jamesotron

Hi all.

My expertise lies in networking and development and not in marketing and business development. I'm probably not best suited to the life of an entrepreneur, but with the help of friends like @peterc, and keeping HN in my feeds I have learned an awful lot over the last year or so.

I am launching http://splinch.it/ in July. Splinch provides automatic router and switch configuration file versioning and collaboration using git. It will also provide log file analysis for the very same allowing me to autodetect configuration changes and read in the new config.

I'd really love some feedback from people here about the landing page as it is now and suggestions on how to improve it. Also, any ideas on how I can reach my target audience would be great.

Thanks! @jamesotron.

Hi all. I'm a small startup based in New Zealand. My product needs to have recurring billing and I was hoping to use a payment service like Chargify so that I don't have to deal with any credit card details and not have to worry about PCI compliance. Turns out Chargify has no support for any kind of sales tax (in New Zealand we have to add GST to sales to New Zealand based customers). Braintree doesn't do international customers (at least on my scale), so it looks like I'm back to trying to integrate ActiveMerchant and having to handle all this stuff in my code - exposing myself to more risk, since I am just a one man band at this stage. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this? Perhaps I just open a paypal account and do it that way?

So, your customer says "give me a website that does X", you say "sure" and go about throwing together an app to meet the spec. What happens after the jobs done and there is a new framework release, or a security problem with the existing app? How do you handle approaching the client for additional funding to "keep the rails version fresh" or "fix a potential issue with XSS"? Do you bake it into your initial contract? The whole thing seems fraught with danger to me.

Okay. Here's my workflow:

  - block out at least three hours of time
  - stock up on coffee and shutdown all distractions
  - code until my brain breaks.

This has implications for office work, because it means I can't do anything other than randomly browsing the nets, meaning that I go to work all day for fun, come home and binge until I fall asleep. Kind of screws the work/life balance we hear so much about these days.

So. How many of you are truly disciplined about your work and how many just binge?