shebson

I generally agree with your post, but I think there is a critical difference between your argument and that of the blog post. Of course teams are more productive with technologies they know, but that isn't necessarily an arbitrarily-defined "boring" technology.

To pick on one specific example in the post: Node.js is popular enough that there are lots of teams and engineers that are most comfortable and productive working with it. For these teams, choosing Node certainly wouldn't cost an innovation token, while deciding to build some service in Python, Ruby or PHP (if we take at face value that this is more "boring") may end up being more costly.

A more appropriate example might be Python. It didn't ship with Pip by default until Python 3.4 (released in 2014).

I just want to say thank you. VB was my first introduction to programming. I was in fourth grade and I asked my parents for VB6, and they thoughtfully also bought me "Visual Basic for Dummies." I was quickly hooked - I especially remember writing side scroller games with it and making the image sprites with Photoshop in my school's computer lab. I don't think I've written a line of VB since middle school, but I will always have fond memories of it.

I tend to agree, but there is still a place for this app. SF's parking enforcement and the appeals process is thoroughly broken. I know several people who have lost appeals when they parked at a broken meter despite having taken photos or videos showing that meter wasn't working (and in SF, signs on parking meters indicate that parking at broken meters is legal as long as you stay within posted time limits).

Berlin may be worth considering as well. Opportunities for developers in Berlin are comparatively plentiful, and while it would be nice to know German if you live there, many tech companies in Berlin use English as the official language because employees come from so many places around the EU and the world.

I'd assume it's an XLSX simply because that's the format they received it in from the Defense Department.

Love this idea! I signed up and am looking forward to seeing what kind of items are available in the coming weeks.

One little thing confused me about the dashboard: I can see that I have "free item alerts" on, but I can't find a way to see if I have alerts on for normal auction items.

In any case, great idea and I'm excited to use it.

Jekyll with GitHub Pages is a great solution, but it's worth mentioning that other static site generators serve the same purpose and may be a better fit for you, depending on your preferences. Hyde is a very flexible static site generator based on Django, and Metalsmith is a very promising static site generator built on Node. Whatever static site generator you use, hosting on S3 is easy and cheap, and it's easy to automate deployments via Grunt or Gulp.

As a result, app deploys are also down.

You shouldn't trust it just because of your UI. With developer tools, regardless of your UI, it would be trivially easy for a malicious user to send any arbitrary SQL query. This would allow them to retrieve sensitive data or modify/delete records from your production database. You really should only build this query server-side, and, as the OP is using PHP, I should also add the caveat that they should use PDO.