There are some really nice designs, especially admin themes, based on bootstrap for less than $20 at themeforest.net. I've gotten 3 of them for a total of ~$30 so far this month.

It's pretty crazy what you can do with them with very little effort.

I followed along, but I didn't understand any of it, tbh. I was more interested in learning about why you'd look at iOS development. Like you must be thinking of creating a killer app?

I like hiccup overall, but there are some issues with it. For example, you can't add attribute tags to certain elements and stuff like that. Minor irritation. I only use Hiccup for the markup abilities, not the rest of the stuff that is available in the API.

No real opinion on ClojureScript yet. I just know there's some issues with it, but how much they matter is hard to say. FWIW, be mindful that it compiles to Closure, not raw JS, and I think it is this idea of learning a base-language (JS), plus 2 helper languages is unattractive. If something breaks, you have to dive into Closure, which if something breaks there, you have to move up to JS. Maybe I'm over-stating the issue, but for right now, I really don't have the time. Probably excellent for you since you are already a JS ninja.

New design looks great. Nice work!

I might be misunderstanding you, but I think you might be using the terms normalized/denormalized backwards? You should be aiming for a normalized database, not a denormalized one. i.e. you should be reducing the number of places where data is duplicated in your db.

That's how it started, a live session tracker for the iPhone, then it morphed into trying to build some tools for work and who knows what will happen if I transition from support to product and stop having to work with the product every day.

One of the reasons I was so gung ho about JS is that with node.js you can write it on the server and we already do it on the client.

I was hoping we could get 90% of that with clojure. Write clojure on the server and then clojurescript on the client which gets pre-compiled to JS but I guess this isn't how it works? The other 10% would be trying to read generated JS when debugging.

This x1000

I honestly don't know how it all works out. I just know that it ClojureScript compiles to Google's Closure (in case you were missing the one-letter difference). And I don't *think* you can dependably debug without going into JS, though the pace of this stuff changes too quickly for me to know.

I'll research this stuff at a later date, but if you find that I'm totally wrong, please let me know. You'd be able to understand the complaints better than I would.

Since I've worked for a company that did Open Source software I'd say the core of our business was this:
Get good developers that are motivated by non-monetary reasons other companies can't compete on and get a good ROI from every single one.

This is not to be underestimated. Getting good programmers is hard and if you have an edge in recruiting you kind of print money.

We basically charged customers to get really smart people to solve their problems. More often than not they didn't even care that it was Open Source software. We pretty much build custom stuff on top of a solid base for every customer. We also tried to optimize away the need for support and keep the support costs for customers low.

A typical project usually involved teaching one or two inhouse devs they had as much as they could absorb so that they could solve their issues in the future without needing us. That's not exactly how most software companies do it but I think it is an excellent business model.
Many of our competitors were stuck in the same old "make them pay through the nose for support" mindset while we prefered to keep support as low as possible. We'd rather use our resources to solve new problems of new customers than solve issues of old customers that we kind of created in the first place (support)

Basically the sales pitch was: We'll solve your problems and we'll also make sure that your inhouse devs can solve future problems in the same field.

+1 cool stuff. If you still plan to get an internship out of it I'd say it may actually be cool enough to apply for some big names. The fact that you picked Clojure will help a bit I'm sure. FogCreek actually has an opening for a 2013 internship...dunno how long you can wait but that's probably one of the coolest internships one could get.

Google's Closure is just a JS library. It also happens to be an optimizer (compress/minify/etc.) too.

I guess Clojurescript uses it internally to make its conversions. Closure's compiler has a few settings though. One of which is for development and another is production.

In dev mode the code is much less minified and optimized so it should be quite readable. In production mode it's fully optimized as much as it'll go.

I'm not sure I like this hard dependency on Closure though. The lib is pretty big and it kind of doesn't make sense to use it side by side with another big lib. It might grow on me though.

