michaelq

Look what I found: Slack's free tier pricing page explicitly states "There's no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912

I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making.

I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages.

The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first community to hit this limit.

Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did).

Slack may be able to fix its sluggishness for these other communities, and someone might build integrations that routinely export then delete messages so as to stay below the 10,000 message limit and remove the warnings. But it's too late for us. We can't pause our community growth while we wait for Slack to engineer around their undisclosed user limit. So we have no alternative but to switch.

The main reason I wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack. Slack doesn't seem to be intended to do this! Please don't do this!

This looks like a great value. We were considering using Campaign.js, but actually getting it up and running on a server to fire out campaigns seemed like a pain (as does using sendy). Combining the affordability of SES with some symbolance of the UX of mailchimp seems like a killer value proposition.

Hackathons are awesome. I try to do like 6 or 7 a year. And I'm married and in my mid 30s.

To take the OP's points one-by-one:

- Hackathons are worth the commitment. They're a fast, efficient way to try out 1) new frameworks and APIs, 2) new employees/cofounders, 3) new ideas.

- Hackathons only exclude people with "lives" who don't choose to make the event a priority. Hackathons filter out timid and less motivated people (and those two attributes are related) and you're generally left with pragmatic people who will make it through the weekend.

- The OP is right. The inconvenience isn't evenly distributed. Life isn't fair.

- Hackathons are only as unhealthy as you make them. Gardening can also be quite unhealthy if you don't wear sunscreen.

- Competition is a positive force, and the extrinsic motivation of judgement and a deadline are real, and good for the hack you produce.

- Since this is a competition, you can't work on a preexisting product any more than you could start a marathon a kilometers up the road.

- They're not just toys. Take a look at POWr.io and Zaarly, both of which came out of hackathons. There are many others, and if anyone knows of some of the top of their head, please reply with them.

I think it's great that people are coming together to help code on your gardening project. Hackathons may not be right for you, but they are definitely right for me and the dozens of ambitious people I've coded with at hackathons over the years.

The college experience for most Millenials can fit into 14 lines of JavaScript: https://twitter.com/freecodecamp/status/531824655573602304

I'm excited to hear about it. http://fourbeansoup.com/ has some cool-looking apps!

Down in San Francisco. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com

This is an interesting approach. So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Most of the ideas here are really high-level. Also, I tried to submit a "situation" without creating an account and got a 403 js error. You might want to hide that button for unauthenticated users.

This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow failed. I've found no such consensus of Quora having failed as a business (http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed), nor as an expert question and answer site.

Anyway, the problem with Fountain is you still have to ask a question. And if you can formulate a good question to begin with, Google (which is fast and free) might very well provide a better answer than some random domain expert willing to answer random questions for small amounts of money.

First of all, congratulations on the job!

We have a project-oriented full-stack JS curriculum at FreeCodeCamp, but if you're looking for a Rails curriculum, check out OdinProject. Erik's curated the best rails resources. And I agree 100% with what Malcolm Diggs said. Build, build, build!

I couldn't agree more. All we need is Craigslist style verticals (categories of work) and horizontals (cities) + identity verification + a reputation system. The overhead for that could be really low.

The $35k/year/worker support staff would seem to be the only capital-intensive aspect of the business.

O'Reilly is a specialized technical book publisher. Hatchette, on the other hand, is an undifferentiated conglomerate (one of the big 5 publishing companies). The types of people who would start their book search at O'Reilly are fairly well defined. That isn't the case with Hatchette. People on HatchetteStore.com are less likely to browse and more likely to search, and the second they fail to find a book they were looking for, they'd probably bounce back to Amazon.

I completely agree. I commute by running, and it's unsafe to look at a screen. So I frequently issue commands into my headphone mic like "read my texts" and "text <name> I'll be there in five" or "shuffle playlist 180 BPM". Many people dismiss Siri on account of mediocre answers to open ended questions, but it's quite effective at carrying out precise instructions.

Vision was one of the last senses to evolve in animals. And yet it's the most useful sense, significantly reducing our reliance on other senses. As a result, if I were to lose my vision, I might well be at a much larger disadvantage than if I'd never been able to see in the first place.

Instead of intentionally walking around blindfolded in preparation for a loss of vision that will hopefully never occur, I could thank my lucky stars that my eyes work and focus on using them to the fullest.

Other than Vim or Emacs (which I do mention in my post), which tools do you use? And which tools would you recommend for beginners?

Thanks for your feedback. I have no quantitative evidence to back up this statement so I will amend it. There are many reasons most developers (certainly in the Bay Area) prefer OSX to Windows or desktop Linux.

How would you feel about: "Macs combine the user-friendliness of Windows with the Unix environment necessary to run most tools and frameworks."

Do you do embedded/native development? Which tools do you use for that that aren't mentioned in the blog post?