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How do you monitor your services?	babul: Used to use Big Brother.
Good Hacker Cities	zain: San Francisco is an excellent place for a hacker. 1) Plenty of other hackers in close vicinity 2) Lots of startups all over the city 3) Excellent public transportation 4) Awesome bike trails all over the place Plus, you can walk into pretty much any coffee shop in SF and see at least one or two techies coding away on their macbook :)
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	mechanical_fish: Of course you can get a different job.Pick a specific alternative technology and field, and learn that. If you go looking for "anything but SAP" of course you're not going to find it. That's spread too thin. And "I could be productive with any of those languages" is a very bad sales pitch. People don't want a generalist. They want to hire someone who will immediately get to work on their specific problem. Decide to become a Ruby web programmer, or a Java middleware programmer, or an Objective-C iPhone programmer, or (god help you) a C++ game programmer, and focus: Read the books, read the blogs, go to the user group meetings, build a practice site or practice app.If you want to leverage your SAP experience as you seek another field, you could try sniffing around the edges of the SAP world. For example, there are surely lots and lots of web apps that are compelled to talk to SAP. If you know a little about web apps and a lot about SAP, a team might want to hire you.The masters' degree might be good for creating a break on your resume, and perhaps for buying you a little time, and it will help you meet other programmers who have nothing to do with SAP. But you're probably right to worry that the degree itself won't help you. You probably need practice, and allies, and networking more than you need formal courses.
Good Hacker Cities	nostrademons: Boston/Cambridge. #2 tech hub (behind the Bay Area), and you don't need or want a car in the city. Unlike in Silicon Valley, where you basically need a car.Neither is exactly inexpensive, though. The problem with living in a tech hub is that tech people tend to make lots of money and bid the price of everything up accordingly.
Bottom Up Programming Question	speek: The Design Recipe from How To Design Programs is very bottom-up based.Personally, I'm against HtDP because it strips out all of the romance in programming for me, but it does work.
Good Hacker Cities	pg: Cambridge/Somerville, Berkeley/Oakland, SF, Portland. You can live well without a car in Silicon Valley, though it's not a city. Maybe Austin, but I've never been there, so can't say for sure. Maybe Boulder, if it's over your threshold of urbanness.
Good Hacker Cities	dangrover: I was enamored with Boston as a city until I moved to Palo Alto a couple weeks ago. Already, I can't imagine ever moving back.
Bottom Up Programming Question	andreyf: It isn't a question of "only top-down" or "only bottom-up". Of course, some thinking will have to go in from both directions. This is why, personally, I think the directed-tree metaphors don't really work.A much better way of thinking about "bottom-up design" is exploratory programming - where one decides what to write by writing it [1]. This means you start by discovering and solving sub-problems, by creating components which work in their own right, documenting and unit testing them (if you're working in an environment that needs it), and moving on to solving bigger problems using said components.On the other hand is the "architecture approach" - where you measure twice and cut once. By "measure", I mean decide what all of your components will be, write out UML diagrams for them, figure out your types, your interfaces, and the contracts between them, write unit tests, and only then begin to write run-time code.There are much more experience programmers than me who advocate both ways, so it's hard for me to make a call [2].Another great metaphor I find analogous is "Mozart vs. Beethoven" style programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292682/understanding-dijk...I like this one because suggests that you can make "great" programs either way. I use the quotes, because obviously, music is a matter of taste, as is the quality of software we develop. This is important to remember - for some people, Windows is the perfect OS out there (for example, those concerned with Microsoft's profits over the OS's usability).1. http://arclanguage.org/2. Although the ones who advocate exploratory design seem more well-rouded: Alan Kay, Paul Graham, and the 37signals guys come to mind. Since I want to be well-rounded and not a specialist, I try to follow in their example. Obviously, this is a subjective judgment.
Bottom Up Programming Question	patio11: Duck 1.0: Has a beak, which can open and close, but only eats green bugs. If you attempt to use it on a blue bug it crashes. Unfortunately, no eyes.Duck 1.2: Eyes.Duck 1.21: Eyes now see color.Duck 1.22: Eyes now see colors including black. Apparently, some bugs are black. Damn users and their damn uncolored colored bugs.Duck 1.5: Realized eyes and mouth both share a lot of code. Refactored as "nerves". Allowed consumption of turquoise bugs -- not exactly sure why they're safe when blue bugs are not, oh well. Added quack just for fun. Spent 2 weeks getting the quack to sound exactly right.Duck 2.0: Now with feet and wings! Turns out to have feet you really need muscle tissue. Refactored again, stealing code from Mouth. Supported modes of operation include walking, running, and swimming. Option in menu entry for flying but if you push it the duck dies.Duck 2.1: It glides!Duck 2.11: So it turns out that to utilize the gliding feature users were driving ducks off of tall cliffs. This resulted in downward acceleration being sufficient at end of glide to overly stress feet muscles, causing critical duck failure. Added in Bones. Damn users and their damn cliffs. As long as I had Bones I implemented them in the Mouth too, can finally eat blue bugs.Duck 2.12: Some blue bugs are poisonous?! WTF kind of bugs do you have in Australia. Added in Tongue. Borrows heavily from existing Nerve classes. More refactoring....
