I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.
Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.
There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.
Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.
Or, since it's more than likely that humans won't be writing code or text in the near future, we'll skip the next revolution in VCS tools, and AI will be able to version its own software. /sigh
I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details and fixing Git's shortcomings, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.
I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it.
I use Paddle on https://webtoapp.design and went through their and my TOS with a german lawyer. Basically they're only responsible for payments & customer support (however most customers come to me directly or get directed to me, as Paddle can only really resolve billing issues).
Paddle checked my site & product 3 times to make sure it complies with their requirements (an important aspect in my case was that my app creation process is automatic and not done by hand). I always got in touch with a human quickly, both during the account setup and later when I needed help (through chat or sellers@paddle.com). In fact I'd say it's probably the best support experience I've ever had.
Regarding your sign-up questions:
- Back when I signed up there were no such options but now I'm in "Standard Digital Goods" which seems to be the catch-all for everything that doesnt fit into one of the more specific categories.
- I had integrated Stripe and Paypal (never again) already, so I didn't have that problem. You could use a "Contact Us" placeholder to manually process payments I guess. If you immediately apply to Paddle then, you shouldn't have to keep that up for long anyways.
That phenomenon is called counter-signaling, which I first ran into listening to Dan Jurafsky making the point that if a menu uses the word "fresh", its a low-brow restaurant. A high-brow restaurant would never use the word "fresh" -- the freshness is implicit in the other signals.
"People of average education show off the studied
regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a
teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial
points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close
friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal
credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials
even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes
accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify
accusations with a response."
It depends on how big a commitment you want to make. I quit my job to go study biology and it worked out pretty well for me. Programming opens doors for you because the majority of biology grad students can't do it. You get good work and an accelerated path through classes, TAships, research and other university business. If you want to work in IT, the experience you get is perfect for applying for prestige places like Google, Facebook or Amazon. Mostly I've spent the last year writing pattern matchers to extract subtle patterns from huge data files.
If you're not ready for a big commitment (and even if you are), I'd recommend taking some classes too get a feel for the subject. Khan Academy has two (or you can google around for more) that look pretty good. The just-plain-Biology one covers a surprising amount of useful information. The one on Genetics is useful too, although you might want to skip past some of the stuff about cross-breeding animals and whatnot.
Another thing you can look at is Synthetic Biology, which is biology plus design, biology for hackers. Synbio says biology has been too interested in describing and cataloguing, and not interested enough in building. So even though what we can do is pathetically simple next to the evolutionary process that designs new organisms, we can still do little things like making human beings immune to all viruses and designing cyanobacteria that produce crude oil from air, water and sunlight. If you're interested in Synbio you should check out the iGEM competition, which is a major event and an organizing site for useful information.
If you don't feel like crawling around the iGEM database of standardized biological parts (it's like the library docs for Life) you could look at these videos instead: https://www.ibiology.org/playlists/synthetic-biology/
Email's in my profile. Don't be a stranger if you have questions.
Wageningen has a large number of relevant courses available on edX.com. A while ago, I audited the three courses "Nutrition and Health: Food Risks", "Nutrition and Health: Macronutrients", and "Nutrition and Health: Micronutrients". They were excellent courses.
Clojure is by far the best programming language I've ever used. Rich Hickey's Sermons On The Mount changed the game of programming once and for all. With Clojure you could finally have your Lisp cake and eat it. Witness the sheer chutzpah of the guy when he basically told Ruby devs they were doing it wrong at Rails Conf in 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0).
Automattic has had offices in the past, so there is some precedent. The Tumblr team has a strong office culture, so we don't want to break anything that's working well. Simultaneously we believe the future of work is distributed, and over the next decade that's the direction we firmly want to head. If you want to learn more about this, including hybrid organizations, check out my new podcast at distributed.blog.
