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I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | wgj: There is a concept in systems theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory) that all systems must move toward equilibrium. There is also a concept that you are a component in any system that affects you. So, the course of action based on this is to change yourself, and the rest of the system must change around you toward equilibrium. This works much better than trying to directly change other people or external situations.I think a lot of your anger may be frustration at lack of control in your situation. I know others are giving you advice to leave your job, but based on your report, there's no evidence yet that the job itself is the problem.You have an opportunity to use this as a learning experience and practice different responses to situations. Observe the results. You may find that this is in fact a toxic work environment, but you can't see that clearly until you've mastered the situation. Finally, your anger is something that comes from within you. It isn't part of the situation, and other people didn't put it there. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle provided really useful tools for me in learning to understand and manage my emotions. I highly recommend it in your situation. |
Start formal group to peer review climate code? | crux_: One thing I don't get is how people always seem to follow the pattern "I'm unbiased. #{strong_opinion_here}."Unbiased... really, hop?For the record: I think that open source + code cleanup + code review is a great idea, and not just for climate science. But it's important to keep in mind that ugly code isn't the same thing as wrong code, and that mistakes in the code aren't automatically become mistakes in the science.(For example, a poorly written data parser with lots of bugs will not affect the science one bit, if none of the data triggers those bugs.)So what's your purpose here:- To contribute to a community, finding and fixing bugs, making things more readable and robust, etc?- To do a little audit to "prove" what you already believe? (I suspect a hint of witch-hunt in the air...)Edit to fix formatting and add a side comment: This "climatologists may be incentivised to spread FUD b/c it brings fame and more grant money" bit doesn't pass the smell test for me. If this is the true motivation of climatologists, then why aren't more of them going for the fame and think-tank money available to them by expressing dissent? I can't believe that all these scientists are dishonest and greedy enough to lie about the science, but not suitably dishonest/greedy to sell out their peers. |
going to USA | freddythefoo: Look, there's a gray area here that everyone drives a truck through. Foreigners are able to start companies in America, just not be employed or get paid. Ever wonder why immigrants have small businesses like grocery stores? Because you can buy a store as a foreigner, you can operate it, and you can keep the profits. You just can't be an employee and get paid. Got it?It's also legal to have a business in Argentina, be an employee of that company, and come to the US to do consulting. I've never figured out exactly how legal it is, but the fact that so many companies, large and small, do this means if it's illegal it must not be very illegal. Every country allows employees to come in and do some work on tourist visas, otherwise each economy would freeze up.For example, I was a software guy working on a hardware device being produced in China. I ended up going over and spending a week doing integration. On a tourist visa. I was working the entire time, as did all the taiwanese who came over to work with me. There was never a question of anyone getting work visas. I suspect that what we all did was illegal, but it's a gray area and I'm not a lawyer.The dodge there is we were working for our individual companies, in china, instead of working directly for a chinese company. I've never seen a law that specifies the amount of work where "contracting in country" turns into "employed in country". Not that I know. There's a practical limit, in that at some point an official notices and you get in hot water. I suppose. China's a big country and there are only so many officials. I've done that kind of thing for weeks at a time; no one ever notices at that length.Couch surfing can be rather pleasant. I've got an empty in-law apartment and a pile of code to write, but I'm writing code this month and next, and don't know if that'll be true past then. You will meet people, you'll learn things. You'll be paid in pizza, red bull, and experience.If you have a friend with an Argentine-based consulting company, or you can find an Argentine-based consulting company, and say you'll drum up the business when you're in the US but you'll need them to get paid, they'd probably shrug and say "sure", although they'll want to keep part of your paycheck.Regarding whether you can be part of YC, you should be able to start a company, pick up YC funding, and pay yourself out of the YC funding with a tourist visa. Establishing a corporation provides added ammunition in case you go in front of a judge, where claiming a sole proprietorship looks more like a visa dodge.What you'll start realizing as you grow older is there's a difference between "management" and "workers". Management gets exceptions. Workers get the shaft. Management is invited across borders, workers are stopped and searched. The largest difference between management and workers is what you call yourself, and how you present yourself.That's the filter they'll apply to get your US visa in the first place. You have to show enough money to support yourself for the time you'll be here. That's about the same as asking if you're "management" or a "worker".Sounds annoying to me - if you've got an EU passport, why not just go to the EU? The exchange rate is worse is all. I might recommend Portugal. The country is very polyglot (I was in an office there doing integration and everyone switched to English for me, and they had some UK people in) and there's a number of tech businesses in Lisbon.Do travel with one nice sports coat and a pair of good shoes, and smile a lot. |