Gul

Just happened to be reading this and noticed Scirra got a mention. You guys are really going mainstream by the looks of things!

http://www.html5gamedevelopment.org/...opment/#slide9

Yeah that's cool! Always fun seeing things pop up unexpectedly. Everything's going really well, our future is secured for the foreseeable future now. We've got some exciting stuff in the pipeline as well. We're both just hitting a bit of a burn out at the moment now though. Need some time off!

I like this.

I don't think I could shoot that high. Either I have to blow them out of the water or be so bad that Spolsky will be inspired to write "The Perils of Teaching Yourself JVM Languages."

Amateur-speak, sorry.

I should do it the correct way: create a mega-relation and BCNF Algo in it. I have a schema I am satisfied with now. I'll discuss it later though.

If it makes you feel better I knew a couple of people that worked at Fogcreek and they didn't love it.

ShoeLace:

I think a great idea to get used to Clojure would be to implement the 6.00 Word Game in Clojure. That has all the issues you'd want to deal with in one shot: i/o, file importation, maps, lots of functions, string comprehensions, looping, etc. You have the implementation mapped out for you to. I guess you'd have to create the UI, but that's not too much of a challenge.

I thought of this earlier today and realized I wouldn't be able to write this program in Clojure. I think I'll do it this weekend, push the game to Heroku, and post the source on github.

Also: http://clojurescriptone.com/

That's a good idea. I'm still not really knowledgeable about all of the data structures and some of the nuances of the language but I'll see how it goes.

I also need to set everything up to play nicely together. I watched a video today where a dude setup a live repl / jetty server and coded a url shortener from scratch with compojure and ring with enlive.

He used eclipse though, but it seemed to have built in support for lein and pulling in packages, etc.. Hopefully that type of work flow is possible using something other than eclipse.

Question for the stackoverflow guru's: I figured out how to use a regular expression in objective c to search for square brackets using predicates, both directly in line and via a string. None of the questions on SO addressed that specifically and I'd like to get the info up there what is the best way to do it?

add a comment to the most relevant question, or just put up a new answer

if you have enough reputation you can edit the question itself, or one of the answers, and put in an addendum

I'm a bit confused what you're asking kerowo, can't you just create another question?

It seems little bit like karma whoring to ask and answer your own question. On second thought, since I have no idea why I need do what I did to get it to work I do have a question. Here it is if anyone is curious: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...in-objective-c

Oh right I get it now. Just so you know, there's nothing wrong with asking and answering your own question:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/0...own-questions/

When you ask a question as well, on the form there's a checkbox showing you intend to answer it yourself as well.

Thanks! I missed that. Nice to already have one wrong answer to the question.

Does anyone have any tips for designing/maintaining style sheets? It's really difficult for me and they inevitably turn into large messy sheets. I've tried modularising them by having a standard style sheet then for each section of the site having a specific one ontop of it, but it only helps a bit.

I keep running into problems with redundant classes which are hard to keep track of, during design I'll inevitably add/delete chunks of pages. Removing the styles associated with those chunks that aren't used elsewhere is often difficult to find and maintain.

I feel style sheets are pretty hacky when your site is over a certain complexity (like Javascript). I'm pretty much self taught on CSS though so might be ignorant of design patterns. My naming conventions suck big time for CSS as well. Keep running into situations where a useful class will be useful elsewhere, and then the semantic meaning of the class name becomes completely obtuse.

We've had decent* success with keeping our css files small and organized by having a Rake job that knows how to construct the page css files from the organized css files. Then we have another rake job that uses watchr and just looks for changes to the source css files and rebuilds the page css files whenever anything changes.

Edit: Sounds like this might not be solving your problem as much. I guess for your problem it is also a matter of really making an effort to keep your CSS by functionality/widget/thing instead of by page or design idea. So for example a CSS file for a menu instead of a CSS file for your page that has the menu classes. It's definitely hard though.


* By decent I just mean decent for CSS which is pretty relative...