That looks interesting, thanks.

Well, looks like the initial stuff is going to fall on someone who is underpaid and overworked.

I started up by installing a VM and setting up CentOS. Really don't feel like doing it and the pace of the progress shows it. The first mirror I tried didn't even download the OS completely and basically wouldn't continue once it failed to install FireFox. This error finally came up 5 hours after I started the download. I didn't care since I was busy with other stuff, but we all had a pretty good laugh about it.

Then installing all the extra stuff. I've been working almost strictly with the command line to simulate a server experience.

I have to say that CentOS is not my favorite Linux. The package manager is seriously dated so to get anything less than 2 years old, I have to download tarball after tarball. Not the end of the world, but why can't I do:

or something? Nah, I just download emacs and get 23.1 (?)

Every download is obnoxiously slow, despite us running 20 down and after it finds the "fast mirror".

This is minor nit. I wonder if this bothers anyone else, so I'll refrain from saying why it bothers me, but I'll explain myself if no one notices it:

I guess the main upshot is that only two things broke in a major way so far. I couldn't figure out the error about not being able to download OpenGL, but I didn't really need it, so I let that one go. The next error is one that I didn't have a chance to look into, but it's probably a path variable issue or a missing package.

I don't mind working with RPM, but Yum seems no better than apt-get with Ubuntu. I just hate how unpredictable Yum is. RPM is definitely better if you want control over your OS, but it is also a bit confusing that CentOS uses some of the things from the Fedora repositories (good luck navigating that!) and doesn't appear to have its own nice repository site like Arch or Ubuntu has. Not that I'd use it if they had one. I'd just continue with what I am doing and download tarballs.

I totally get why CentOS really is a "Community Enterprise Operating System." Oversized and definitely not bleeding edge. Not the worst thing to learn about if you are interested, but I certainly wouldn't hand this to a beginner.

Will you venture into DevOps? At least learning about vagrant, chef;puppy;other could make it a little more fun.

Dunno what you'll use your server for but I don't want the most recent packages on a server I want the most tested and stable ones. And I'd reach for Debian first pretty much always (unless the company wants support in that case one of the commercial ones, probably RH).

yum -y or
yes | yum

Dave, have you looked into yum's equivalent of using a PPA with apt?

I'm using a ubuntu server that has an ancient version of a few services I use but it took very little effort to add in PPAs for the things I wanted modern versions of, run a simple apt-get update and install the package as usual afterwards.

Totally seamless experience without having to manually anything something from source or download a tarball and setup my own init.d scripts.

My two friends and I are starting a small development shop. We have a few projects lined up, but tossed up this website just to have something. Any feedback?

http://www.assemblyshop.io/

When I mouse-over your logo on the screen, it looks like I am wiggling a penis.

Design and Development Shop might not be ideal language. Digital Performance Specialists, or something else might be more interesting.

Granted obv we all get labeled Design & Development shop, thats usually more colloquial than just putting it in writing.

It does kind of look like a penis. Haha.

I'd crop the two images on the about page to the same height (you could also consider taking a single picture with both to show more unity...shaking hands or something :P)

Meh on using ".io" for this but that's whatever.

Also on the about page:
"He has a love of building technically challenging, fun, and interesting applications"
Not a native speaker but "a love for" makes more sense imo. Same thing a sentence later, maybe I'm just not used to the "love of" construct though

I just pasted your about snippets into http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ (recently featured on HN) and this sentence is flagged as very hard to read (I think the flagged adverb is fine):
"An economics major at Colgate University, he wanted to turn his love of building products and passion for business, statistics, and entrepreneurship into a day job."

Might be a good idea to paste all website text into it and see what it spits out

Edit: I also have my doubts that cash+equity is going to fly. If I understood your site correctly you're trying to work for startups (lacking techy guys)? That should be communicated better and I think you should phrase it more in a "what problem do we solve" kind of way. I like the text on the landing page but am meh on the about page.

I'd add a contact us/get a quote type of link/button on the landing page as well...at the very least mark that for A/B testing imo.

Ya rework the logo. Looks too much like a penis and balls.

Agree on the penis and both hover effect seem a bit pointless

Also I think it's pretty good overall just focusing on the stuff I don't like ldo

The team page is the one we haven't really tackled yet, I just tossed that together. Will rework that text for sure, as well as evening up the images. Definitely need a call to action on the home page to go somewhere else too.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks. Ya, we really just tossed that together yesterday. I'll pass along the feedback about the balls to my designer friend.

Just trying to get something up that is kind of sleek and professional looking for when I give people my business card.

+1


stick to the strudel eating, my friend :P. "love of" sounds more natural than "love for" here.


that one is awkward. and it's actually semantically ambiguous the way the "and"s are used. but i wouldn't put too much stock in that hemingway app. hemingway himself scores pretty badly on it.

i too was a little put off by this: "We'll be interviewing you while you interview us. Are you up to the challenge?" My gut reaction as a possible client is, "**** you. I'd rather hire someone without attitude."

Finally, I have a good slogan to go with your logo: "Development so good, it will make your cock hard"

Happy Valentine's day!
http://imgur.com/gallery/DKyq7

Thanks for the feedback. Can I steal your slogan? :P

I'll think about how to rephrase the "interviewing you" thing. I guess limiting inbound leads in any capacity doesn't help us, so I should probably just get rid of it.

i actually like the option of equity + payment, i just think you should pitch it differently. pitch it as something you are *offering* me. ofc, you will be inverviewing the person when you decide if you want to do it, but don't say that

Ack! You nailed the largest anti-pattern and my singular biggest pet-peeve of design sites: you assume that I am on a Mac w/ Retina and that I have 20/10 vision without my glasses on.