Ask to be acquired? | veteran: this might be helpful http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/22/sold-to-the-highest-bidder... |
Ask to be acquired? | jeromec: I just had another idea. I still think approaching them for acquisition is an option, mostly because I don't like businesses dependent on other businesses (for precisely this reason). However, an alternative route may work better. I wish I had a fuller understanding of text based RPGs like MobWars because they are making an absolute killing. I tried one out once, but just couldn't understand its draw, otherwise I'd create one in a heartbeat. But obsidianportal.com seems similar to me, just based on D&D copyrighted material. Try to brainstorm out a text based RPG that would appeal to D&D'ers but with your own material. You already have a community to sell it to, and it might grow to be worth far more, and you own all the IP. |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | clueless123: Be professional (Read clean code chapter 1), do your best, don't take it personal.. it is just a job.If you are good at what you do, and behave professionally you should not have to be angry at your job.Now, If you are being asked to behave in a matter YOU consider unprofessional, it is up to YOU to say "I can't do that" and... be prepared to find some other job.Having options is the best medicine for frustration. |
Start formal group to peer review climate code? | david927: I'd like to start a formal group to bring back the glaciers and arctic ice cap. |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | xcombinator: Who cares?I don't care if this is normal or not, and honestly, I don't know you. How am I supposed to help you?You could be:
A bad programmer.
A good programmer.
A non social person, and hate socializing with colleagues.
A social person and hate writing code alone.
A good leader that wants to decide by himself.
A bad leader that just want another relationship with his boss.You want to be happy in your live, don't you?. So go to a good psychologist or read books and fix that by yourself. You are a grown up human. Take responsibility. |
Review my web-app for creating Android apps | benedwards: Clickable link:
http://redbirdapps.com |
Ask to be acquired? | qeorge: As a general rule, your community is valuable, your tech is not. They can reproduce your tech in-house, the user base is harder.Why did their first attempt fail? Was the tech that bad or was it a marketing problem? If its the latter, I like your chances better.Either way, I think you should approach them directly. As you said, your current approach hasn't worked, so it may be time to mix it up. |
Ask to be acquired? | zandorg: Not really on topic, but this is a great D&D website. |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | notphilatall: I don't think it is specific to software development, it sounds like you just aren't getting respect from your colleagues. The same could happen to folks in chemical engineering, public relations, or any professional setting.Set boundaries. If an unreasonable deadline is set onto you, insist on the reasonable date you previously agreed to. Tell insensitive colleagues to straighten up, or you'll leave or go to HR. If you are on a romantic get-away for the weekend, make it clear that the problem will be your top priority Monday morning (or Sunday night). If things are on fire and you are the point man on the situation, you should stand up, but you should not bend over.Be willing and prepared to leave. Keep enough money in savings to be able to walk away from the job and take a few months to find a better fit.Good luck! |
Any startups offering summer internships? | dreur: Thanks for starting this thread.I am a Coop CS student from Quebec Canada looking for a Summer internship around Toronto or Ottawa. |
Keyboard Recommendations? | hyyypr: I recommend the happy hacking keyboard professional 2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard |
Ask to be acquired? | jlm382: From what you've described, there's a huge negotiation problem. You don't have leverage, and you're starting to sound desperate - everything they can use against you in the event that they contact you.Lets say you asked them to acquire you. They're interested, they google around for anything about you, and find this post. They know exactly what your fears are, they know that you're not ramen profitable, and they know that you know that they're coming after you.Which means, they can negotiate you down to a point where they're buying your company for pennies on the dollar. What's your BATNA? (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) - right now, it's just to continue on, despite the fact that you're losing money. Fix that BATNA, and you'll be in a much better position to either sell this off, or to even just continue running with it.But just asking HN for help is huge. Most people never get that far. :) |
Start formal group to peer review climate code? | yters: I'm definitely interested, not sure about the time. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | grinich: Medicine for the 3rd world. It's a big problem. |
Start formal group to peer review climate code? | lutorm: I think you miss the fact that to figure out what scientific code does, you also have to know the science. Yeah, you can look for dumb bugs like the one they show in that clip, but you have no way of knowing whether calculations are correct without knowing what's going on.I found it disingenuous how they flashed a line of code that says "fudge factor" as if that makes the code incorrect. Unless you know what that fudge factor is for, you can't make that judgement. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | tc: Programming languages and tools.There are some counter-examples (e.g. Franz, LispWorks), but I think it's best to just consider this sort of work a labor of love. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | fnid: Amazon is losing $2 on each e-book. Sometimes forward thinking innovations take a while to get profitable. Sometimes the market is too small. There may be 5 people who want it, but it costs more than they can afford. