CodeMirror vs. Ace

Here's why I went with CodeMirror over Ace for Rewritepad:

• Better support for textarea (good to have for scenarios where JavaScript is unavailable). Ace has a special build for it but it isn't compatible with the regular API yet.
• Smaller in size (34k vs. ~185k) and comes with a very handy compression helper.
• Much faster and deals with huge documents way better than Ace because it only puts the visible content in the DOM tree. As pointed out by Fabian Jakobs, the author of Ace, in a comment and by Marijn Haverbeke, the author of CodeMirror on Twitter, both CodeMirror and Ace use the same technique and in fact Ace actually pioneered it.
• Better documentation compared to Ace.
• Marijn Haverbeke.

Ask for what you want

I've noticed that in most situations my assumption that what I want won't be feasible (for my employer, family and friends, service providers, business partners)  is exaggerated and just plain wrong.

Have the clarity to know what you want and the courage to ask for it and more often than not you will get it.

Starting up

Starting Jan 1, 2011, I switched to consulting part-time (3 days a week) at my regular gig Directi (which IMO, is one of the best companies to work for in India) to spend some quality time with my then pregnant wife and focus on building products that scratched my own itch.

So far, I've become a dad (it's a girl!), shipped Owe.to, shipped OboxApps, almost shipped Rewritepad and saw bombay evolve in the process.

Along the way I also stumbled upon what looks like an interesting problem to solve, with a sizable market that I'm very excited about.

Overall, its been a great year so far and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

Business 101

1. Find a pressing problem faced by enough (depending on how much money you want to make) customers* .
2. Come up with a solution to the problem and offer it to customers. The price is a part of the solution.
3. If enough customers are not willing to pay for your solution, then either the problem was not pressing enough (go to step 1) or faced by enough customers (go to step 1)  or you don't have the right solution yet (go to step 2).
4. Rinse and repeat till you have enough paying customers.

* Customers are people with a problem that they are willing to pay to solve. Your users are not always your customers. For example, users of a site/product might just be people that your customers can advertise to.