Good Hacker Cities	jayp: Champaign/Urbana, IL. Cheap cost of living. Lots of good engineering students on tap. Great community. Great bus service, especially around campus town. Get from any point A to any point B in town in less than 10 minutes. Plenty of events (athletics, theatre, parties, etc.) due to being a university town.Negatives...corn fields galore. And flatness. And long winters.(This is not a joke. But most will think that it is.)
Good Hacker Cities	phyr3wall: You cant beat Los Angeles.If you want great Metro Transit, this is it, and each city within LA has its own metro line. like the blue bus in santa monica/venice. south bay transit in the south bay.Plus tons of employment opportunities in the IT field with great pay. i make 90K as a front end developer.No doubt LA is the greatest
Good Hacker Cities	cookiecaper: I was going to suggest Salt Lake City, and you don't absolutely need a car here, but you're much better off with one. It meets all of your other criteria finely, though. There's a very large group of IT companies here, especially in Utah County, 15-30 miles south of Salt Lake. Predominantly, Novell (as well as the SCO Group) and other things.It's a relatively low-profile area, very clean, very safe, very nice people, and modern infrastructure and appliances. A great place to live and work, though I wouldn't want to raise children here.
Bottom Up Programming Question	hs: there should be a feedback element (or resistance of media)btw, duck can't fly so u may want to cut that feature
programming and science related podcasts?	ricree: In addition to SGU and Astronomy Cast, both of which are excellent, you might want to check out the Nature Podcast ( http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/ ). It's gives a good overview of new science news, and often includes interviews with the researchers.Also, SE Radio is an excellent programming podcast. http://www.se-radio.net/Finally, it isn't a science or engineering podcast, but I just started listening to the History of Rome podcast, and I'm really enjoying it so far. http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	andr: Over the last 4 years you've gained more than SAP-specific knowledge. You've developed a process, or methodology, for solving problems. This is very important, and smart employers will recognize it.Also, use your spare time to code in one of those languages so you have something to show employers. I would suggest a more advanced language, such as Scala, because Java, C# and Python are all essentially subsets of Scala.For what it's worth, I had pigeonholed myself into PHP/MySQL development and was getting sick of it. So I applied for a summer internship with a financial company and got to work on some much more interesting stuff. Of course, I was still in college, so your mileage may vary, but what I'm trying to say is that if you want to change courses just start applying.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	reg4c: Also, having some kind of certification like Sun's Certified Java Programmer/Developer thing can be usefulIMO, you should write something cool and then apply for some jobs and if nothing works out then just wait a while, write something else, then apply againOw, and you are definitely not in a hole, SAP is an awesome company. If you're bored with what you do now ask for a transfer to a different department.
programming and science related podcasts?	jwtanner: CBC's Quirks and Quarks, great science radio show ( available in podcast ).http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/
Good Hacker Cities	theantidote: I'm gonna go ahead and add DC to the mix. It has 3 airports, an excellent metro and bus system, Verizon FIOS, relatively cheap out in the exburbs or apartments in formerly sketchy neighborhoods, and great proximity to NYC.The only issues are the lack of people and VCs. You can always do contract work for the government though!
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	noel_gomez: I am looking for someone to help me build a web app. I think it may be possible to do by building or extending a module for Drupal. If you are interested I would share my concept and you can see if it is appealing to you. This way you can gain some experience and maybe we can create something great. :)
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	scorpioxy: Why does the employer have to take your word for it? Why don't you write something in the language/technology that you want to work with and post it up on your website...or contribute to an open source project that uses it...etcThe point is, code speaks louder than words. And your project doesn't haven't to be anything fancy or big, just something that you might need. A blog engine, an rss reader, a utility to do foo. Anything that shows that you can solve problems in this new environment as well as you can in a SAP based one.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	dobes: I think the best advice so far is in fact to learn other tools in your spare time and work on some open source and personal projects so you have something to show. Start a blog to describe your experiences. Send a potential employer to look at your blog and projects and they will see someone who (hopefully) communicates clearly and codes well and thus will want to hire you.
Bottom Up Programming Question	gruseom: Your analogy seems to me to go awry here:you would start with cells - sounds goodyou would first have had to have divided the duck up conceptually into different parts in order to know that different cell types are needed - does not follow.I noticed that your premise assumes a requirements analysis that already nails down what the program is supposed to do. While that way of thinking is common in the corporate world (where, I note in passing, effective software development is not common - coincidence?), it doesn't fit well with the style of programming you're asking about. If you've read PG's piece on the subject (http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html) you may recall that there's one passage in it that he emphasized. It begins:It's worth emphasizing that bottom-up design doesn't mean just writing the same program in a different order. When you work bottom-up, you usually end up with a different program.The program changes as it evolves and your understanding of what the program is changes as it evolves [~]. All sorts of interesting feedback loops result.When I work this way, I listen to what the code is telling me. That is, I start with something primitive (your "cells" in the analogy) and sense where it's leading. Perhaps it's akin to riding a horse where there's a balance between what you want to do and what the horse wants to do; or to creating a piece of art where the creative process incorporates feedback from the medium itself and from the work as it's emerging.That doesn't mean it's all spontaneous, with no guiding factor. If that were true, no system would emerge - you'd just keep going around in circles and finding yourself back at the primitive level. But the guiding factor is not at all like "dividing the duck up conceptually into different parts". It is more like having a felt vision of what a duck would be like. You have that vision and you keep referring to it as you go along. But the vision itself clarifies, and sometimes changes, in response to what happens in the code. You discover what the system is as you make it.Learning to listen to what the code is telling you is one of the most interesting things you can do as a programmer.([~] PG's piece doesn't say that your concept of what the program is changes, only that the constructs it's composed of will be different. I think the two are related though.)