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | wmf: The CrunchPad? Ignoring the legal problems, it sounded like people would buy it at cost but with any markup it would be too expensive. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | mcav: "Make something people want" is primarily valuable as a negative test:You probably won't profit if you make something people don't want.But making something people want doesn't correlate nearly as well with whether or not your product is commercially viable. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | vaksel: It depends on your definition of profit. You can make something people want and end up with a business that makes $10K profit, but you won't be quitting your job to run that business. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | philwelch: Any non-excludable goods, which includes public goods (which are also non-rivalrous) are very difficult to profit from. These include lighthouses, laws, national defense, clean air and water, a sustainable population of fish and game, and so forth.I say "very difficult" because search engines, for example, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in practice. They are "public goods". The trick is, access to the attentions of and data generated by search engine users is excludable, and this is the good that Google actually sells. But any sort of non-excludable good from which your consumers cannot generate an excludable good you can sell for others would be unprofitable.Programming languages (mentioned by another post) are another good example of a public good: they are non-rivalrous, and while they may be excludable as long as you sell the only compiler/interpreter/runtime and sue everyone else who writes a different compiler/interpreter/runtime, in practice no one will pay for a programming language anymore so you have to make it non-excludable for it to even exist in the outside world. Likewise, Google is probably excludable in the sense that they can set up a paywall before you use it, but in practice Google has chosen to make the search engine non-excludable and it's hard to see how a paywalled search engine would work (though I won't rule it out as a possibility). |
Start formal group to peer review climate code? | DanielBMarkham: The neat thing about being a professional programmer is that you are always working in somebody else's problem domain.So I wouldn't take the naysayers too seriously. If you can't peer review climate code, you can't peer review financial code, or medical code, or astronautics code.Sure, you'll need problem domain expertise. But that's a given with any kind of programming. Climate science is no different than any other kind of work programmers do.I think it's a great idea -- if you can pull it off. But that's a really big "if". |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | rmetzler: I had a love/hate relationship with software programming for a couple of years until I discovered test driven development for me and committed myself to do development cycles with the client.Maybe that would work for you as well. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | apsurd: We really need to remember that "make something people want" is a specific piece of advice relative to building a product. We get all giddy about this advice because as programmers, that's what we love to do; build things. But a business depends on many many more things than just your product. I'd argue that a company's product is, at max, 30% of what matters to the profit-generating system as a whole.So to answer your question: it is irrelevant. And I encourage you to separate "product" from "profit". Because if you want to make profits, you need to master business and marketing. Making products is for those programming guys. The great thing about HN, is that we think we can do both ... and we can! - Just remember that they are different hats for a reason.=) |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | ephermata: Jury is still out, but free/freemium music services look hard. (People don't seem to want subscription services.) lala sold allegedly because they weren't getting to profitability fast enough, imeem struggled, and Pandora needed an act of the United States Congress to deal with sharp increases in streaming royalties. |
Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? | jodrellblank: > Unless someone here raises some issue that I missedThat you haven't explained any benefit of doing so? |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | zitterbewegung: 4chan is probably the best example of this. Loads of people want an image board but it isn't profitable. |
Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? | tdonia: why does it make sense that a url be set in fixed width? |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | jeromec: A huge thing to note, even with a large number of unprofitable cases, is not that the YC mantra is flawed, but more likely systems may not yet be in place to facilitate profitability. For example, if there were an awesome micropayment solution I'll bet a lot of currently unprofitable sites could find profitability. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | ryanwaggoner: I think a better motto is "Make something people want to pay for." |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | zackattack: Wikipedia needs 7mm in donations but only has raised like 2mm so far.Hiphopgoblin had a bunch of people who proclaimed their love for the site, but I doubt any one of them would have paid cash for it. Maybe I could have cooked up some sort of new media advertising plan had I realized enough traffic, but I decided to abandon..People's love is a revealed preference when they vote with their wallets. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | chrischen: I give out free $100 dollar bills. People want it, I don't profit. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | noonespecial: Making something people want : easy.Making something people want enough to pay what it costs to create it : hard. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | physcab: Music |
Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? | ashleyw: You have a point when it comes to the proportions of dots and such, but I'm not sure if it'd be a fix to a problem which doesn't exist. I don't think it'd effect phishing much either, since that kind of user wouldn't understand that dots are important, et cetera.But anyhow, here's a quick mockup: http://grab.by/11oz |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | staunch: What I've found is that there's almost always some people that want any particular thing. The two really big questions are 1) How many of them are there? 2) Can you make money off them?#1 is much tougher. If you're in a niche inside a niche inside a niche and you end up with 10 paying customers sending you $20/mo it's technically "working", but too small to be worth it.#2 is easier. The situation Twitter is in. They have tons of users and now it's purely a matter of ingenuity to come up with a way to profit in a big way. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | slashedzero: Fully on demand cable television. So many people tell me "I'd love it if I could just pay per channel and forget about the other channels."That got me thinking it may be something to exploit. Not so, with infrastructure costs swallowing up so much of the potential profits. People will just have to deal with all the channels they end up paying for. So, it's either the internet or bust if you don't want to play the cable game. |
Front End Development | hellotoby: I've found the quickest way to speed up front-end development isn't necessarily with the slicing but more with having a robust library of my own code, and my own custom (pseudo) framework of html & css templates with which I begin every job. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | byrneseyeview: It's a tautology (how do you know they want it? They're willing to buy it!), but a useful one. |
Review my windows/mac/nix application | DanBlake: Screenshots:Main view: http://ioj.com/v/qzbp3Alternate Theme, Settings open: http://ioj.com/v/0xretIndividual item view: http://ioj.com/v/yui6vIf you want to try out the windows beta client, You can grab it here: http://harknesslabs.com/setupcontrolc.exe |
Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? | duncanj: Not all code is in fixed font. Most older Pascal and Algol texts put their code in variable width, sans-serif fonts to set them apart from the text. For many texts, just changing the font is the solution.URLs look bad in PowerPoint, but sometimes they need to be there. |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | KevBurnsJr: Speak your mind. Even if your voice trembles. |
Review my windows/mac/nix application | ryanwaggoner: Did I miss the link to check this out? |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | teyc: General MotorsInvestment BanksRailwaysSubprime lenders |
How do you manage money? | patio11: Read a Random Walk Down Wall Street, give up, and put it in an index fund.You would naively assume that actively managed money has a higher return than passively managed money. This is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth, especially for small investors (and if you're at mid six figures, you're small). Your transaction costs and all the time you spend managing your money come straight out of the profits, and there aren't guaranteed to be any profits for them to come out of. (Many people might spend, say, two hours a week managing their investments. That is probably in excess of $10k at your implied wages, or like 2 ~ 4% of your portfolio. Throw in another 2% for transaction costs and you have to clobber the market average to do as well as just putting it in a low-fee Vanguard total market index fund and forgetting about it.) |
How do you manage money? | joshu: Find someone who you can hire to help decide what to do (typically a CFA, I guess) -- someone who isn't paid by commissions on your decisions.The typical thing to do is allocate money to stocks (us, emerging, europe, etc) and bonds (govvies, soverign debt, corporate,) mostly via funds. You want to have a variety of uncorrelated assets.Algorithmic portfolio trading is /hard/. You're not building an automated trading system by yourself. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | sw: Charles Goodyear |
Startups and Viral Marketing / Social Media | aaronbrethorst: I find counter-examples just as helpful. Maybe you could highlight how a handful of relatively high-profile startups could improve their viral marketing strategies. |
Review my windows/mac/nix application | est: Can't install in Sandboxie. Some file not found VB.NET error.Nice app though, But I don't know if 21MB memory usage is worthy for a collector like that.Can not collect HTML texts in IE or ChromeCan not collect richtext in Word or anything elseIf copied some Excel data with CJK characters, VB.NET yields a System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException error. |
Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit? | swolchok: http://mbusreloaded.com/umbus -- several hundred people use it every day, all of them cheap/lazy college students who aren't going to pay for the privilege. The value of advertising on the system seems to be barely greater than costs (a few tens of dollars per month) and the current advertiser is behind on payments. |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | seymores: Thanks everyone for the replies. Helped me more than you know.I'm not going to quit my job -- this is the best job of all the jobs so far. Oh well, not yet anyway.I could be frustrated because it supposed to be a quiet weekends away from work or it could be that I just burn out lately. |
Recommend a nice man-bag/briefcase | marcamillion: Thank you all for your feedback. I think I am going to go with the Tucano suggestion. The Work-Out for the 13.3" MBP, is perfect for my needs. |
