Do we really need either Angular's or htmlbars' (see slide 37) way of "decorating DOM elements with behavior" when it is so trivial with just ES5 and HTML? See this jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/dexygen/nU8VK/ Give me a couple/three strong JS devs and I guarantee you I could take these simple building blocks (as well as spans with data- attributes, and innerHTML, instead of templates), and I could build out a framework way faster than either Angular or Ember.js and would validate as HTML5 to boot. Doubt me? I pretty much did the same thing for PHP; see http://dexygen.com/ria/#!/docs/jackrabbitmvc
The following approximation of Adobe AIR took gluing together and/or modifying about a half-dozen existing open source projects with just about 100 lines of code:
I've always said Ben Franklin was the father of open source, at least as pertains to hardware: "Of the numerous inventions Franklin created, he did not patent a single one"; see http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_inquiring_little.html
Last year I devised an open source alternative to Adobe AIR (http://code.google.com/p/deskml/) and intend to use that as the platform. I've already got some code written for the ereader, that mounts and unzips an epub using Tcl's virtual file system capabilities, and changes the embedded web server's document root to a file indicated inside the epub by the epub meta data. Etcetera.
Come join the project, if you're a student you can get paid by Google, and after the summer we should have a nice startup bootstrapped.
Your in a city with a great startup culture. Staying in school in that city and thereby staying exposed to that great startup culture for 3+ years could very well be worth what debt you will accrue in the meantime, and if your smart enough to do well at neuro-science, you will probably get out of that debt in short order.
I've got a felony conviction from over 22 years ago, and for contract hunting, I actually turn this into an advantage. For instance, I "advertise" as already having a clean background check going back 15-20 years. For your situation, just be up-front with your co-founders (which I read you have), and perhaps stay out of any function that involves finances.
umenline: with regard to my platform (deskml) for creating desktop apps from web technologies, I put my email in my profile, just click on the "jemptymethod" link. Hope to hear from you.
BTW I own several compelling domain names related to this project "deskml" and it's tagline: powering "the desk wide web". Plus a compelling domain name for my ebook/javascript idea.
Glad there may be some interest, I have another startup idea, so if somebody rips this off I have a fall-back position ;) This one is just so compelling though, I'm willing to take the initial risk.
Pretty damn close to straight PHP I'm guessing. Am using for the webUI on an embedded device, manufactured by one fortune 100, for another.
In prior gig for a startup last Aug-Nov, they used Symfony and lost projects for 2 of the most heavily visited websites in the world. Home page took 10s if not 100s of thousands of function calls to render, I know cause I profiled them with XDebug after the fact. They laid off 1/3 of their workforce last week.
I think this "2-3 hours of real work per day" stuff is a myth. Or maybe this depends on a definition of "real work" that only entails "heads-down" "in-the-zone" coding. Still I think it's too low. I'm 44 and just a month and a half ago I had to intensely focus 9-10 hours a day to meet a very aggressive deadline (PG you are so wrong about us older coders ;) It was exhilarating and while I wouldn't want to keep that up for months on end, I think 5-6 hours heads-down is definitely do-able. What about the other 2-3 hours to come to an 8 hour day? Well, there's analysis, documentation, email, etc. Some people like to do this sort of thing first thing, but then is when I focus best. Indeed by mid to late afternoon my brain is craving television, but I force myself to at least think about problems, even if I'm not solving them through code. And it usually pays off, with a solution through code the next morning. Anyway that's my experience.
Contractors _don't_ get paid four times as much as hourly employees. Oh sure, companies might get billed four times as much (though in my experience it has 1.5 to 2.5 times as much: I've seen invoices sitting on my boss's desk, and once even the consulting company mistakenly sent the invoice to _my_ address). Contractors probably get paid 1.25 times as much on average: the rest goes into some suit's undeserving pocket.