The debate was “one cron job sending 1000 emails” vs “1000 cron jobs”. Justin’s suggestion had me emulating 1000 cron jobs on iron.io, setting up a worker to send a single daily email once a day, and scheduling itself to fire again the next day. It talks to my server to get the email data and to update the id of the task, so they can be canceled.

I also moved all “trickle” emails to this kind of process – one week after registering on the Birdy, you get an email asking how it’s going. Now when you register, a job is queued for 7 days from now with all the email info. Much tidier, and less stress on my server. Perfect!

Yeah, the Drama episode was great. I love This Developer’s Life. It’s just too bad that the shows are so infrequent.

Thanks so much for the positive feedback on Catalyst. It really does take a ton of energy, but I’m having a lot of fun with it so it’s ultimately worth it. I guess it’s because I like challenges as much as I like technology. 😉 Also, it’s a good thing that I got Justin roped in and that CJ is helping out, otherwise I’d probably lose my mind. 😉

Also, I really like the idea about the auto-formatting IDEs. That would be awesome! 😉

The HN saga reminded me of the Drama episode on This Developer’s Life podcast 2.0.9. Rob Conery decided to produce that episode based on a flame war experienced by Scott Hanselman on one of his blog posts. It’s a must-listen.

Also I wanted to say how impressed I was with your efforts around Catalyst. I can appreciate how much effort and energy this would take. At the end of the day the programming language and environment you pick does not matter as much as the learning kids will get. You’re not teaching them to be programmers, just to have an appreciation for what code is all about and how to get their mind focused in a specific way.

This could be doable without virtualisation too – just prepare some modified linux live-cds.

Of course both approaches can fail – VMs because of machines which cannot run them smoothly; live-cds because of machines with strange hardware… But maybe it’s something you want to consider?

And just so we don’t start a proper flame war, I’ll only say: I can’t wait for IDEs which read / write only AST to files, but display code automatically formatted according to your settings. It shouldn’t matter where the original author likes to put braces. For compilation they’re completely irrelevant, so they should be displayed according to local settings only. Then I could also continue to use 3-spaces-wide indentation using tabs, without people getting crazy about it.

I do not follow the K&R method, except when doing Javascript. The only reason I do K&R there is because Visual Studio is rather adamant that it MUST be that way. But only when doing Javascript, the rest of the time it likes “normal” brackets.

@Justin, maybe you should provide three versions to make everyone happy:

————————————————————————————–
Hello World
This is how to code a Hello World application in DoubleDollar.

$$
({
home :
{
route :
{
default : function()
{
$(‘body’).html(‘Hello World’);
}
}
}
})

Hello World
This is how to code a Hello World application in DoubleDollar.

$$({home :{
route :{
default : function(){
$(‘body’).html(‘Hello World’);
}
}
}
})

Hello World
This is how to code a Hello World application in DoubleDollar.

$$({home :{route :{default : function(){$(‘body’).html(‘Hello World’);}}}})

————————————————————————————————–

Thanks for the podcasts!

It’d also be fun hearing Jason go nuts when someone gets a job.

🙂

@Both – Glad to see you are considering the advertising option. Don’t forget that with job advertising, referrals can be actually larger than you think. Should your referral lead to a placement, you could receive a bonus – sometimes a percentage of the first week/months salary.

Jason, one funny thing about the LinkedIn invite is that I tried to ignore it for a little while but LinkedIn kept spamming me every week for 3 or 4 weeks saying something to the effect of “you still haven’t responded to the invite from Jason…”

As far as charging for Job shout outs, I think it is a good idea. The standard rate on Stackoverflow/LinkedIn/etc. is about $300 – $400 for a 30 day posting. Not sure how that would translate to a 30 second mention on a podcast.

No worries, though the “best” (read: worst) part is that LinkedIn keeps sending me reminders to connect with you (since I didn’t have an account to complete the request with).

My impression was like Justin predicted: a bit flattered. I was like “Man, Jason went through all the trouble to track me down and add me as a friend, what a nice guy!” Then my dreams were crushed 😉

I had a similar issue when Google+ came out, and it recommended a bunch of gaming friends that I had (my design) used an alias with – but apparently there was an automated forum email that was CC’ed instead of BCC’ed so they were all in my contacts. I about sh*t a brick when I saw those recommendations – “how the hell does Google know about *those* friends!?”

Yeah, I guess I’m going to have to take a hard look at MonoTouch. Thanks for keeping it on my radar.

Thank you for all the hard work. Keep it going!

BTW, I mentioned MonoTouch. I’ve been playing with the tutorials; it’s phenomenal.

It’s apparently better than steroids and legal 😉