going to USA | gorbachev: As others have already mentioned, you can't legally do anything considered as work in the United States without a work permit.If you still want to do it (illegally), which I would strongly recommend against, no legit company will ever hire you, because you will not be able to show the requirement documentation to prove that you're legally allowed to work in the United States. In order for you to get around that hurdle, you'd have to acquire the documents illegally. Or work for a company that hires illegal immigrants.It's a very bad idea. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | nostrademons: Google Code Search:http://www.google.com/codesearchI use it for working my way around Google's codebase, which is a few orders of magnitude bigger than that.Also, there's no substitute for getting your hands dirty and diving into the code. You don't really understand something until you've changed it a few times. Grab a couple of low-priority bugs and write some patches for them; you'll learn far more than if you just sit down and study things. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | patio11: Once upon a time, a client of the day job dropped a substantial Perl codebase on our desk and said "Tell us what this does." My boss gave me the job, and expected me to actually READ all the code, but given that I had no desire to read through 100 kloc of Perl code commented only in Japanese, I went for visualization instead:1) Inspect several files for commonalities. Thankfully, the author was obsessive compulsive about coding standards.2) Write a parser for the Perl they used. Use it to glean what pages of the site were connected to each other and what the flow control was like. (a -> b, b -> c, b -> d, etc)3) Plot that on a graph (all hard work already done for me: http://rgl.rubyforge.org/rgl/index.html )4) Visually inspect the graph to learn non-obvious things about the codebase like "Oh, there is an English language version of the site embedded in here. Isn't that TOTALLY UNDOCUMENTED." Do a bit more code to chop the graph into subgraphs by related functionality (signup flow, admin functions, etc etc).5) Spit out all the code into HTML pages with appropriate autogenerated navigation, inline flow control graphs, and syntax highlighting. Do a bit of quality control, add in some comments about notable things I had learned, burn on CD and hand to customer.6) Charge customer $X0,000 for the CD. The customer was overjoyed they got it done so cheaply. (Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?) |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | xenoterracide: Maybe try this book? http://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/d... I'm not sure how good it is. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | gte910h: Doxygen is great if it understands your language in question |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | cmars232: I used to use pdb.set_trace() liberally to poke around at the internals of Django to figure out what it was doing in undocumented places. |
Good alternative to Google reader | rcfox: To get your feeds from Google Reader, just go to Settings->Import/Export and click "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file."Any competent RSS reader will be able to import that file.Starred/Shared items have RSS feeds themselves, which can be accessed from Settings->Folders and Tags. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | rajasaur: Itd be good to get a debugger, connect it to the process and run through the code. You will find a pattern emerging when playing with the application, say, for different clicks of a webapp. After a few days, you will know how the flow works.That said, Ive been more successful looking at the forums of an open source project, figure out what problems folks have and trying to solve them. You will be amazed to see how much you can learn about the code base and undocumented features solving those problems. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | tptacek: Is it a web app? Open up Firebug, look for interesting URLs, and grep for segments of the URL. Find the function that implements it, read bottom-up. |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | gtani: ruby:http://eigenclass.org/hiki/rcodetoolshttp://railroad.rubyforge.org/http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/12/read-the-source-luke-a-re...http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37105/how-do-you-actually...---------------------------(you'll see lots of questions on stackoverflow: navigate/inspect/read source repo's)http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623906/programmatically-...http://stackoverflow.com/questions/935516/how-does-macos-dev...python:http://code.activestate.com/recipes/213898/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1568544/given-a-python-cl...emacs, vim, ctags, etags,http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1220456/navigating-effect... |
How do you manage money? | nearestneighbor: My take on trading is that it's a zero-sum game, and some people have inside information or particularly good insights into the market. If you are average Joe, or are trading randomly, you would be losing money on every trade. |
Do you find developer screencasts useful? | jonursenbach: It all goes about how the way you learn. I'd say offer both -- screencast and a traditional how-to document. |
Is there a canonical source for image processing papers and information? | Kliment: It's rather problematic. I'd start with sciweavers ( http://www.sciweavers.org/ ), since they have a lot of readable, new papers, but the vast majority of the references are fairly math-heavy and somewhat removed from the applications. A very good resource is the Oreilly book ( http://www.amazon.com/Learning-OpenCV-Computer-Vision-Librar... ) on OpenCV, and the OpenCV source code ( https://code.ros.org/svn/opencv/trunk/opencv/ ). Imagemagick source ( http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php ) is also amazing for learning how basic operations are done in code.Learning to read the style of older research papers and to pull applications out of them is very useful though. It's surprising how often something seemingly overacademized and useless, when translated into code, turns out to be very useful and smart. |
Where can I learn about game design? | RevRal: I went through sloperama back in the day. I even printed out every one of his articles.Ah, yes, fond memories. Unfortunately, looks like his website is down at the moment. You're going to have to check archive.org or something: http://www.sloperama.com .I believe his full name is Tom Slopper. I could be wrong.Good luck! |
