clickable http://awesome.taskrabbit.com/017e0

(email is just for new macbook air contest, you can download the app w/o it, just don't enter your email if you don't want to try to win)

I design mascots and logos, shoot me an email at the email in my profile.

I think web design is a really good trade to have and you should not stack up a list like that. If you are on HN, I imagine you have grander ambitions of doing your own things, so if I were you I'd learn to respectfully say no more often. I learned this one the hard way, but once I started saying no, it was no big deal, and I was helping others, but in reality these tasks take away time from my own coding projects, and it's not worth the trade off.

Find a different way to pay it forward with friends and family rather than offering your professional technical skills (if it's becoming too time consuming, maybe you'll have down time some times, and you'll know you can pick it back up).

can you explain 'convertible note' and 'no dividend' 'no cap'

hm, his email isn't on his site. do you know where I can find it to ping him?

pg@ycombinator.org, I believe.

Thanks guys for those comments, quite helpful.

whats a good one to use for single devs/small teams?

I use git at work and for personal stuff. The learning path is maybe a bit steep if you come from things like Subversion, on the other hand I instructed a developer new to VCSs and so far he didn't complain, shoot his foot, or shoot mine :)

git is only my personal preference, generally speaking I recommend to go for a distributed version control system: it's modern, it's mainstream, and it's more versatile in terms of workflows you can implement.

Anything that supports a decentralized model. Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.

would love to see an answer to this as well.

I believe that's already been done...forrst.com

I agree, this description makes the site sound like Forrst. It doesn't highlight the focus on professionals sharing links to things that they're reading.

What language/tools did you use to build it?

I used: ruby 1.9.2, ETL (extract-transform-load), vagrant, chef, mongodb, redis, sunspot/solr, rails 3, cucumber, rspec.

I plan to write a couple of blog posts explaining the "how" later on! It's been an interesting ride really.

Awesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?

It took much too long: around 300 hours as of today.

But a large part of it (the 2/3rds) was a learning exercise around chef and vagrant, which wasn't necessary to the project.

Of the remaining third, I've got around 70% for data processing in general and 30% on pure front-end code and design.

I really wanted to learn how to deal with sysadmin in a more productive fashion, so I took the plunge :)

would be interested to hear your learning experience in sysadmin.

Since I started freelancing in 2005 I've always deployed my stacks myself, learning gradually.

I always felt that doing it manually (even using well-written notes) then gradually home-baked tools was a loss of time.

I looked at chef more than a couple of times, waiting for the documentation to be more available, and for feedback from people I know.

I started using chef with the opscode platform, then went back to chef-solo as it really fits my needs already.

I'm using it for client work as well as for everything behind HackerBooks (including Rails app deployment without capistrano anymore).

The consequence is that I can boot a new ubuntu instance from scratch, completely configured with the whole stack (rvm, rails 3, passenger, nginx, solr, god, the properly configured crawler, data restored from a S3-like etc) in less than 15 minutes.

I will never go back to manual sysadmin (apart from small tips) - this really fits my way of working.

But it has been a time-sink to get in :)

Hope I replied to your question properly, if I didn't, ask again!