Currently I am the sole contributer to all the content you see on Ri and since our page views have gone through the roof lately, I have decided that it would be best to pick up a few contributers to the site. These contributers can range from part time to daily, that is completely up to you. Our goal is always putting out the best quality content on a daily schedule. The more posts per day the better is how I look at it. The qualifications of a contributer are not very rigid. You must have a passion/knowledge for technology (specifically software development) and self-motivating. At this time contributers will not be paid (could change in the future), but it is a great thing to add to a resume or spread your name among the development community. Those who are interested can email me at the address on the about page.
I have been telling myself this every single day that I have been doing software development. It seems that there will never be a shortage of zealots pushing the next big language. They will tell you that there are some great new features that you cannot live without and you’re missing the boat if you don’t change. These outside comments make it very difficult to select a language for any upcoming project that you plan on starting. No matter what the concept, whether it be a copy cat of an existing application or completely original and innovative, you will have a line out the door of people telling you why their language is the best for your application. I have one thing to say to those people that never miss an opportunity to plug their favorite language, “If you knew anything, you would realize that your language is not the best.”
This was not an easy lesson to learn. Our site is less than a few weeks old and I had figured that it would not receive any large traffic for a few months. I was wrong. As some of you noticed our site hit the viral level with our article about web terms. The amount of traffic that was sent our way crippled our server and taught me the importance of caching mechanisms.
After tweeting back and forth with a friend of mine over what language to use for our next project, I came up with a idea I want to try for our readers. Everyone is a fanboy of one language or another. What I want to do is challenge each of you to tell me “What language is the best and why?” in 160 characters or less (a single tweet). Post them in either a comment or send them to my twitter. I will then post the best and most creative ones in a post later this week. Also I would like to thank the HardOCP and Digg community for the recent traffic influx.
It seems that everyone has their own idea of what Web 2.0 means.That is one of the pitfalls to using a single buzzword to define everything you see on the internet. I have heard people describing nearly every new website as being Web 2.0 as if it was describing the launch date of a site. The term ironically is the most popular category on Resourceful Idiot. In leu of this, I am going to finally give you the definition of Web 2.0 and the principles that define it. In order to do that however, I need to start from the beginning with Web 1.0.
To kick off this series, I figured a good place to start is with the acquisition business model. This has become one of the more popular business models for web services. The reason this works is because there are big companies (ie. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc) that are acquiring startups at an alarming rate. Like any business model, basing your company on the sole idea of being acquired is risky. If done right however, it can be a very lucrative approach to a startup business.
After talking with our editor, I have decided to start a series on business models. Each Thursday for the next couple weeks I will be taking a look at different business models for development startups. In each article there will be an overview of the model, when to use it, its advantages, and disadvantages. Each post will be filed under the series category so you can view the entire set of posts by selecting it from the right column. The series has yet to have a name and I am open to suggestions so post a comment if you have an idea! We want to get some discussions going on around here.
There is an announcement about Twitter potentially moving away from the Ruby on Rails framework and looking for alternatives. In the article it suggests that Twitter is looking to migrate toward a Ruby only architecture. All this is no shock to anyone who has attempted designing a Rails-based application as a flagship product.
Every startup is focused on the same thing and that is getting a product out the door at a minimum amount of cost. The easiest way to ensure low cost is to cut down on physical development time. What I mean by physical development time is the actual time it takes to go from paper to final product. This is where Ruby on Rails has found its niche. Rails has been hailed as being the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to rapid development. I am not going to debate this fact because this is exactly why I use the framework myself. The highly debated topic I am here to weigh in on is the points of scalability and performance. These are exactly the same two points employees at Twitter have very publicly commented on.
Stumbling around the internet today I noticed that there is a resounding movement toward the usage of UML diagraming applications. I agree that these programs like Microsoft Visio are cool and a required tool of most business development cycles, but they are a waste of time. There hasn’t been anything that can replace the tried and true methodology of diagramming on paper. Visio can never add enough features to match a developers artistic skills. So here I am to teach you in the next two paragraphs how to take an idea and turn it into code the easiest way possible.
In the first part of this two part article, I discussed a high level overview of the entire interview process. Now, as promised, I will discuss the types of technical questions that are commonly asked during the interviews.
When interviewing for any software development position, the most important quality for the interviewer to find out is your development skills. They will first look at your resume and begin to work off of that. Prep work begins by reviewing your own resume and making sure that anything listed on there is correct. If you listed something like C++, but have not programmed anything in C++ for the last few years, it is best to give yourself a high level review on a wikipedia article.
Read More
Add Ri to Favorites
Follow us on Twitter
Add Ri on Facebook
See our Stumbles
See our Diggs
Check our bookmarks