Good alternative to Google reader | jmonegro: http://www.feedafever.com
http://www.lazyfeed.com |
Ways for reading open source code bases? | ssamuli: I guess you could also take a look at a tool called "LXR Cross Referencer" at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxr/. Page http://fxr.watson.org includes LXR-generated cross references for multiple operating systems. |
Where can I learn about game design? | bemmu: http://lostgarden.com/ has some good stuff |
I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal? | iworkforthem: It is not normal. Bad project mgmt if you asked me. PM did not manage the change request, did not manage users expectations, did not recruit the best talent, etc.But then have I done yet to help him? Hm... I think I have. |
Good alternative to Google reader | Gmo: I personally use gregarius that I host myself. Not perfect, but good enough for my needs and my independence :) |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | dan_sim: Hmmm... I'd say that you better start coding and stop reading. It will be a mess at first but you have to gain some experience.I don't want to discourage you but you probably won't have thousands of users on your apps at the same time at the beginning so don't bother with creating scalable sites yet. One day, you'll have some slowness on your app and you'll learn it at this moment. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | peterhi: Well there is nothing stopping you from getting a small host somewhere and put up a site of some sort. This can then be used to practice the skills you will require to manage a host. Make sure that the site is actually being used for something so that you will need to maintain it and do upgrades.Then you only have to learn how to...1) Install and configure a machine
2) Configure a web server
3) Set up ssh access securely
4) Set up your database securely
5) Do backups (and as a test nuke the box and rebuild it from backups)
6) Automate the deployment of your application
7) Keep the machine up to date with security patches
8) Keep the hackers at bay
9) Monitor the general health of the machine and servicesBasically you will start to learn the art of the sysadmin. It is a useful skill if you end up at a small company without a dedicated sysadmin and even if you have one it will have a better idea as to what is required to develop and host a site. Empathy with the sysadmin is always good thing.You will learn a lot of new skills, most of which do not involve coding. I have a little hobby site that hosts fan art for a web comic, I have learnt much about automatic deployment by keeping the site up with minimal disruption. I have learnt much more about the running of databases (as opposed to just writing sql) and loads about unix security (users, groups, permissions, jails etc) that programmers just tend to ignore.All for around $9 a month. Money well spent if you ask me. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | bbq: It's been hinted at in dan_sim's post, but if you have a "real project" in mind just go do it. Learn what you're missing when you need to. You probably know more than you think. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | nethergoat: http://highscalability.com/ is a great resource for building scalable sites - it has consolidated architectural details (culled from presentations, blog posts, interviews, and more) for many large-scale sites (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc).As for testing environments, take a look into the principles of continuous integration (many resources available) and continuous deployment (especially Eric Ries's blog: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/). Some tools commonly used to this effect: Git/SVN for source control; Hudson/Cruise Control/Team City for builds; Selenium for testing.Finally, applying patches and updates to a server falls into the domain of systems administration, so I'd suggest looking for articles on patching/updating high-availability sites. Note, however, that cloud computing is a huge game-changer here. Whereas at many enterprises, applying patches is an arduous (and tedious) quarterly effort culminating in an late-night maintenance window with many hands on deck (all crossing their fingers), clouds afford their adopters the ability to simply fire up new, updated servers alongside the old ones, allowing them to be thoroughly tested in place before any traffic is redirected.-Mike (@mikebabineau) |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | etherealG: the best way to learn is to try. all these things that only apply to "real" sites can be tested in smaller doses. try setup a "scalable" blog site.setup an artificial system that can't stretch very far by limiting the memory / instances of your web server e.g. then hit it with more than you know it can handle. deal with that how you think it should be done. if it works for 1000 -> 10000 requests the same might work for 10000 -> 100000 as long as your scale technique doesn't depend on small numbers.same goes for all the other things you mentioned, they can be tested and coded for without having more than a "blog site" as a test platform. just do it :) code away!the same applied to a "testing environment" would be to make yourself a 2nd copy of your blog site. push to the copy, make sure things work, then push to the main site. possibly even automate that 2 tier push by writing tests that can be tested without user intervention :) |
Is this all there is to life? | jganetsk: Cheer up, for a million years, it was a lot worse than this. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | nicara: (warning: going a little off topic here, sorry)
Might I ask how you got started in the first place? I've got a fairly reasonable background regarding the theory of it [programming], I know the principles of OO and basic algorithms, etc., but in school we don't cover the actual writing of code. (And even if we did, it's probably safe to assume it'd go nowhere near as far as I'd like it to.)
