thinkbohemian

This program offers interesting features to a business but not s much for the traveler. Anyone who is spending 25+ nights a year in a hotel is going to be sure to be getting points for those stays. Points == status and status == more convenience when traveling. Beyond earning free nights, there's expedited check-in, private lounges with free food, gift baskets when you check in, etc. The caveat is that to get status most (or all) of your points need to be with the same company. This means most hardcore business travelers are very loyal to <program x>. This travel program doesn't have any kind of loyalty rewards which is a non-starter.

Other downsides of airbnb: booking isn't instantaneous as with a hotel (wait hours or days for confirmation from owner), checkin has to be pre-arranged and requires you get in touch with the owner (i.e. no 3am red-eye check-ins), each place you stay is slightly different amenities versus hotel chains which all have the same brand of pre-wrapped toothbrush when you forget yours. These might seem trivial but when you travel a bunch it's the little things that hurt the most.

Story: I once had to wait for 2 hours to check into an airbnb in SF since the owner was in Africa and his mother forgot to leave his key where he said it would be.

At Georgia Tech we got a very small server space which was used in a few CS classes, it would have been large enough to run hubot. Your university might have a similar setup.

If you've got a static files you could still serve it using Heroku free. Put cloudflare or another CDN in front of it and boom you've got 24 hours of fast responses. Though if it's a static site why do you need Heroku? Kind of like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

> The first step was removing varnish

This was removed for architectural reasons. It brought a lot of downtime to the platform and didn't help speed all that much. It's better and faster to cache this type of content with a CDN anyway.

I bought this game a few years ago. I learned quite a few things about vim. Unfortunately the puzzles in the later levels aren't very clear. I spent hours trying to figure out what on earth they wanted me to do. To me this was counter productive and got less and less fun. I ended up leaving the last few levels unfinished as I felt I got very minimal returns for time invested.

If you're interested in picking up vim, I love it for the first 5 or so levels. After that, not so much. (I currently still use sublime text but do occasionally use vim on servers)

Tenderlove, the super nice guy who submitted that PR is on Rails core. Too bad to hear he's part of the evil visible minority that you just made up in your head.

Austin is amazing! If you're in town stop by an Austin on Rails, great community. There's always friendly folks, companies hiring, and ususally some food.

I think there are a few issues. The first is funding. If you are an engineering manager and trying to ship product, you don't want a 25% faster Ruby VM in 10 years, you want someone to benchmark and optimize existing code in existing products 25% today. I agree that it's a good pay off, cost versus benefit...however the benefit is spread around hundreds and thousands of companies. Google gains marketshare for chrome when V8 gets faster, there's very few companies that get significant advantage explicitly from making Ruby faster for everyone. If you're paying to make Ruby faster, it's also getting faster for your competitors too (if they use Ruby).

There are a bunch of core contributors that are very active. Several of their companies allow them to spend time contributing (most of them are from Japan). Another example is Aaron, he is on Ruby core and his company allows him some time to contribute to open source, so this is sponsorship in a way. I while a company stands to benefit from sponsoring a full time developer, they benefit just as much if someone else sponsors a full time developer. Right now there's not enough companies with either a business incentive, altruism, or interest. Perhaps there are companies out there interested in sponsoring full time devs who just don't know how (and to your point cannot find them) but I think that would be the minority case.