Good Hacker Cities	thingie: Europe (every city) ;-)
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	bayareaguy: I don't know much about SAP. All I've heard is that it's a beast big corporations seem to seek out and battle with varying results. However I'm guessing there are likely places where a little Python or Ruby program could have made a positive difference in an SAP implementation.Is there any way you can find the opportunity to do some non-SAP programming that would make an SAP system work better? If so, then I would start there because that would allow you to build on what you've already learned.
What do you want to be able to customize?	makecheck: Customize the number of "reply comments" visible below each main comment. Or maybe, a widget to show or hide a comment tree (with the option to be hidden by default).
Proposal for Managing the Addictiveness of This Site	mwerty: fwiw, I built a facebook app on this exact premise (shame): http://apps.facebook.com/friendlybets
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	samyxp17: Simple, been there before. I call it the "Four Step" career turn. - First pick a language you like, that could land you the kind of job you want and STICK to it. - Second, practice, write a few complete apps - Try to get any type of "paid" work that involved coding in that particular language... I recommend consulting...freelance. - Now you have a credible portfolio, finding a pretty serious Software engineering position in ur desired domain should no longer be a problem.The whole process should take about year or less. And no you're not in a hole. If you know ur stuff u'll get noticed. Besides an addition to ur new knowledge u'll have 4 year of SAP ...nothing to sneeze at. For some companies that may just be the perfect mix. Personal bias (I recomend PHP)
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	liangzan: From an employer's point of view, they don't like to take risks where hiring is concerned. Your wages are a sizable cost. That's why most would require you to work in a similar environment before they would hire you. Not many would want to spend $$ to train or risk hiring a lemon.So going by reverse psychology, the best way to convince your future employers is to build projects similar to what the position entails. If you're looking for Java jobs, build something(substantial) in Java. It tells them 'Hey, this guy has done it before. He probably can do it"
Who wants an intern?	rochers: You should apply to intern here: http://ict.usc.edu/internships/I did it in '99 and '01. Then I was hired fulltime out of school and worked there for three years. Most definately an awesome place for a creative person with Computer Science and Psychology background.
How do you monitor your services?	aaroneous: munin and pingdom.com
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	c1sc0: This begs the question: why is SAP work so grossly overpaid (at least over here in Germany)? Doesn't look particularly exciting or challenging to me. Most of the implementations I've seen are of the 'meh' type: buggy, boring, bloated. I'm a bit biased though since a colleague of mine ran away screaming from a highly-paid SAP job. 'Never again', he said.
Good Hacker Cities	macco: If outside the US would be an option, Berlin (Germany) Public transportation is great (24/7), a lot of cultural activities, quite a view of web startups there and in contrast to other big cities in Europe and the US, it very cheap.
Bottom Up Programming Question	ntoshev: Your duck example is interesting. Obviously the evolution doesn't use any top-down design.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	nailer: Ask HN: Afraid I've dug myself into a hole12 points by fbacon 80 years ago \| 20 comments \| flagHello guys. This is my first time writing to HN - I've held off mainly because the internet hasn't been invented yet. I'm an interior designer, and I have been doing that for the last 4 years...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(painter)
Who wants an intern?	Jakob: I like it how you list Delivered tech support to many families in a local neighborhood, spreading the word of Free and Open Source Software in the process.[…] This is real work and should be listed there. Will add sth similar to my CV, too.Perhaps so one day this would be seen as work even by relatives.
Good Hacker Cities	nandemo: You didn't specify the country so: Tokyo.Rent is expensive, though.