Anyway, I picked up some Ruby lately, worked through a bunch of tutorials, and it's been going decently - at first much too easy for someone like me, then challenging, but then there's stuff I just don't know how to do.
On the one hand, I've repeatedly had big problems with blocks in Ruby - I can't seem to grasp why to use such a weird format when you could just use regular loops instead.
On the other hand, and much more importantly, I don't really know where to go from there. I can't write any real programs, and I'd like to get into Rails eventually (as a gateway to Web developing as a whole).Edit: Out of the tutorials that I did, this one[1] was the one I liked most, as it had a lot of cool tasks that you could just try and solve for yourself, it really helped me get the basics down. However, none of the tutorials have gone any deeper than that one, and as I'm sure you'll agree, I'm not exactly a programmer yet after that tutorial :)
Additionally, I've started to read this[2] book, but it appears to follow a really strange direction and is generally not very pleasurable to read (IMO). And, again, the moment it tries to explain blocks to me I just stand there puzzled.. dropped it after I hit that point, as I did with all the other materials I've tried out so far.Again sorry for hijacking the thread and apologies for being unable to offer any advice on your situation. Regards[1]
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/[2]
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/Edit2: Alright, just saw you've been a developer for longer than I've even used a computer :)
So I suppose you can't answer this question either, bah. Wish there were more people that didn't get into programming either 1950 or at age 5. Really, where does someone start nowadays when they're 20 and have no clue. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | flooha: If you are young and just starting, try to find a position with a web dev company who uses the technologies you want to learn. Pick an agile company who doesn't need a load of sign-offs to get something done. Don't worry about your $/hr. Worry about what you can learn.Basically I'm trying to get you to find a good mentor. You can learn more in 1 week from a good mentor than you can by reading PDFs and blog posts for two years. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | jmonegro: The best way for you to learn is to do so as you go. Plan an idea, a "big project" without worrying about your skills. Make what you can, learn what you cannot. When you come up with a question Google cannot answer, go ahead and ask it at StackOverflow. They are very nice and do not mind "noob" questions.That way, you will learn by doing, which is much more pragmatic. However, that does not mean that you should not learn programming theory! Embrace what you can. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | marram: I would suggest starting with Google App Engine (the Python version). For the following reasons:1. Python is a good language to learn. You can use it for other things beside building a web app. GAE is similar to Django.2. The GAE datastore is easier to fathom than a traditional database. For some reason, I always found databases hard to understand, and it seems that designing schemas for non trivial projects is a separate and distinct skill set from software engineering.3. GAE solves the updating/patching of working code by providing a sane environment and tools to update and version your app. You can easily switch back to a previous version. Patching datastore schemas is slightly harder.4. You get scalability out of the box. You don't have to worry about hardware, or even configuring "virtual" instances. None of that. But you probably won't have to worry about scalability for a while.5. You can easily deploy code to multiple environments. You just need to signup for more apps, and update your app.yaml file to point to a new app name. You can do this in a simple build script.I hope this helps.Cheers. |
Method/Tool to test if a link has already been submitted to HN | yan: If the URL is identical to one that has already been submitted, your submission will count as an up-vote to the original post. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | roachsocal: For frontend stuff:High Performance Web Sites
Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
(By Steve Souders)
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307And for an intro to scalability:Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications
(By Cal Henderson)
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio... |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | iamelgringo: Updating and patching a server running a web app without down time is an art. And, there's not a ton of stuff out there about django deployment best practices. Here's a few thoughts from a fellow developer:Python has a decent way to isolate deployed apps using virtualenv. If you google virtualenv django, you should find some interesting reading.For automated python deployment on unix boxen, fabric seems to be the state of the art. You might also want to take a look at capistrano on thr ruby on rails side. You'll probably find a lot more interesting reading about deployment tips and tricks by reading stuff from ruby/rails land. (Don't flame me) The Rails guys have historically had more problems with speed and scaling rails, so there's a lot more information out there. They've also built some really cool tools to deal with those problems.Django has some really cool caching features. I was just playing around with caching and load testing http://newsley.com by throwing ghetto localmem caching on top of my main view, I got an order of magnitude more pages served per second. I didn't even try memcached as a backed yet, but I feel a lot better knowing the basics of how to do that if the need arises. Regardless, you'll want to spend a bit of time learning the caching tools anfd reading about memcached if you're interested about scaling django.A lot of scaling web apps is about scaling a database. It's routinely the slowest part of your web app. You shouls be able to find a lot of reading about that. The highavailability blog is a great resource for that stuff.Cal henderson (founder of flikr) wrote a great book called "building scalable websites" if I'm not mistaken. |
