My development company, Verdage, has finally launched a site. It’s nothing terribly exciting, but if you have nothing better to do (and you probably don’t), please take a look. Feedback is much appreciated.
There is a significant problem for businesses who want to develop in Ruby on Rails: a shortage of programmers. It’s not that there are few people who know Ruby (although compared to PHP and Java resources, I would guess that this is also a fact). The problem is, they don’t want full-time jobs.
Where .NET or [...]
You may have noticed the affiliate sales pitch on the right side of my blog. If you did, you probably read it because I have enough respect for you, the reader, to explain in sentences why I think Lunarpages is a good deal, to openly admit my affiliate status, and to suggest that they are [...]
It is often frustrating to deal with web development clients who don’t know everything about the web. Recently, I explained to a client that her new site would “not be stuck in a frame of a certain width” but would “expand to fit the size of the window”. In other words, my partner toiled day [...]
When I was born in the Soviet Union, nobody had credit cards or mortgages or even loans. If you wanted anything, be it a TV or a house or a car (yes, we had those, you jerks), you hoarded your rubles under your mattress. Many moons and a country later, when I started my first [...]
Among my former employer Joel Spolky’s wisest words were these: “Users are lazy”. That means: don’t make them do stuff. Don’t ask them to enter info or register or download software.
You can help users be lazy in many ways; for instance, by ridding your site of browser-specific features, such as custom scroll bars, that may [...]
I have worked with several print designers whose clients happened to want a web presence, so they hired me to translate their designs into functional sites. They are all awesome people, but working with them has often been a rough ride with a a few disconnects. That’s because the web and a piece of paper [...]
Today I had lunch with a friend in Kista, Sweden’s Silicon Valley, and he shared some great ideas for a new dating site. A few weeks ago I had a prospective client tell me about a cool concept for a niche social networking site. Both, however, are thinking of subscription fees as the planned revenue [...]
Let me preface by saying I love Skype dearly. The poweful little program and a headset gets you: free calls to, and conferences with, other Skypers worldwide; cheap calls (couple cents a minute on average) to landlines worldwide; the ability to rent a very cheap SkypeIn number that landline users can call you through; [...]
I made the mistake of agreeing to do what was supposed to be a weekend job: a simple registration form for an event with a splash screen. I knew the client was not completely web-savvy so I padded the estimate just a bit and asked for $400 for the coding, and $100 to give [...]