You still need to guestimate how much bandwidth etc you are going to be using, but this will give you a good estimation of how much it will cost you per month to host on AWS: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Jalex, you checked out bizspark? Free licenses for things like SQL Enterprise/SQL Datacentre.

You don't have to be a startup either, and you can reapply. Defo worth a look if you haven't already no harm in applying and save a lot of £££.

Hadn't heard of it, but we don't qualify. But that's pretty awesome.

Just saw that there's a "7 databases in 7 weeks" to be released. Kind of like the 7 languages except for DBs...just moved onto my must get list, probably a good overview since my DB knowledge and approach is pretty much
1) RDBMS...if in doubt use postgres because it has tons of features, runs on all OS I'd ever want to use and is Open Source. If forced to use MSSQL or Oracle..curse (at SAP). Also avoiding MySQL ever since Oracle got involved.
2) noSQL...buzzword alarm bells go off, turns out I did noSQL for a living without relizing it though i.e. ZODB..object databases are nifty and nice (but should probably be indexed by using a RDBMS anyways) would like to use them more but RDBMS+ORM is good enough for me
3) Random other DBs...no clue

Basically I'm just a DB user (from code) that doesn't worry too much about DB details, my design is done DB agnostic and I usually just hope it somehow works

motherfvcker when i email you asking how to change a php.ini setting, i dont want your advice on whether or not the setting is good to use.. just tell me how to solve the problem i ask

i could post this exact rant any time i visit any IRC channel for any language whatsoever. it's like, instead of just answering the simple well formed question that was just posted in 20 seconds and helping someone out, let's type ~why to the IRC bot and ask a bunch of irrelevant questions about context. because of course the point for us is not to actually help people, but to find something wrong somewhere in what they're doing so we can smugly show off our knowledge of why that thing is wrong.

just got word that the best guy i interviewed over the past year accepted and may be joining my team. whooooooo!

lol indeed - but just bear in mind the same thing goes on here a lot too. people will sometimes post threads like "So UTG raised, UTG+1 3bet big and I flat call from the SB with 72o. flop comes K76. how much should I bet?" then get all tilty at people telling them fold pre when their question wasn't about preflop

Not comparable at all. When you ask the php question it's usually because you're stuck with the problem due to issues outside your control...pokerhand it's usually exactly this "lol don't get into this spot" information that is valuable (and not getting there is 100% in your control). If you ask a question about calling or folding river and someone gives you an answer about flop play...I always stop and read those because they tend to be either really insightfull or some trivial stuff people post (I assume because they somehow want to up their post count or sound smart or something).

That short rant lead to the following random thought...someone should invent some sort of team poker where 4 people play PF,flop,turn,river and can't communicate.

certainly the phenomenon exists here, as well as on almost any forum, like stackoverflow. and sometimes the obnoxious attitude is understandable. but on IRC for some reason the frequency of it is just out of control. literally there are people who sit in those chat rooms just waiting to type ~why or otherwise derail questions. they aren't exactly trolls, because they are regs and are doing it under the guise of being helpful, and sometimes even are helpful, but they are still basically trolls.

Free e-book today that some of you might enjoy: http://leanpub.com/dowhatyoulove

Thanks, downloading now.

My theory is this:
The ~why posts get made by people that want to build rep for whatever reason...usually it's really easy to pick up the typical ~why responses by idling around for a bit. Then suddenly you belong because you know the lingo and are ready to move up to @boom status.
At least that's how it went in a fairly large linux irc chan I used to hang out in.

Def some good stuff in there. The chapter on dealing with recruiters seems like really good info to have.

I have decided Cucumber is awesome and will start building a new project (Rails webapp ldo) next week just to use it

Planned "design process":
Pen+paper, write down a couple of core features...gogogo

Won't really worry too much about should I decide on features first or look for scenarios (user stories) just free flow it. I think I'll actually just draw some mockups and extract features from that.

Curious to hear if anyone has any recommendations of integrating UI design and BDD.

i think that's right, which is what makes it so pathetic.

is ~why some sort of meme?

~why do you ask?

get ready to live.

i supervised a guy on my team through using rspec to develop a Rails app with TDD. the most important thing is to design your tests at, roughly, the API level. trying to write tests for "this button should be at x=200 y=50" is a plan doomed to failure, but you probably already knew that.

it tells the irc bot to define why. so it spits out a paragraph like "why means that in order to answer your question properly, we need to understand the context in which you are asking it, blah blah general truisms that everyone can agree on". so you'll often see a convo like:

newb: which is faster, in_array() or array_search()?
irc troll: ~why
<insert paragraph above>

gotcha thanks.

I get your point, but I think it's comparable more often than you think. Just off the top of my head I can think of the post with the guy asking about how to use cron to do something - when the right answer was to make a design change so he didn't need to use cron at all.

That being said, it's not exactly difficult to answer a simple question directly and ask for more information about context at the same time.

duc~y

if your goal is to help people, this is the right way to do it. That is, "The cron command you need is "xyz," but if you're using cron your design is probably messed up."

Versus the person whose goal is to incite an argument which they are assured of winning, with the frequent bonus of concealing their inability to answer the original question: "Cron is joke, why are you using it?" This question is followed by a series of explanations from the OP which are promptly rebutted, exposing the troll's enviable command of best practices and the OP's lack thereof, leading at last to the explicit or implicit conclusion that the OP should rewrite his entire application, possibly in a new language. Oh yeah, or he could just figure out that one cron command he came looking for, which will most likely be a perfectly acceptable solution to his problem.

I wish I were joking about all this.