There are quite a few sites/services out there that are catering to the more "seasoned" developer that isn't particularly interested in the race-to-the-bottom jobs found on elance and similar sites.
Sites like gun.io, matchist, ooomf are some good examples. Google those and you'll undoubtedly find a few more.
If you end up using a service that I didn't cover in my post, shoot me an email (if you don't mind). I'd love to keep that blog post updated and evergreen.
Can anyone speak to the demand, or lack thereof, for Django books and educational material? Do large(r) technical publishers not see a viable market for Django books?
I read Two Scoops Of Django (on vacation, no less) and would love to see more books on Django best practices.
I wonder if this has to deal with some external factors, like availability of a good free book (often times from the makers), or volatility of APIs.
Having said that, for a long time I have been evaluating popularity, risk of adoption, and job market impact of technologies using the number of O'Reilly books and videos published on the subject as a crude measure.
My only criticism of the Django docs is that every sentence has equal weight. That makes it difficult for someone starting out to distinguish between things that are absolutely critical and those that just nice to know. However once you are up and running they are great but they do need re-reading for the same reason.
They definitely don't have any Django books, but the Rails count is a little exaggerated there. e-books and print are listed as separate entries, there are a lot of "mini" e-books, and some of the Rails books are from 2007 and are surely pretty useless now.
When I learned Django, the existing books were, how can I put it, awful. Really
Sorry, but the ones that were "recommended" to me had no sense of a learning curve whatsoever. I was left frustrated by them, thinking I would never learn this.
And beyond the Django tutorial on the site, you're left all by yourself.
To be fair, Django has excellent documentation and a great online community of bloggers and people to poke with questions. I've rarely come to a situation where I was truly off on my own. Although, yeah, I would love to see more Django books out there.
Have you looked at Mailgun? (YC alum, now Rackspace)
(disclaimer: I did a guest blog post for them, but that was a result of me being a happy customer before they even contacted me)
They have lists, webhooks/reporting for tracking opens and clicks, HTML support, unsub notifications, etc. All accessible via the API. Poke around the docs and trial, sounds like it could be what you're looking for.
Your comment is unnecessary and I'm shocked that's sitting high on the comments page.
Trivializing the amount of effort and energy this fellow put in to producing/developing this cross-platform mobile app because you disagree with...well, I still don't know what your issue is with the quotes you pulled, care to share?
You might have felt better after posting your comment but you also gave up your chance to add something constructive to the discussion. To paraphrase pg's reaction, it makes me embarrassed for HN when people include projects in their blog profile and this is the sort of response they get.
This is great. Spinning out a consumer-friendly front end to the Zencoder API has been in my sparkfile for too long. I even shared the same idea with HN[0] because I know some bootstrapper is going to make a killing if they can pair it with Stripe and push it out the door in a weekend.
A co-founder of Zencoder even replied to my suggestion mentioning that there's a market for it.
(If you're a hardcore wantrepreneur, here is your idea. Now go forth and build the bootstrapped SaaS biz you always wanted. Send me a link when its done, I know some people that would probably use it. Seems I can't ever find a spare weekend to build it myself)
I'm no MBA or startup guru, but I don't often hear "Founders in very early stage/prototype stage should avoid interacting with their users". Early stage interaction is critical to the success of the product.
>> Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it
If the goal is to get to know their audience needs, and iterate the produce development quickly, then dev-to-dev feedback is absolutely critical. Now is probably not a good time to clog the feedback filter by adding another human to the mix.
You can spend 30 hours working on your product backlog of features that haven't been vetted, or you can spend 30 hours getting to know your audience and discover that NSCoreLibFoo gives people the most trouble with push notifications.
What would convert more: a homepage hero about the three new features you dreamed up OR the fact that PushLayer can fix everything that sucks about NSCoreLibFoo (which half of your audience hates with a passion as you discovered).
I did not say founders should not interact with users.
What I said was that if possible, a marketing person should be assigned or brought it as soon as possible. Founders have to realize that they don't have to do everything. Letting others do for them is what helps a business grow.
Lots of useful information here and kudos to the author for composing a well-written post: summary of the issue, "here's how we fixed it" (with code samples) and concludes with some caveats/things to watch for. (Reminder: quality content like this is how inbound marketing works)
IMHO the official Django docs are some of the best you'll find anywhere of any open source project. My suggestion, though, is to read and re-read and make sure you gather all documented information about $YOUR_TOPIC before formulating your own game plan. For example, here is the chapter on handling static assets in Django:
There are a lot of relevant links on that page that are worth following if you want to make sure you a) get the picture and b) know how you want it to all come together for your project.
Lastly, on the topic of storing assets: if you want to offer a Django-ready library for your new cloud storage startup/setup, consider writing your own file storage handler
Between ZenCoder and the encoding services that AWS released, someone needs to expose easy video encoding to non-developers. It's easy for us to wire up these services for our needs, but Joe Marketer can't.
Here's what he see when he searches: a large amount of spammy looking sites offering downloadable software of questionable origin (and ability). Five minute trial versions. The actual download page has twelve other download buttons for affiliate links and products. It's awful.
He just wants whatever-file-type he was given to work on iPhone/iPad for this upcoming ad campaign.
Suppose Sue Webdev bills at $60/hr. and needs something like this for a clients website. She's never heard of webkit2png before, not sure if she has PyObjC 1.1 installed and can't seem to find installation instructions for Windows.
Will Sue be able to create her own urlbox clone in two hours?
I hope to keep it updated as sites come and go (so if you have a good experience with another site/job board, let me know!)
http://www.gethourglass.com/blog/sites-to-help-launch-your-f...