munger

Agree. What is the point of using composer or any dependency manager if you check-in the vendor folder?

Focuses on food replacement cost of calories burnt, which makes very little sense since author at their own acknowledgement does not account for cost of maintenance on car or bike, or better health.

If you're going to ignore all of those things, you may as well ignore the cost of food per calorie burnt as well, which would mean to ignore this article.

Unless it's a financial application...

In a way, this is where it can help to have a developer day job with a salary or at least that mentality. Where commercial pressures and tight deadlines can light a fire under you to just get things done.

In some cases these types of motivators can cause you to hack out something that only barely works at first, before circling back with test writing, best practices, etc. But maybe that can be better than not completing anything at all?

You can always refactor your way to an awesome codebase if it starts out a bit quick and dirty at first. Sometimes just having the minimum amount of friction to complete the requirements to get going can be helpful, as starting is sometimes the hardest part.

Maybe you just need to set deadlines as if you are the CEO of your company and not the developer where by certain dates you need the MVP or new feature and it has to happen no matter what.

Maybe build an MVP such that you can start charging people and get customers, which can also be a motivating force to continue on and continuously improve it because you feel the obligation to your paying customers.

I second Mandrill. 12k free emails per month, $0.20 per thousand after that (and cheaper for very large volumes). This is for a shared IP address with other free tier users. You can add a dedicated IP to build just your own reputation for $30/month. You can easily setup DKIM for your domains even on the free shared IP tier. Libraries in many languages + restful API if needed for others.

Arg, I think I found a dead-end on mission 1. I had the heartbleed virus v1.2 and the mission called for v1.0 and so after installing v1.2, it no longer allows installation of an additional one or deleting the first one so now I am still stuck with $0 because the wrong version is installed. Any advice?

I agree with both of these points. Also as someone else mentioned controlling how many ships to send out - I sent out my largest planet to capture a tiny one before I understood the mechanics - which brings up another point. To replenish a 440 ship planet would take HOURS building 3-10 ships at a time so it makes planets that attack pay a little too high of a price.

Sweet, fun so far. I think the drag/drop background broke on reload for me in chrome? Can't seem to move map anymore.

A little slower paced than expected, and a little labor intensive like farmville. Maybe some hotkeys to speed up tedium? Or a select all / mine gold command or similar.

Overall awesome work though, I'm intrigued.

Unfortunately here in Louisville/Boulder Colorado, it's either Comcast or Century Link. I have tried both and done my own testing, and Comcast is still the best connection despite their price point.

I could not agree more about latency. My first try with Century Link last year had 120ms latency which is terrible because Comcast was 15ms. CL upgraded my neighborhood loop and got to 20ms which is fine, but the CL upload speed is still crippled at an outdated 768kb/s where as Comcast I get 3.5Mb/s upload. I work from a home office so upload bandwidth is important.

So since there is no other contender that has both good latency and upload speed I use Comcast for now.

Although, I guess there is nothing to stop me from running servers on Linode and continuing to use RS for Cloud Files/Akamai -- except for network speed of course. Linode can deploy to Dallas though, where I use RS so maybe the network speed won't be a big problem.

Couldn't agree with this more. I cringe at laugh tracks that literally get set off after each line of dialogue in many exchanges, especially when it is not even a joke and not funny.

Compared to that, SV is much much better in my opinion. I can't even watch BBT because the laugh track is so grating and don't get me started about "Bazinga", the most trite manufactured catch-phrase ever created.

Rackspace cloud customer here… These Linode upgrades are very tempting to entice me to switch.

I get I might not be their target market (small business with about $1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from doing so: 1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance. 2) Some kind of scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an individual server.

I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.

Not really sure how it's possible to hang out on HN and not know who patio11/Patrick/Kalzumeus is...