I also hate those kinds of forms, though you did do it a bit differently. While I strongly prefer it if the fields have the "what" above them, I sort of like how they show what they are despite being in them. With that said, I still have no visual cue of how large the fields are. Plus you forgot the Submit button.

I am somewhat aware of what all those symbols mean, but it is sort of funny that the only ones that are descriptive are the HTML 5 and CSS 3 symbols. I know what RoR, Angular, and Backbone are, but not everyone is going to know. Someone with deep pockets doesn't really give a **** what you use as long as it looks good and runs fast.

The rest is pretty okay. You guys look like a couple of good-looking honest guys. Others said something about the writing. If you need a bit of help on that, shoot me a PM and I'll gladly do a once-over for you for no equity or charge.

That Hemmingway App is pretty cool to use as well, even if I don't agree with it totally.

I just have a job to do and I'm the only one that is (somewhat) willing and (somewhat) able to do it. The reason I used CentOS is because the program I needed has very good documentation for CentOS in particular.

It's all to make my coworkers' lives easier. It's not a part of my job and I honestly don't care what tools I'm using as long as the crap gets up there. I also don't really care about this project, thus why I'm not going to customize it or do anything more than the bare minimum. I can show a glimmer and hopefully management will get a pro in there to do it and said pro can do whatever.

I get the battle-tested theory in many cases, but there's a few things that I want that are shiny and new. Emacs would come to mind. The difference between Emacs 23 and 24 are night and day. Just no good reason to be defaulting to old versions of stuff like this. For IP Tables chmod and other stuff, I'm agreeing with you there.

It is also irritating to note that I can build a complete Arch Linux in 30 minutes, yet it takes Ubuntu and CentOS at least 3 hours to get everything set up and running, and that is assuming the installer works the first time around.

FWIW, the Perl packages that are used with the program are also older, but that is fine by me.

I've also been trying to go pure Admin experience and using vim for editing files. Pretty interesting to use so far. I hate to admit it, but I sort of like it.

Nailed it.

Yum isn't quite that bad. It is sort of like a one-step combo of wget and tar and the rest is taken care of for you as long as you are using a .rpm file. Tarballs is the same extraction as you'd use anywhere else I guess.

My complaint with yum is my complaint with apt-get. What do you get with these:

I just hate this kind of unpredictability. I don't like random versions, and from what I've seen of the package documentation of Cent and Ubuntu, it is still rather hard to tell what you are getting.

Dave,

I find apt-get perfectly acceptable for normal use. Setup dependencies to compile firefox is 1 line, on Mac OS it was several hours of head scrating. Usually a reasonably updated version of java/python/vim etc will be fine. When I need precise control there are language specific tools (virtualenv etc) or customize sources.list. Also it's not apt-get's fault that Ubuntu is ******ed with their package distributions and stuff randomly breaks all the time. I would never use anything but Debian if it was a machine I was planning on running for a long time. But most of my linux setups are per project/language/test and are throwaways.

I would certainly use Debian or anything else. I'm just not interested in turning this into more of a learning experience than it has to be. The program's documentation for setting up RH + derivatives is monkey-read monkey-do. Red Hat is not free, Fedora is too bleeding edge, so CentOS it is. There are some Debian and Ubuntu docs, but they all run to 404 so that wasn't really an option if I wanted quick and a tolerable level of dirtiness.

The more I use CentOS, the more I'm getting used to it. I think I like it more than Ubuntu, to be honest. There is also the plus that you can use some fedora packages like epel, which is pretty convenient.

You're saying the text is too small? I'm looking at it on a 27 inch 1080p monitor right now and it looks fine IMO. Maybe the text could be slightly bigger?

Kind of agree about the form. I think it's ok in this circumstance, but anything larger than 4 fields (one of which is obviously a text area for more info) is probably not ideal. I've mentioned this to my designer friend before.

Also agree a little about the submit button.

Appreciate the feedback.

Also, I guess I should ask what browser you're on? The forms should have borders, and there should be a submit button (though I thought you were saying it just doesn't stand out enough, which I agree with)

Nchabazam: I'm saying that the text on the menu and form is waaaay too light. I can barely read it. I looked at it on FireFox on Win7 and Linux so far.

I finally saw the Send text, but that was only after I highlighted the whole page. I could still barely see it and had you not mentioned it, I probably wouldn't have found it even after highlighting.

Also, consider doing some sort of gallery of your previous work. I know that this company hasn't done anything, but I know you and your partners must have a portfolio. This may be a premature thought, but just pointing that one out.

If I was not familiar with the normal webpage design these days, I wouldn't have noticed the menu at all. It is by habit that I look at the top of the page for menus, but it is still very hard to read and I have to lean in to read it. I have 20/30 in my left with contacts in.

Hmm, ok thanks. I don't have any low resolution devices to test this stuff with (some first world **** right here). My buddy has nothing but HD screens too.

I have no eye for design, and my friend is relatively new to it (he's very good at prototyping and coding it out quickly). We obviously can both benefit from some feedback.

Agree on the portfolio to an extent. I think until it's super impressive, it only kind of serves to hurt you a little. It would be nice to eventually have a list of projects you can show that are impressive. I couldn't put the last few projects I worked on on there legally.