Good Hacker Cities	dualogy: Exotic developing countries for the win!I'm still having a hard time "getting" the whole "hacker city" question, which comes up every now and then and always ends up with SV / SF / CA as the only reasonable options.If you're plannign on hacking away most of the time, possibly even bootstrapping product development, you need:1. transport -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be out and about all the time 2. connectivity -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be online all the time (since most of the time, its not research you're doing but distractions like HN) 3. inexpensive cost of living -- thats what really matters unless you made it big already! But then SV / SF / CA is a no-go. 4. "good" people -- they exist everywhere, just like the "bad" onesOriginally from Berlin (which is pretty friggin cool for a German city), I almost exclusively live as an Expat in Cairo, Egypt now, to combine drastically lowered costs with perpetual sunshine.I highly recommend it. There's a small and very nice expat scene here, not much of a "hacker" scene. Well, it depends. I gather, like in other emerging economies, there's hundreds of thousands of people here in this 20 million metropolitan area who happily "hack" away on C++, C#, Java, basic web stuff. They just don't care much about Web 2.0 or Hacker News, Macs or even the whole "GNU hacker ethic" etc. They're "just" into programming (but then, isn't that "pure" interest more what we're looking for anyway?...) Sure, they all use pirated commercial rather than open source software and sure, many of them often work on outsourcing gigs found at rentacoder, but: it's not like there are no "hackers" here.I don't need a huge social scene since I wanna get stuff done, not talk about it and I don't need a VC or angel scene since the only money I will ever take is that of paying customers. I don't trade futures, particularly not my own. Granted, I'll keep my German passport for setting up the formal company there at some point and I'll keep my German health insurance, too. I'll keep my German consulting clients and I'll keep paying taxes to the German state. But we're talking about locations to live-and-work here...Now, what else do we have in store. A hugely different culture and a strongly religious one but if you don't speak the language, you don't get most of it anyway. It's a different pace of life that's fascinating to watch. Crackling infrastructure, although hey my ADSL has been up uninterruptedly for a couple of days now! Transport: depends. There's a vast oversupply of Really Cheap Taxis here, more than making up for the relative lack of a public transport system. Basically you can get wherever you want 24/7 at minimal costs. But I prefer biking which gets you through the perpetual jams more quickly and also that's the only exercise I get so I keep riding it. Get a mountain bike though, to cope not with mountains but with dirt and the quality of roads and pavements.It all depends on your individual priorities. Mine were and are: climate, cost structures, cheap flight availability to mainland Europe (to Berlin from here: 4 hours and EUR 140!), peace and stability, low crime level and a certain basic safety. Smog, Islam, dust, pollution, noise and crowdedness I can live with, these aren't so high on my list of priorities.I guess it's about making the trade-off that fits you personally. And I guess the equivalent for a US person would be some minor, warm Latin American country within cheap-flights reach that also is or is being kept peaceful.
Where's the best place to purchase a domain name?	tsetse-fly: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377301http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339823http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436364
Good Hacker Cities	maryrosecook: If you're willing to not confine yourself to the US, London is great for cheap public transport. On average, the cost of living is quite high: housing and nights out are expensive. However, if you're clever, you can actually subsist on a low amount of money: eat at home, live in a small flat outside central London etc.
Good Hacker Cities	madmotive: Brighton, UK works fantastically for us. You can walk between most parts, most tech businesses and coworking spaces are fairly central. There are regular trains and buses to get out to Sussex University where there are a bunch more. The community is very welcoming and there are events and user groups almost every day of the week (http://sussexdigital.com). When you need big customers and investors London is less than an hour away by train.
Who wants an intern?	TPLDrew: Marc, what kind of work would you like to do this summer? Perhaps working with the guys at Bee Hive. They'd be a great match for your skills.
Bottom Up Programming Question	wulfcry: Nice but you have to program the cells to contain the appearance of the duck the cells should know about and because that is a feature difficult to grasp it does not matter where you start. First design the beak put it in the cell Design the webbed feet put it in the cell Design the head put it in the cell Construct all cells and enumerate the cell based on the ducks feature And there you have it bottom up designed DUCK with out worry where to start.
Good Hacker Cities	lv_: Manila - Very Cheap, lots of Tech talent. You def dont need a car and you shouldn't if you value your sanity.
Who wants an intern?	iuguy: We're based in the UK, about 45 minutes from London. What type of things are you looking into? Do you have (or would you like to gain) any experience with particular languages/frameworks?
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	iuguy: Try to move across from BW/BI to Enterprise Portal-type work, anything on the Netweaver side will bring you closer to Java, PHP and Ruby etc. From there you'll find it easier to migrate into a generic dev role.I got very heavily into SAP security a while back and I understand your situation completely. Your alternative would be to take the Database route, but then you're just swapping one hole for another.
Bottom Up Programming Question	markessien: What you look for first is always a unit that functions on its own. Then you program that. For example, a feather could be used in a feather bed, or it could be used in a duck. You can program a feather, test it and make it work, without needing to have designed or modelled a duck yet - of course, you'll have an idea where it belongs, but since it is an enclosed and reusable component, it can be created first without a top down model.
Good Hacker Cities	c1sc0: Do you even need a fixed city these days? I've spent a lot of time on the European high-speed train network lately and I've jokingly been thinking about 'setting up office' in the train. For some reason I'm very creative and productive on trains.You got wireless, snacks & drinks, relative quiet and if you take one of these all-you-can-travel (Germany: Bahncard 100) deals you just bought yourself an office in every German city for about 3500 euro / year. If you want first-class it'll be 5900 euro.
Who wants an intern?	point: A friend of mine works in the military, and he says that there is good pay on short term contracts at the moment in Iraq. I could get you in contact with him if you're interested. It's much safer than one would think actually.
