It would be great if such a network helped startup entrepreneurs earn money through writing articles. It could mean giving technical / business advice to other people, or just doing reporting on the industry and markets within it.
I think unpaid internships can be good. We must realize that there is more value than money. If a company establishes something that they have considered how you can benefit from, then I think they should be encouraged, particularly for early phase startup companies that don't have the cash but have interesting new solutions.
If the investors would appreciate the fact that they are the second person, then no one would have anything different to say about single founders, because any extra load would effectively be taken up by the resources that the investors give the true founder (adding someone to the team when there is too much load doesn't make them a founder just because it's early on, they can help in just the same way as if they were a normal employee).
Also the investor should (and is in a better position to) act in the same manner than a second founder does by encouraging and prompting the founder to deliver - it makes a huge difference when someone respectable with power is just saying "so have you got it done yet?". I think a second "founder" plays a large role in this respect, through just small actions.
I think there's a big space missing in learning to make web applications (this doesn't fill it). We often see material about the raw stuff (js,ajax,css), but we don't see material that focusses on HOW you should use that raw stuff. This is the most important part.
This course uses Rails, so I imagine you get a good overview of how you do stuff....but that's just how Rails says you should.
Does anyone have framework agnostic material that talks on a higher level about how we should be doing things?
I am working through this book right now, very slowly since I have a lot of other stuff going on right now. Links to my source code so far, as well as my running website-in-progress, are below.
I'm still at the part of the book where it provides guidelines for selecting tools (I chose Sinatra, Sequel, and Heroku), and exercises to become more comfortable with those tools. The next chapter is about planning.
Seconded. I just finished the first chapter of this book and it's really worth it.
I want to complete a project using Common Lisp. And I'm using Hunchentoot as a webserver, Postgresql as a database and the Postmodern library to interact with it.
Well, I wrote a simple blog engine after finishing the chapter
although I don't use a database here, the blog is saved directly to
disk (http://github.com/l0stman/Blog).
The biggest hurdle with Common Lisp is configuring the system
correctly because there's no out of the box solution. Although
there's a lot of library -- http://www.cliki.net is a great resource
-- figuring out how to use asdf-install is a bit painful. I took me
almost four days to figure out how to launch Hunchentoot as a daemon
at startup under FreeBSD
(http://github.com/l0stman/Hunchentoot-daemon). In my case, the lisp
server itself lays behind nginx as a proxy. The latter serves the
static pages too. Here's nginx's configuration:
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
location / {
root /usr/local/www/nginx;
# Use absract URL for static pages
try_files $uri.html $uri/index.html $uri $uri.txt @fallback;
}
location @fallback {
return 404;
}
# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
}
# Tunnel all requests where the URI path begins with "/ht"
# to a Hunchentoot server listening on 127.0.0.1:8080
#
location /ht/ {
rewrite ^/ht/(.*)$ /$1 break;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
proxy_redirect http://127.0.0.1:8080 /ht;
proxy_read_timeout 300;
}
}
Well...I haven't read the book, just skimmed through the chapters, but no, that looks more like a beginner book which focusses on the tools and the end goal rather than how to use the tools.
