In 2013, I designed and built a cryptocurrency exchange for the China market. The basic concept & architecture only took a few days, but the full implementation required several years. I shared the basic architecture in 2013, and with the recent spike in interest in Bitcoin and...
David Veksler
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My first blog was launched from my university dorm room in 2001, using my personal computer as the web server for a long-forgotten XML-based CMS. Over the next 16 years, I’ve created new sites using over a dozen different blog and content management platforms. The websites I’ve created...
The other day I mentioned on LinkedIn that I was looking for a freelancer web developer. A USA-based agency messaged me to express interest. Their rate—$150/hour. This a typical rate for an experienced US-based web developer. The project I need help with has a budget of about $1,000...
The Foundation for Economic Education turned 70 years old this year. Over the course of several decades, FEE collected a warehouse full of archives. Although the archives were eventually digitized, no one knew what to do with the scans, so they sat around for many years collecting digital...
Facebook’s Instant Articles are a new way to create fast-loading articles within the Facebook app. We wanted it for FEE’s page because we wanted the boost in performance as well as engagement. FEE.org runs the Umbraco CMS, and there was no Instant Articles plugin, so I wrote...
Some notes from a short presentation I gave on building quality software development teams: Effective teams start with good people. A business is not a charity and cannot wait for people to grow into the role required of them. Intelligence and inherent motivation cannot be taught. These...
No matter what any recruiter will tell you, you alone are responsible for your career. That means ongoing education and working on a team with proper software development practices. These practices will help ensure that you spend your time having fun building new things rather than the...
Individual skill makes a huge difference: A good programmer is ten times more productive than an average programmer. A great programmer is 20-100 times more productive than the average. Studies since the 1960’s have consistently shown this. A bad programmer is not just...
Two projects have kept me busy during the last two years: Liberty.me, a private online community, and FEE.org, a 70 non-profit educational organization. While both share a free-market philosophy, they have very different business models, and so very different designs and technology stacks...
In my previous post, I talked about the process of building a website for FEE.org using the Umbraco CMS. In this post, I will discuss why I chose Umbraco for this project. WordPress, Umbraco, or Custom? Background: Most web developers who were around before the explosion of modern content...