Good Hacker Cities	disambiguated: Bangkok - great food, good connectivity, close air-wise to Singapore/HK, low cost-of-living, good overhead/underground trains, cheap taxis, tuk-tuks, and motorcycle-taxis.Plus, it's easy for even totally unattractive social misfits to obtain intimate companionship, with no strings attached.;>
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	davidw: Here are a couple of ideas:* Like other people said, start doing some projects in interesting languages. Preferably, they should be open source projects so that you can get feedback about what you're doing, and meet other people.* If you want to do something that's not too far from SAP, is open source, and could use some good hackers, OFBiz is an interesting project: http://ofbiz.apache.org/
Good Hacker Cities	mtw: montreal, canada. There's foulab.org (a hackerspace), also FreeHackers meetups, lots of tech user groups (scheme/ruby/python/php...), one of the cheapest cost of living in North America, great friendly people, culture too (it's bilingual, active art scene). For connectivity, there's IleSansFil around the city, which provides free wireless in bars and coffee shops
programming and science related podcasts?	knapr: I'm actually working on a podcast aggregator/recommender site right now, it will launch within 1-2 weeks, as soon as I finish it. I have plans for how to make money from it and my reason for creating it is, there are loads of podcast-sites out there but very few(or none) helps you to actually find the good ones.In the meantime check out: http://www.se-radio.net/ for very good podcasts about software, I think the guys doing it are german but their english is good.
Bottom Up Programming Question	brent: Hmm... I thought this was going to be about dynamic programming based on the title.
Good Hacker Cities	talleyrand: New Orleans! You can get around just fine without a car, great people, and good times.
Where's the best place to purchase a domain name?	tlrobinson: I always start at http://instantdomainsearch.com/ ... very handy for quickly checking availability.
Good Hacker Cities	andrewhyde: I can't believe Boulder has not been mentioned.Thriving tech community, really beautiful place and a great transit system.I ride my bike 80% of the year.http://www.boulder.me for more info (calendar there too).
Bottom Up Programming Question	lgriffith: Isn't it more a matter of means vs ends. Top down is more or less means programming in which you don't really know where you are going but know how you are going to get there. Bottom up is more or less ends programming in which you don't know where you are but know how you are going to get there. Seems to me you need a good bit of both to get from where you are to where you need to be.
Bottom Up Programming Question	jerf: The biology analogy immediately starts you off on the wrong foot. That has nothing to do with code.In code, a function to trim whitespace from a string is perfectly functional on its own. When you actually try to write code this way, a rather large number of things can be written, larger than you may think.Rather than write a lengthy explanation, my suggestion is to write a non-trivial program in Haskell. After that you'll better understand how it is possible to have many functions that can stand on their own, and I think this will help clarify the situation in your mind.You can do this in any other language, but most languages make it relatively easy to reach out and touch lots and lots of state. Real-world evolved systems tend to do the biological equivalent all over the place, to a level even the worst spaghetti code ever written doesn't even come close to aspiring to, and do not resemble human-engineered code in the slightest. The Haskell advantage here is that it won't let you. Achieving this in other languages right now is a chicken-and-egg problem; if you knew how to do that you wouldn't be using the metaphor you cited.(BTW, just to state it explicitly: No, I didn't directly answer your question. As others point out, it's not a very informative question. I'm going for the root of the problem, how you are conceiving of functional units in a program.)
Good Hacker Cities	time_management: New York has a lot of incredible people, and our public transportation is probably the best in the country. However, the cost of living in New York truly sucks. If you lose your job, you're fucked. Housing costs are kept very high by three factors: (1) rent control, which leaves a lot of upper-middle-class, well-connected people in an arrangement that is superior to ownership (they pay 1960s rents, which is less than maintenance) costs and therefore never leave, keeping about half the good housing locked-up (2) Wall Street, and (3) indulgent parents who willingly drop $4k/month for their unpaid marketing intern progeny to have the "Manhattan experience" in their 20s. The latter two of those are threatened by the economic situation, and rent control is supposed to be phased out if the vacancy rate reaches 5%, ending the state of "housing emergency" that New York has been in since the 1940s, although I'm not optimistic about that one coming around.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	snowbird122: This reminds me of something one of my professors wrote about: "Don't get good at something you hate because then people will pay you a lot of money to do it and you'll never be able to stop".Lots of good advice on this board. I love Hacker News.
Good Hacker Cities	jbrun: Montreal, Canada. If you don't mind the cold, you have great public transit and bike lanes throughout the city. Not to mention amazing food, culture and low cost of living.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	pingswept: I don't think you're in a hole. You've got a high-paying job and four more years of experience (in a field you dislike) than all of the folks coming out of college.The point is that if a kid coming out of college can get a job writing Python or whatever, you can too. You even get a salary while you look for the job!In a sense, whether you're in a hole is relative. Compared to [Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, name your hero], we're all in a hole.
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	rufius: Hack on an open source project. Get your work out there for people to see and link it on your resume (Direct links to a web-VCS/SCM or something like Ohloh or CIA.vc).Employers like seeing things like this, its verifiable that you did what you said you did on your resume.My analysis is that you should probably do this stuff in your spare time while continuing to work your current field as its still lucrative and the economy isn't that great. I'd wait a while before making the transition as it would be advantageous to have some body of work to show for it :).
