SoylentNews

Ask SN: Best Online Store for a Command-Line Tool

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 13 2016, @12:29PM   
from the bucks-for-bytes dept.

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

I'm nearing feature completion of a command-line tool that I hope will enable me to pay my rent myself. There are many services that provide online stores; which would be the best for me?

I expect to provide installers for .deb and .rpm Linuxes (Linuces?), *BSD, Mac OS X and Windows. The user will select the platform, pay then download the installer.

I expect I'll provide a time-limited demo.

It won't have DRM as I'm convinced someone would just crack it. And really DRM sounds like a PITA from my perspective. The product will be inexpensive; I have the hope that most people would rather pay than have to figure out how to download a "liberated" product.

The eCommerce services I've checked out so far enable the sale of physical products as well as Software as a Service.

I am less concerned with the cost of my store provided I can still make a profit.

I'm not going to sell it through Apple's App Store because I don't want to deal with the sandbox. I expect most of my users will be comfortable with command-lines; I don't forsee them wanting to shop at the App Store.

I hope to go Alpha in a week.

[In consideration of other Soylentils who may have a product with a GUI, or even this submitter should they decide to add one, what other store(s) would you recommend? -Ed.]

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Original Submission

• MDC, Please read thisMDC, Please read this (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 14 2016, @12:24PM

  by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @12:24PM (#401747) Journal

  I just went to your web site and it is full of things that would make me not hire you. In no particular order:

  • You have a 'careers' link in the navbar that goes to a typo squatter. Makes your site and business look dead.
  • You have a 'tips' section that looks like it doesn't contain any content that you wrote after 2002 (two articles have dates from 2000, the other two have copyrights from 2000 and 2002 respectively). Again, makes you look completely inactive.
  • You list a load of random buzzwords, but no evidence of competence in any of them. They might be things that you've worked actively on for decades, or they might be words that you saw on the spine of a book somewhere. I have no way of knowing which, so I'd assume the worst. Put up some indications of past projects that you've completed, quotes from satisfied customers, and so on.
  • Skimming one of your 'tips', didn't give a good impression. I looked at the 'Pointers to C++ Member Functions' article. If it were recent, I'd expect some discussion of std::function (given how small your selection of tips is, I'd expect them to be removed, lowered in prominence, or updated, so the age isn't really an excuse here). You say that you don't have access to the g++ source code? The article indicates that you don't know how pointers to members are implemented on *NIX platforms in spite of it being well documented in the ABI spec. A very quick skim of the C++ memory management article indicates that it's all pre-C++11 and actively bad advice to give someone now. My impression from this would be that you haven't kept your skills up to date and are completely unaware of this.
  • You try to explain your customers' business to them. The only one of your skills that links anywhere (the OS X kernel extensions) tells people what a kernel is. Potential customers either know this in a lot of detail, or don't want you for this skill and so don't care. The ones that care will want to see evidence of competence, not simply that you have a basic understanding of what the terms mean.

  Please either update or remove the tips, add some concrete examples of things that you've done and some of your prior customers and remove the dead links. Your site will seem a lot more professional as a result.

  (I'm not going to complain about the soggy wizards domain. Good programmers are often eccentric, and as long as those eccentricities don't outweigh their competence, no one minds too much)

  --
  sudo mod me up

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3

• Not a typo squatter, actually(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 15 2016, @02:43AM

  by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday September 15 2016, @02:43AM (#402110) Homepage Journal

  Sorry about that, it's supposed to go to a link list full of companies that are hiring.

  I moved the domain to a new registrar then totally spaced setting up the new DNS for the subdomains. Also missing is mike.soggywizards.com.

  --
  Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]

  Parent