They aren't in crunchbase apparently. They said they just had seed money but not Series A.

As far as the learning hours - that's just not the way I like to do things. I don't want pressure on my time while I'm learning - especially if I'm remote. I've followed my instincts in the past and it's worked out generally well. My instincts tell me don't charge full rate to learn some brand new technology that I really want to learn. Make me learn COBOL or Joomla or something, you're getting charged full rate.

No one is swimming in money right now, especially people who haven't raised a Series A.

If you charge hours for time spent learning, that you were transparent and clear about needing to learn, your hourly rate would work out for them.

If you have to charge $110/hr but are providing heavily discounted hours you are both too expensive and being unfair to yourself.

I understand your point about pressure, and I'm sympathetic to any anxiety, etc. that you may not want to bring upon yourself. However, if you truly mean 8 hours of effort being billed for 1 hour, you may be doing it wrong.

Maybe cutting a bit of time here and there is fine, but building good software is hard and learning is part of the job that they require, and you are their guy, so they should be eating that 100%.

I also think the precedent that you are manipulating the hours you are billing is something worth avoiding.

If you are billing 1 hour because you spent 8 learning, what happens if they give you something really hairy that takes you 10 hours because you've done exactly it before?

Do they expect you will bill it up because you know the exact expertise is worth a premium?

+1 to what Larry is saying.

ya, I obv have no experience with any of these interactions but paragraph 3 seems ridiculous and could possibly open you up to some real questioning from the company.

but since it seems that you are bored and really want something to work on, I would say just offer 85/hr and charge them as many hours as you feel comfortable and go for it. not only will you learn docker and some other technologies that you are interested in, but you will also learn about contracting

Ok glad I read this before sending. The hours manipulation stuff makes sense. I almost sent my reply a few minutes ago but decided to wait a bit so I didn't send it one day later on the dot. Lol.

I took out anything that sounds like I might be manipulating my hours.

That's a great reply

Years ago I was at a professional services company (staffing, business side) and had a UI/UX developer at a client site for a 3 month contract.

Everything seemed fine from his side, his manager and HR person didn't have much for updates other than the project was progressing and work was getting done.

Fast forward to the end of the contract, I get a frantic call from their HR person. They asked him for a 3 month extension because the project was continuing, and he said no, that he lined something else up. Which is technically completely in his right, but kinda dickish.

In a call with his VP of Engineering (who I had not spoken to before) I found out he also went to Hawaii over christmas/new years time in the last 2 weeks of the contract and billed 60 hours each week. To this I responded basically "woah man, you could have easily brought this up with us, because I'm a tiny bit skeptical he put in the most hours of any 2 weeks of the 3 months in ****ing hawaii" VP agrees and says they take a lot of the blame and his director is specifically who he is blaming mostly. But this VP has 3 teams in the US and 3 in Western Europe so people are just busy and traveling so no time to pick their heads up and they just plow forward.

HR person had banished me, but this VP let me back in. Then we got to talking about what challenges he saw in the next 6-12 months and they had a technology that not many others were scaling a certain way (they were analyzing traffic for major ISPs). I had interviewed at said tech company and kept a sales guys card, shot him an email and he gave me one of their former senior engineers who is now a consulting architect for the tech's info. Get in touch with him and he has an opening in 4 months, boom.

also

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...unced-Jif.html


BOOM

It is a soft 'g'

Got a reply back. We're going to talk next week. I think we'll work something out.

Thanks for the advice to not mention manipulating hours. I didn't really think about it like that but it made a lot of sense. I don't have what you call "good social skills" when it comes to that kind of stuff.

Just because he created it doesn't give him any control over the right way to pronounce it...

If the guy who created NAMBLA wanted the acronym to be pronounced "Free Candy" would we have to honor that?

Maybe for your birthday I'll jive you a jift.

Seems like a premature optimization. 100 users is nothing if you have decent server hardware. Page rendering isn't very cpu intensive.

Hopefully it's a per gurrrraffe

Almost all soft G words in the English language have French origins.

If the creator wants to call it "jif" he should have made the G in the acronym stand for something besides graphics.

Giraffics Interchange Format.

Whoever the front end people here are, apparently the rails tutorial team/Michael hartl are considering a version of their tutorial using a js front end framework. Someone here should help them write it. Free publicity.

I don't understand why they'd do that. Using whatever framework you want alongside rails is easy and virtually no different than doing it with for example node.

And there are a billion front end framework tutorials out there. What do they think they have to add?

hartl writes really well and is excellent at explaining things in a relatable way that makes sense. I'd read pretty much anything he writes on anything.

Also, where are all these good front end framework tutorials? I swear I've looked, but maybe not terribly hard.

Could it be possible that Python has slower latency to the database than JVM?

It's an inventory, etc system, and just about every system I've seen was sloooowww. Like, people are trying to get **** done and don't have time to wait 30 second for every action. I don't mind doing upfront work to make sure this doesn't happen with this one, regardless if it is an open source hobby project or not.

Also, I've hit a ton of conceptual walls, limited by my own knowledge and lack of hardware, so I'm sort of freaking out and procrastinating.

I write database backed applications in python. It is rare that any page takes longer than than about 100ms on the backend. Really intensive pages might be 500ms. Python is not the culprit.

Well we landed on $85/hour. I talked to the lead investor who apparently sold his company to Microsoft a while back and has been travelling the world ever since. Should be an interesting project. Sounds like a ton of their employees still have day jobs as well. But they said they're going more full time.

One page in particular hangs. It is irritating because it is a top-level page.

It runs two queries. The first query is simple. Explain analyze puts this stat out:

"Planning time: 0.453 ms"
"Execution time: 0.135 ms"

The second query is pretty robust and is one of the more complex queries on this entire site (only a select query). The stats on it:

"Planning time: 3.748 ms"
"Execution time: 0.397 ms"

The total load time on the page is about 650ms. It was around 900ms, but I updated the CDNs and that seems to have chopped off 250ms. Still a bit disappointing.

The page isn't really intensive at this moment, but it could be intensive under full stress.

I assume that's counting from the time the request is sent until everything is delivered to the client or something? Can you tell how much time the server is actually spending? We used newrelic for monitoring that and I think by far we spent more time shoveling bits to the browser than anything else.