Is there a canonical source for image processing papers and information? | jremillard: The stuff that is posted on the web is usually trivial beginner stuff or research. The vast middle ground is all in books. If you are doing this for work, goto Amazon pick up 6 or 7 the books as they tend to only have 80% overlap. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | Dmunro: Having recently started as a "professional" developer, coming from the realm of the hobbyist, I can say that the best thing you can do is get a job.Start with an internship if you are not yet confident in your skills. The best way to hone your abilities is to set up a situation where you get unexpected problems from code you did not write or an environment you aren't entirely familiar with, and fixing it with the mindset that failure is not an option.It also helps to get paid while you're doing it. Really. It shows that someone has put an incredible trust and investment into you, and they value your intellectual output.Start a personal website to host your projects, make it available to the public. Take a look at the tools you use. Try submitting code contributions to the open source projects. Start a blog and document your hardships and discoveries for other budding hackers.Hopefully this advice helps you some, best of luck! |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | JoelSutherland: Scalability solutions are best found when you have a scalability problem.I don't know that I have heard of a project failing because it wasn't scalable enough. The types of things that create scalability problems also tend to bring the resources (and motivation) to solve them. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | sanj: Spend some time at a company that does this stuff daily.(Yes, I'm hiring.) |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | almost: I wouldn't get to hung up on being "scabable" if I were you. Just do it and worry about that later if it becomes an issue (which it probably won't, plenty of sites are successful at what they're doing without having to many troubles in this area).Oh, and learn to use source control (Git or Mercurial or similar) if you haven't already. When you break something on your site and don't notice for a bit it's pretty important to be able to look back through the code history to find out where it all went wrong :) |
What code editor do you use? | c_allison: Currently giving Komodo Edit from Active State a shot. I too am trying to get away from NPP |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | moron4hire: "just do." I know that sounds rather cliche, but it's something that I've found a lot of beginners are missing. They spend a lot of time trying to find the "best" way to do something before they start doing it. Really, just do something. You'll learn from the experience either way. You'll probably learn more than if you had found the maximal solution first.I probably learned more about programming by hacking together a simple role playing game in Javascript+DOM in 2001 than my next 3 years of college and 5 years of work. That 8 year old code still worked up to the point GeoCities died, and then it was gone permanently. Not a big loss, but it was nice to see that it survived a myriad of browser updates. I learned tons about what made good, readable code just from having to live with it. I learned a lot of the art of optimization because of how much Javascript sucked at the time. But more importantly, I learned that it was more important to get-it-done than to be working in what was popular (you would not believe the flack I caught for not using C for it, even though I was also learning C as well and just wanted to do something in Javascript). |
What code editor do you use? | DanielStraight: Sublime Text: http://www.sublimetext.com/Visual Studio for C# though. |
What code editor do you use? | russell: I use UltraEdit32 for everything but Java. It's feature rich, highly customizable, and works the way I do. For example it supports cross system editing via ftp or ssh.For Java, I use eclipse. The interface is non-intuitive, but the number of tools cant be ignored. |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | prakash: Software Engineering for Internet Applications by Philip Greenspunhttp://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web |
Where can I learn about game design? | spokey: http://www.gamasutra.com/ might have some relevant content for you. |
What code editor do you use? | SlyShy: Pretty standard gvim setup. For writing Rails applications a lot more plugins come into play, but for writing plain C the simplicity is nice. http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/2009-12-07-113456_1024x600_s... |
How to learn to web dev for real ? | silentbicycle: I'm not a web developer, but I posted a similar question on Ask.Metafilter last summer (http://ask.metafilter.com/124165/Web-development-big-picture...) and got some helpful suggestions.For me, the most useful response in the long run has been delmoi's suggestion to just scrutinize the HTTP 1.1 spec and write a webserver from the ground up. (I'll release the webserver, an embedded coroutining/select-multiplexing server written in Lua, when I release the project driving its development.) My interest was specifically in using HTTP 1.1 / REST as a generic interface for servers, rather than creating dynamic web sites per se, though.Either way, it definitely helps to have a real project in mind. |
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