Hey, I'm Thomas, the author of the article. I do agree with your observations pretty much entirely.
I'm mostly talking about the "throw a component, library or jQuery plugin at everything" sort of mentality. That just yields and unmaintainable buggy mess—unfortunately I've encountered this all too often in the wild. (While I was a consultant, I could make a good living from cleaning up these messes, so I won't complain too much!)
It all boils down to, however, a willingness to actually think about the things you're doing, and trying to do good solid work. IMO not enough people do that, or even aspire to do that, which makes me a bit sad about "my" profession.
Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.
I've made $60k in a year with a highly topical 60-page ebook (PDF only) that I wrote in about a week, mainly by promoting to a mailing list with only a few thousand people on it.
As Nathan says, you need to set a price. Plus, tell people why it's worth more for them to buy and read your book than to either not have the information in it, or spend the time researching themselves.
My book is on supporting Retina screens on web browsers[1]. Yes, you can spend a week reading all you can ok the web about it. Or you spend $49 and know all about it in half an hour and spend the other 39 1/2 hours of the week making money with client work.
So you got about 1,200 sales out of a list of 3,000 subscribers? Would you mind sharing your exact conversion rate (total # of sales/total # of subscribers) that made you $60k in revenue from this book?
I replace my main computer (MacBook Pro) every 1-2 years with a maxed out top of the line model. I keep the one I had before around as a backup in case my laptop breaks or gets stolen.
Yes, it doesn't make too much sense tax-wise. However, it would cost me much more in productivity to wait 2-3 years longer to replace it. This thing needs to run bunches of stuff for development, like various DB servers, multiple VMs (yay 4 different versions of Internet Explorer) and should be as light as possible so I can take it everywhere easily (usually servers go down when you're mid-vacation).
So it might save a few hundred dollars by taking advantage of tax laws, or I might earn thousands more because I can develop faster and things are just more enjoyable. I know what to pick.
If you're building the kind of app that Ember is designed for, all of the above will be true. But we never anywhere claim that Ember is the right solution for every webapp. There's a definite type of app that doesn't benefit from Ember and I'll happily tell people that. There are also other simple widget based apps where I think Backbone is a good option.
Ember is not marketed as being for a specific type of app, and not for others. The sole hint to kind of app is "ambitious apps." As a reader, that seems like a challenge. Oh, I don't think ember is right for me? Must not be ambitious. Nowhere on the site that I can see is there a discussion of fit, or tradeoffs.
I'm not attacking Ember specifically. All the MVC frameworks' sites are the same in this regard: breathless boosterism, slathered in benefit-speke.
That's a good point. We probably should add a section on helping users decide whether Ember is a good fit for their goals. While there's obviously some disagreement in this area, we can at least make it clear what sort of apps we intend Ember to be used for.
Basic Marketing 101: if you try to attract everyone, you will inevitably get a lot of people for whom the product is not ideal, and then they will be angry. And then there will be backlash.
Better to build your fences and make them clear so people are educated, instead of seduced.
You're quoting from the Ember website but your bad experience was with Backbone.js. In fact, Ember is designed to avoid the kind of deficiencies you hit in Backbone. Sounds like you should give Ember a try in your next app. ;)
I'm not sure if you intended it, but this comment seems extremely egotistical.
Are you genuinely interested in his/her experience and having a conversation about it, or are you saying (as it seems to read), "How many apps have YOU developed?"
If it's the latter, you're being kind of a dick. Just saying.
I can see how my comment could be taken this way. It's not want I wanted to express. I wanted to state, as a disclaimer, that I'm the author of the post.
As for answering the comment, it's really more of an ad hominem so that's why I wrote the snarky "That's interesting".
I am interested in what he developed though, especially as he's so sure of his one true way.
NB: My husband isn't a native English speaker. His point was that he wrote about our experience with a specific app and that the bulk of jacquesc's argument was "Thomas rails like a zealot" and implies Thomas is an old dead horse (?), and otherwise was basically "nuh-uh." Without supporting detail.
It was an invitation to provide details instead of ad hominem attacks (speaking of being kind of a dick). Because his native language isn't English, this got a little bit mangled. I already pointed that out to him.
Also he wanted to say he was the original author, and it ended up sounding like a line from an action movie.
Bummer. Well, I guess all I can say it's nothing personal. I thought I was arguing against Thomas's opinion (which I disagree with), and his constant attacks against any JS framework over 2K in size.
In case anyone reading this exchange isn't privy to the facts of the matter:
Thomas doesn't "constantly" "attack" libraries "over 2k in size."
He's a core team member of Prototype, wrote/"founded" Scriptaculous, scripty2, and Zepto. All significantly larger than 2k. All different types of frameworks, libraries. All of which we use.
What Thomas does is promote smaller, more modular libraries -- based on experience. He promotes them because large libraries dominated the market utterly, and monocultures are not productive for hackers. So he started http://microjs.com.
Some people like to characterize him as a zealot for promoting an alternative and talking about why huge frameworks/libraries often have more tradeoffs than benefits.
I guess after writing Prototype with it's 2GB source it's understandable that one would become a promoter of smaller, modular libraries ;)
I'm myself a supporter of small libs, actually wrote a zepto "competitor" to be compatible with IE9 [1], but get the impression everyone is being a little too defensive (offensive?) on the matter.
Not when you consider the original blog post, which addressed the question of "Why not let the server be the data store?" Among the other "points"[1] jacquesc raised.
[1] anyone who wants to pretend to have a serious, rational discussion -- don't start it by calling the person a zealot. Bam! Insta-noncredibility.
To be fair, he said he was "railing like a zealot" -- a subtle but important difference. Calling someone a zealot is attacking them as a person, calling their behavior "zealot-like" is only attacking the behavior.
I'm mostly talking about the "throw a component, library or jQuery plugin at everything" sort of mentality. That just yields and unmaintainable buggy mess—unfortunately I've encountered this all too often in the wild. (While I was a consultant, I could make a good living from cleaning up these messes, so I won't complain too much!)
It all boils down to, however, a willingness to actually think about the things you're doing, and trying to do good solid work. IMO not enough people do that, or even aspire to do that, which makes me a bit sad about "my" profession.