> Significantly, they also acknowledged the contributions I made. Acknowledgment doesn’t require a parade. These are small gestures that folks made that were meaningful to me:
> Using the :clap: emoji in a pull request comment to highlight a clever bit of my code.
> Sending a direct message of thanks upon realizing they were actively benefiting from a refactor I’d made to a previously gnarly bit of code.
> Posting a note to our #gratitude channel on Slack recognizing how helpful some documentation I’d written had been to them, and encouraging others to use it.
I remember reading a study about how for a romantic relationship to succeed, the ratio of positive to negative interactions has to be 5 to 1. [1]
Work relationships might only need a ratio of 1:1, but especially as an engineer, where the default's to critique and only pick out the bad parts in code reviews, these really help! Even at Stripe, I remember how far a "Nice! I've been meaning to do this for a while" as a part of a code review would go in just making all the other suggestions go down better. Definitely kudos to CircleCI for making this a part of the culture.
Running a Germany-based SaaS startup at some scale, so I feel confident to chime in.
To put it bluntly, you're right. We have to do more work just to get started accepting money than our American counterparts. Yes, the insanely complex EU-VAT rules actually need to be followed. Yes, a lot of your customers will want to pay via bank transfer and not through credit card. Yes, the American folks will still want to pay in USD and not in EUR.
We use ChargeBee (https://www.chargebee.com/) to abstract away most of the pain. I would greatly suggest using such a service (Recurly and Chargify are more enterprisey alternatives). We had a selfmade implementation before switching to ChargeBee, and one EU rule change caused us to have to re-issue all customer invoices for one quarter. Not fun. ChargeBee prevents you from doing the biggest blunders in taxation, and also allows you to keep track of invoices paid through credit card or through bank transfer (and specify the Dunning rules accordingly). Overall, I'd greatly recommend it.
Because VR makes it easier to look at the structures like the branches of the tree. You can put this on a screen too, of course, but from a user interface point of view it's a bit like looking at the world through a letterbox.
The 3d-ness of VR makes it easier for people to maintain a persistent mental model of a virtual environment than that which can be presented through a single screen, and that facilitates the presentation and navigation of complex structural information in 3 dimensions.
My favorite for now stays mkdocs (http://www.mkdocs.org/). For relative small ones with the material theme (http://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/) and bigger ones (because of top bar) with bootswatch theme (http://mkdocs.github.io/mkdocs-bootswatch/). It works the same, just builds a site from your MD files but creates a static site which can be hosted anywhere (e.g. github/gitlab pages via auto CI). Editing and creating your own theme is also easy and documented.
Installation is easiest I found for docs sites (pip install mkdocs) and it's blazingly fast. Comes with good themes and proper responsive design (saw some issues in Raneto on my ios). Has proper live reloading and build in serve functionality.
For large projects (enterprise size) we have made our own version based on what I learned from the Polymer docs (https://github.com/Polymer/doc) but removed the GAE requirement. Also, we are considering if using SO Enterprise is a good solution. Personally I'm in favor for in house docs and knowledge sharing for that. It's so flexible and people are already used to it. But that is a different ball park considering the OP.
To end with a positive note. Raneto seems to support much of the same as mkdocs or any of its alternatives. It looks good and whilst static site is something I want I understand it is not a deal breaker for all. In addition, Raneto mentions authentication is built in which is a nice thing if I want to host for internal stuff on a public domain so external customers can also use it without requiring a VPN account. Overall, nice work! Not for today, but I have bookmarked it.
Actually, having someone sit at their desk while I continued to shoot closer and closer to their face was probably the most fun of the entire project.
I tried some basic calculations, but as you could guess with a nerf dart, building HVAC, and all the other things going on it wound up being faster and easier (and again, more fun) just shooting until I was on target a couple of times.
After the first few desks it was pretty easy to get close on the first shot because you could generally know that 4ft left or right was about an adjustment value of +/- whatever from the last coordinate you had dialed in.
https://glitchtip.com/