a week. Responsive support OOTB isn't there (KendoUI has solutions for this on their framework) and the only choice for reusable code for portable devices is an adaptive approach using Sencha Touch. This doesn't mean ExtJS is a bad choice, but typically ExtJS excels in desktop apps that are data driven with designs that were made for ExtJS (its rare to not recognize an Ext app if its built on Ext).
There's my two cents. I'm sure Sencha is going to destroy me if they ever read this.
Absolutely correct. ExtJS definitely excels at Desktop applications (pushing and pulling data sets from departmental DB's). That's we use it for and it's fine for that. However, the learning curve is fairly steep.. 4.x is much better than 3.x, more structured with some nice MVC hooks. Unfortunately, I would never use this for anything BUT an internal app.
For our B2C company, AdWords turned out to be a stable revenue driver for us. I had little experience in it (I'm a software engineer) and it took about $3k burned over 60 days to really understand how to build a profitable acquisition model using AdWords. I bought a couple books and worked on a bunch of multi-variant testing. I eventually obtained a sustainable and predictable process of obtaining revenue.
Never use AdWords Express, spend about 160 hours minimum of learning how marketing and PPC works, and use only data to drive decisions. ROI comes 4 months later when first starting out. If you're an engineer, AdWords API is a really useful to combine CRM and user data to discover new keywords and personas.