How do you get someone to help with the CSS on an open source project?	ZenzerNet: Use one of the CSS frameworks, like Blueprint. I'm no designer, but it's easy even for me to box everything up to look pretty good. Plenty of whitespace helps :)
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	ssharp: The answer could be to source it now but still learn it for the future. The nice thing about learning the entire vertical of a platform is that you don't HAVE to rely on outside help for any part of the process. You may still want to, but being able to do everything yourself is a definite advantage, especially when time and/or money is an issue.However, you time is best spent just learning CSS and web page layouts. Web design and graphic design are not the same thing. You can learn to layout web pages with limited artistic talents. When a site may need heavier graphic elements, you're better off going with an expert. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is very important.The wonderful thing about the web is that its very easy to stand on the shoulders of giants. With layouts and usability, you don't need to do your own work and testing. Take a look at websites with great layouts and morph their ideas into your own. Read design and usability blogs and try to determine what will be best for you.Best of luck!
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	pj: SAP is dead. Listen to this debate between Saleforce CEO Mark Benioff and SAP's Chairman Hasso Plattner. Benioff totally destroys SAP for an hour.http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8481Your best bet is to save up a /lot/ of money, enough for a year or two, then quit and start working in your own time on another project in another language.Enterprises are moving away from big bulky ERP systems like SAP in droves. They are too expensive, they take too long to implement, they are impossible to maintain without a full time staff of outside consultants who don't care about your business, but do care about charging you more money.I've known many SAP consultants and every one of them hates everything about their job except the money.Why are you wasting your life away doing that crappy stuff? It's terrible.There are great companies out there right now who need people who understand how crappy SAP and other products like them are. They want to build better software. Find one of those companies and go work for them.Tell them you are trying to get away from SAP and you know how bad it is and you can help them make a product better than SAP for less money and that is actually /good/ software.Your life will thank you for it.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	rsayers: I am also a back-end developer and have found design knowledge to be very useful.Very often I'll be given a layout which breaks once I started adding code to it, a good html/css understanding will let you fix issues like this without having to pass it back to a designer.I can think of many times where design skill has paid off, namely a time when our sole designer quit leaving me to fill in for him, but I've found the knowledge to be extremely useful even if I only need it occasionally.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	rockstar9: I think it's important to learn HTML/CSS. A good understanding of user interface will complement and affect the way you program. You should have a good grasp of how a website should "flow."On the other hand, graphic designs is a different story. Developing a good artistic sense will take time and practice. If you plan on developing entire websites on your own, why not spend a little time to graphics design to make things look prettier? However, you don't plan on spending any time on this, then find a good designer :)
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	wallflower: The more you know about design in general, the more effective you are. People don't respond to a back-end transaction program - they respond to the user experience.I would highly recommend checking out a CHI meeting (Computer-Human Interface a.k.a. UX/UXD). I guarantee you will learn a lot by meeting and listening to designers lecture other designers.http://www.sigchi.org/local-sigs/
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	sachinag: I'm going to, as someone who cannot code, take the minority view here. You are more valuable to your company or to your clients (if you're doing freelance work) if you know systems administration in and out. Between crowdSPRING + PSD2HTML, you can get a decent implementation of a design relatively cheap. There's no way to outsource "good enough" systems administration.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	pj: omg, this question is painful.HTML and CSS are skills that are worth your /time/. Forget the money. You can improve your /own/ life with HTML and CSS.The more you know, the more powerful you are!Have you ever been approached by someone from the front end who said, "Man, it's hard to build this page the way I want it because the backend doesn't do XYZ?" and you look at them like, "figure it out!"You only do that because you can't relate to them. You don't know how hard it is to do a three column layout in CSS so you blow them off and think, "It's been done before go do it."But that's not the right approach. The right approach is to understand /why/ it's hard from the front-end so you can make your back-end more suitable to the front.Building complex systems is a conversation between layers. Data comes from the database, goes through the "backend" then gets displayed. At each of these levels, the more one knows about the other, the easier the dialog between the layers.So, OF COURSE it is worth a back-end developer's time to learn more about the front-end. It's also worth a front-end developers time to learn more about the backend.YES.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	inerte: Yes, it is worth, specially since you're making a website, even if you're going to hire someone. You can at least glance if they're doing correctly, as far as you will know.HTML/CSS isn't hard. And you need to consider if what you're doing will work on multiple browsers, including mobiles. Knowledge about this will mean more visitors, and thus more money.Now, creative... that's another question. A good design, in the strict aesthetics sense of the word, is very hard. In fact, for some people, it's a whole career :)Also, while I don't recommend going for the aesthetics route, there's much more involved in webdesign. SEO, usability, accessibility. You should be able to take a pretty PSD from a designer, and develop with ul/li for menus instead of using Flash, for example.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	functionoid: I'd say learn html/css and along with that concentrate more on usability of the website. To be really good at creating graphics and flash for websites could take some time. So I'd say definitely learn HTML/CSS also learn the usability aspect of web design and out source the graphics part. May be for this project you might want to outsource the html/css also.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	code_devil: I am often in the same boat as you are in. I would say for this current project, hire a Web Designer to complete the project. However, also try to learn HTML/CSS so you can follow the HTML/CSS written by the outsourced programmer.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	eugenejen: I did back end for a long time. But in last two year I have to get into the front end because I couldn't find good front end guys for the project. It helps me to be better in looking at whole pictures and prevent some mistakes that front end developers made for the the back end and vice versa.Business wise, it is not good. But for a better understanding of the whole system. I think it is worthy. It is especially good for DIY projects for bootstrap and experiments.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	Encosia: In the ASP.NET community, we catch a lot of flak for the terrible sites that some developers have created with ASP.NET WebForms. That embarrassment is due exactly to developers choosing to hide behind the (leaky) WebForms abstraction and remain ignorant of the markup that their server-side code produces. I'd advise against emulating that failure case.If you're working on any code that's within one tier of the HTML/CSS, you should have a basic understanding of the HTML/CSS.That general rule applies to most things. The more understanding you have of adjacent concerns, the better you will be at your own task.
