I agree. oDesk has been great for me - nothing but good experiences. The key is to set up a good profile that differentiates you from the cheap workers.
Wow. The word "kanban" in the title caught my attention so I thought I'd take a look. I currently work (for another week anyway) on the finance team for an aerospace manufacturing firm so we are very familiar with kanban and other lean principles. Little did I know lean principles (even Kanban?) are working their way into the software development world!
This is all the more interesting since I've just taken a position as the financial operations manager for a web/finance startup in Atlanta. Good to know that some of the cool lean principles and tools can translate into my new environment! Definitely something to look into...
I wouldn't worry. The article says that EtherPad share's some features with Wave but the main interest in their technology might be the ability to operate behind firewalls(?). EtherPad's text editing features will probably (hopefully) get rolled into Google Doc's text editor.
We looked into using Wave as the basis for http://squadedit.com. But we quickly realized to really use it effectively you needed a different Wave for each of say your model, view and controller. The mail like interface vs. something like tabs gets confusing pretty quick. You have to invite people each file or put then together and then pull them apart later. It's also a challenge to execute any of the code you're working on in a Wave. It's hosted but not in a development environment you can really access or control.
All that could maybe be done in an interface outside of a standard Wave client. But not being able to follow where someone is editing makes it hard to use for instruction or code review.
We ended up just creating a different kind of interaction that we think works a lot better for working with code.
That's awesome. I just checked out your app; it looks pretty bad ass. I have two points of criticism, and its only because I love what you have going:
1. Kill the ads; they make your product look like shit. Instead convince me that you have something ubber clean & simple that I should pay money for to upgrade. Etherpad did an amazing job at this. I'm also guessing you're not making much from the ads.
3. Make a premium feature where I can hook this thing up to a .git repo and browse a folder structure (like I do in Textmate). I can't tell you have insanely valuable it would be for me and four other coders to have synced code views and tabs while we talk on Skype.
Good luck, I'll be rooting for anybody who can fill in the big shoes that Etherpad will be leaving behind.
1. The ads were too much for sure. When each ad was made it didn't seem too bad, but once all the dancing was on the page at once we knew it wasn't going to work. Unfortunately it was one of the last things we put in before launch (3 days ago). Given all the traffic, we've been focused on making sure everything stayed up an running. Today we put some temporary static ads up while we're redesign them.
2. Not a bad suggestion, but I like being able to bookmark the app. Long term we'd like to be more a competitor to desktop text editors. A bookmark directly to the app that isn't tied to only one share made sense to us, particularly in like a Fluid or Chrome OS type use case.
3. We definitely want to tie in with version control. The challenge is in doing it elegantly without forcing a particular VCS on someone. We've got some ideas on this we want to implement in the future.
I rowed in college, we experimented with different riggings (including arrangement 'a' from the article) and found that, indeed, bucket-rigging and others seemed to yield good times. There were other variables though, strength of the current, wind, how intense our hangovers were... so it's hard to attribute it to just the different arrangements. I will say that sitting in an arrangement where the guy in front/behind has his oar on the same side as you leaves very little room for error. If you don't get that oar up and out at the finish you'll hit oars and crab for sure.
The start and finish of the race are located at fixed points. If you're racing on tidal rivers near the coast, where most of our regattas were, the current varies widely throughout the day. Say it's a 5k head-race starting upstream and coming down towards the sea. At high and low tide you're essentially racing with no (or very little) current - much like a lake. When the tide is coming in, you'd be racing against it and a 5k race can take 20 or more minutes. If you're lucky and your race heat starts when the tide is going out, that same race will take 15 or less minutes.
