Increase your rate. Let them know that 2012 is a new year and every year, at some point early in the year, you increase your rates to reflect the growing cost of living, but more importantly, the growing value of the skills you've acquired during the preceding year. There is no reason you can't double your rates if you have enough clients who are willing to pay at those rates. If they don't value your work at your proposed rate, they'll drop themselves.
Nice to see that the hogan.js site itself is using Skeleton ( http://getskeleton.com/ ) for its responsive layout. I've been enjoying using it quite a bit.
Every language has its gotchas. Even assignment operators are kind of a gotcha.
If you're coming from a basic math background, and have no programming experience, then the expression "a = 15; a = a + 1;" would be confusing in any mutable language, because assigning a value to a variable is not equivalent to stating the equality (identity) of both sides.
You're right in that even Scheme, which evolved with teaching in mind, has gotchas. However, the Racket folks made "student languages" that specifically exclude gotchas, so DrRacket is as close as a student can get to a gotcha-free environment.
This post highlights the difficulty in making data accessible in a "traditional" web app. One of the most intuitive interfaces for accessing and manipulating tubular data is the spreadsheet, but very few web apps look or behave like a spreadsheet.
I would argue that there is an inherent friction between usability and accessibility of information. Adding options to sort, filter, search, or selectively show or hide fields might make data more accessible but result in reduced usability overall. The exact point where the tradeoff happens isn't clear to me, but 37signals tends to err on the side of usability, at the expense of accessibility. Of course, one could argue that in a data-intensive app, accessibility _is_ usability, and vice versa.
f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).
3) Why use CoffeeScript in this instance? I don't see this being a valid criticism of any JavaScript project, let alone one so trivial. Comma prefixing on the other hand...
UX could be improved by not using small dark text on a dark background and a main navigation below the fold on the right side.
The site seems to be catering to two completely different audiences. There's the corporate deciders who will be reassured by the "social proof" logos of Microsoft et al. And there's the 1337 script kiddies who will feel at home with an unreadable color scheme. It seems like many node.js-related sites have this type of unusable color scheme, much like the Flash sites of yesteryear.