Who wants an intern?	Dilpil: Perhaps we should hold some sort of HN internship fair, as I doubt that speek is the only student looking for an internship this summer.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	critke: From my experience I would suggest learning html/css coding but finding a creative person to do the actual design (colors, logo, white space, typography etc etc). I really doubt that it's possible to be good at everything - but html/css is 'just' coding - design however is a completely different story.
Good Hacker Cities	ken: I know many people here in Seattle who don't have cars (and others with Zipcar, if you only need it on occasion). I have a car, but I only drive it every couple weeks, at most, and I would certainly get along fine without it.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	siong1987: So, you are a MC Rails guy without the V. IMO, you really have to learn how to design a simple website with CSS and HTML.One thing that definitely can help you is to screen shot or bookmark every website that you think that is simple and nice. From those example websites, you can start designing your website.
What web framework(s) do you guys use?	webmaven: Zope: http://zope.orgAlthough I am also currently experimenting with App Engine: http://www.webappwednesday.com
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	ggruschow: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SpecializationIsForInsects
What are the best Arduino starter projects?	minimee: any arduino starter kit with Ethernet ???
Afraid I've dug myself into a hole	hugs: You're in a rut, but not a hole. You'll be okay! :-)First step... start looking for a new job! Second step, look for jobs that require SAP experience, but at employers that will give you room to grow as a developer beyond a strict SAP admin/dev role. (For what's it's worth, I think Lego is an SAP shop. :-)I was in a similar spot about 8 years ago when I was a consultant at PeopleSoft. (It, too, was my first job out of college.) I got to a point 2 years in where I wanted to work a bit more "closer to the metal" with web development tools and -- like you -- I felt that only knowing PS technologies was a bit too "sharecropper" for me. I made the switch away from PS by going "in house" and becoming a PeopleSoft admin at a software development house in Chicago. (It should be easy enough for you to find SAP customers in the city you want to live in.) At my new employer, over time I took on more projects and roles (in addition to using my PS skills), until I officially could "let go" of my PS role and do custom software development full time. I was able to then develop "pure" Python and JavaScript dev skills in my new role and I've been having fun every since -- including a tour of duty at Google and cofounding my own startup last summer.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	sokoloff: It depends on what your goal is.I'm a backend guy who runs an IT department for a top 100 e-commerce site in my day job. Knowing HTML/CSS doesn't do me any practical good there.For my side projects, I know just enough HTML/CSS to be dangerous. (http://www.almamatersports.com is all programmed by me in a couple hundred hours this year, but has obvious visual bugs on several different browsers, some layout issues, etc, but that didn't stop it from pleasing the guy paying the bills.) For those kinds of things, knowing more at the start of the project would have saved me tons of time and gotten a better looking end result, but wouldn't have changed the clients satisfaction all that much. Then again, the gameplay is so much better this year than last for him that it's not a fair comparison, since for most sites that level of visual bugs would be unacceptable.When I think about my day job (which is what really pays the bills), in my experience it's much harder to find top-notch back-end developers than it is to find top-notch front end guys. Yes, the very cream of both crops is hard to find, but there's a much larger number of A players in the front-end space, so I'd recommend concentrating and developing your skills on the back-end and just getting a (relatively) tiny bit of exposure to front-end development issues and hiring that expertise out.
What's the most widely used contact management solution?	phombaiah: Import from CSV, most contact management tools have an "export to CSV" option.
Bottom Up Programming Question	mbac: > So, once again the question, how can bottom up programming work without some level of top down design?Ever heard of something called... LINUX!?
