If you don’t know, now you know:
https://stripe.com/
Stripe is, or rather states, that they do online processing for a flat fee and act as your gateway interfacing directly with your bank. AWESOME! I think Stripe is pretty new right now; and unfortunately I haven’t used them to know how great it really is. But, I’ve built enough online stores to know that online transactions are cumbersome. You can push for one gateway over the other but ultimately you’re going to deal with several over the course of your career.
PAYPAL!?
Ever tried using PayPal to accept money? Of course you have. Have you ever tried to build a store around PayPal? No, you haven’t. Because if you have then you’ve surely jumped off a cliff by now. I can’t seem to test in the developer sandbox of PayPal’s without having their service go down at least twice. Now the live gateway is reliable, but testing is a nightmare!
OTHER GATEWAYS
So there are a ton of other gateways. And I’ve used several in combination with dozens of merchants. I definitely favor some over others. And, I’m not trying to knock any one of them or say what anyone should or shouldn’t use. But, I do want to hear from people out there.
Have you used Stripe? If so, how was/is it. How good is it for larger scale store type systems? How do you handle refunds, escrow, or customer data? If you haven’t used Stripe do you think you would? I’m going to give it a try next chance I get. The fees are right and I’m excited for a service like this to be available and I think it’s a long time coming. Kudos.
This week I saw a lot of problems on forums, and at our office related to scope. So I’ve decided to write on scope as it relates to a few languages and discuss why understanding variable scope can save you a lot of headache. I know there are already quite a few articles online about it; but while most only discuss how to keep variables in scope and use them, most don’t talk about the importance of it. And, more importantly, I don’t see a lot of articles discussing scope as it relates to variable declaration and in some cases datatyping. Let’s get right to it.
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I’m a pretty big fan of open source initiatives, code, rules, and especially software. If you go to school for computer science they’re going to give you the command line and probably a bunch of proprietary software; either free or not, to develop with. Sun puts out a decent developer JAVA. Microsoft has Visual Studio. And, if you’re as fortunate as me you’ll get to learn BASIC and you might even come upon a floppy with QBasic on it! If you’re doing web development you may even be told to use Dreamweaver to do your HTML and CSS (if they’re even aware of CSS). While I’m a big fan of JAVA and of Visual Studio as far as ASPX is concerned I’ve got to tell you I don’t use either often. And, I don’t do ASP development ever and don’t plan on it. Not because it’s Microsoft but because there is enough stuff out there to learn about and that system isn’t one that’s I’ve been around or care to use.
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I’ve been working at this office in Bakersfield for about 2 years now after my foray into the freelance world which I did also for 2 years. And while I still freelance on the side it’s nice to work with a team of people I see everyday. It also provides me the opportunity to start taking more time out and writing about the work I do and things I love. Recently at the office I built our towns first mobile app. It is geared primarily for the iPhone although I’ve heard rumor it runs pretty well on Android as well. In building this mobile app I ran into a lot of hardships and created quite a few workarounds to problems that may have been easier to fix than I made them. However, it was a learning process as it was my first mobile app and it turned out to be a pretty awesome one at that!
IN THE BEGINNING
Let me start by listing the frameworks I tried:
jQuery Mobile
jQTouch
Sencha Touch
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Okay, so everyone’s done it and now I am going to too. Here’s a place for cool things I find, code I write, and stuff in general that I’d like to share with the community (the internets) and family alike.