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	csuper: It can't hurt to learn it, right?I would image that you will find it very simple to pick up and likely very rewarding.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	jraines: Based on my experience just this morning, yes. And don't neglect Javascript, either -- no matter how hard you try, you're not going to be able to avoid needing it.glances at copy of Simple and Direct on bookshelfLearn HTML, CSS, Javascript, a library like JQuery. You'll need them.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	raffi: I'll avoid me too and agree you should learn these front end technologies. That said, there seems to be a question of how and what underlying your post. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, still I hope this helps:== XHTML/CSS ==1. Learn basic HTML, understand what "semantic markup" means. I assume you know some HTML already.2. To understand CSS, understand the box model. Understand inline and block elements. Understand selectors. Understand positioning. The rest of it falls in place from there.Hopefully you'll have an appreciation for markup and meaning versus presentation at this point.== JavaScript ==3. Learn Javascript. Understand that everything is a hashtable. Understand how it handles scoping and understand classless objects. Once you're comfortable with this you're ready to move on.4. Understand the DOM and how to manipulate it.5. Read a little on AJAX, I found the DHTML utopia book on Sitepoint.com?myaffiliateid=me was good.6. After you understand AJAX and DOM, go learn a library like JQuery or whatever else people advocate these days. These libraries are like mana from heaven. They will save you time! Oh, if you did steps 3-5 you'll be productive with a JS library in about 2 minutes. The learning curve is small at this point. Great stuff!7. Install Firebug and spend an hour or two learning how to use it. Firebug will save you time and console.log is so much better than alert(). Firebug has made me happy.Now you know how to manipulate sites on the client side. Great! Last step:== Graphics ==8. Learn a tool like Photoshop or the GIMP. Understand how to select stuff, copy and paste. Then become familiar with layers and masking. I am not a graphics guy but I've only recently become turned on to the power of masking. Wow. People like you and I can do neat things.I don't have resources for everything because I scrimped and learned as I went. However this should represent a good order (and some pointers on what to look at) as you pursue this. Good luck!
What's the most widely used contact management solution?	buro9: Outlook works for businesses that have implemented AD and require an internal address book, accessible by all.MS Access databases or Excel spreadsheets for small businesses that tend not to have AD set up.Go for CSV to start with.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	cmars232: Yes, you need to know design. Even if you hire a designer, you'll be better off in understanding what you're paying for, being able to maintain the site they deliver (and being able to tell if what they give you is maintainable).I learned design by reading a bit on CSS, JS, and reverse engineering & imitating sites that have a certain effect I'm trying to get. Firebug is awesome. jQuery is awesome. Blueprint CSS might be what you need, or it might get in the way, but give it a try.Oh, and don't be afraid to break the "rules". If your page looks and works the way you want, you win, even if you used (gasp!) tables.
Good Hacker Cities	russell: How about telecommuting from where you are/want to be? Are any of those of you hiring willing to engage telecommuters?
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	phoreo: I straddle the line between these worlds. My day job is frontend development with some Ruby here and there, while I've been designing and building out a Rails app on the side.I think my response would be similar to your 'developer-side' response - if at any point in working on a project I find myself confronted with something I do not understand, I have this compulsive urge to figure it out. In the process, I've saved myself thousands of dollars by investing a few days to learn what I need to at the time to get around the problem.It sounds like you're a great Ruby developer with a leg up on all of the new "ZOMG RAILS!" converts. Don't be too concerned about the "jack of all trades, master of none" category. If you're working on building a company from scratch, product guys/gals are key - people who may not be experts in everything, but can get the job done for rev1 no matter what. If you can play that role yourself, you'll have far fewer people to depend on.If you decide to work on the frontend yourself, start with raw HTML and forget that CSS exists entirely. This might help you to think of HTML/CSS as a backend developer.HTML is just XML with a fixed set of elements that are named according to their purpose and have specific functions in a document - and you'll probably only need a small subset of them. So, look at your comp and think of the elements in it; paragraphs, lists, images, buttons, links, etc. Then, start writing what seems like an XML document describing it. Again, don't even think about styling it at this point. Just build the best web page that 1994 ever saw: <html> <head> <title>My Application</title> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <div id="branding">(Name, logo, etc. here)</div> <div id="nav">(Navigation)</div> </div> <div id="content" class="column">(Main app content)</div> <div id="sidebar" class="column">(Sidebar content, if you have one)</div> <div id="footer"></div> </body> </html> Once you've got your document written, you can start to tackle CSS. Since you've got a valid, well-formed document composed of semantically-meaningful elements, you'll find it much easier to style than people who focus upon the look of the document as they write it rather than its well-formed-ness. If you choose to hand it off to a dedicated frontend developer at this point, they'll be grateful that you've provided them with a solid canvas to build on.Good luck building your application; whichever route you choose, let us know when it launches!And if you'd like any recommendations for either a designer or just someone who can slice and dice a comp, let me know; I've got a few solid friends who charge reasonable rates and have some availability coming up.
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	travisjeffery: CSS/HTML is simple as shit. Frameworks like Blueprint make layouts/grids easy as anything.
What web framework(s) do you guys use?	rodrigo: JSPs, Servlets and POJOs. Im a complete beginner so im trying to learn the basics first. Im very aware of some Java shortcomings but I like the fact that I can get responses from thousands of books, tutorials, and the web. A bunch of Python frameworks looks very nice though, and the languaje also, but Im required to use Java for now : (
Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS	alnayyir: Learn HTML and CSS, then you'll know the full circle.You need to know these things as a backend developer and as a programmer period.
What's the most widely used contact management solution?	drm237: Depending on your requirements, outsourcing the first version might be the best option. Check out http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget
What's the most widely used contact management solution?	cdr: When I centralized my contact database about a year ago, I pretty much had no viable choice besides Outlook. Most applications have an "export to Outlook" feature and it's at least pretty decent at contact management.
Need help solving simultaneous nonlinear equations	sgk284: Be honest. Is this a homework assignment?

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