Valien

Riding the train at Dollywood is one of life's best experiences. Highly recommend it for sure!

Also, if you're ever in Pennsylvania and go to the train museum in Strasburg you can ride that steam train as well and it is also a blast.

You can always find a lot of us on LinkedIn :D {I work at Tailscale}

Psst...did you say browsers?

https://github.com/tailscale/ts-browser-ext

super experimental but really cool

I used to work at Teleport and am now at Tailscale. Both are solid products. Sad to see the Team offering disappearing but sounds like they are moving more towards large enterprise vs the small/medium startup/growth companies (while I was there we had a really healthy mid-market team but I think it's all gone now).

Take a look at Tailscale. If you are all in on AWS then using SSM is solid but if you have general access or other cloud access then Tailscale can probably help you out there.

It can help for sure. Especially if a company has an EDP or PPA with Amazon.

The process to become an ISV on AWS takes a bit of work though.

Can also use tools like Teleport that handles all of this programatically. Open-Source core as well (github.com/gravitational/teleport).

Source: I work for Teleport so a little biased, but love the fact that more and more orgs are going away from static creds/keys and using short-lived certs and/or passwordless solutions. Spent many years in a production role and wish I had these tools (or was aware of these tools) back then.

Go volunteer and spend time with those with less resources. Pour yourself into something worthwhile. When you take your focus off yourself and pour it into others things will improve.

I also know this isn't popular here but spiritual fitness is key as well.

3rd for sure. We're a RH partner and specialize in OpenShift work. Tons of excitement with customers on using OpenShift. I love it.

ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.

Ah, welcome to a dilemna I've been wrestling for a couple of years. I actually have an idea/product that has started/stopped a few times that's geared for missionaries, pastors, evangelists, etc.

I just need to find someone smart like the OP here to help execute the vision.

We use TinyMCE and a .NET plugin that uses the GoogleSpell check service. It's dead right now and we are trying to find a solve for it.

Frustrating about something like this is all day most of the Sendgrid systems have been down most likely related to this issue.

Very frustrating for folks like us who rely on them for SMTP routing.

I can confirm that the new beta lets you select which directory/drive to install files on. It's a great change and let's me start filling up my 2 TB drive instead of my C drive!

Anyone know if they have a CDN like they did for 1.4? I was using it on a test site with this link - http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/1.4.0/bootstrap.min.css and it works fine but didn't see if they have a hosted 2.0 version yet.

Sorry for taking a while to respond. Got busy. I kinda stumbled into it actually. I had just come out of the tech world (a failed startup) and was talking to recruiters about IT positions. Well, I talked to one guy that was absolutely horrendous - no personality, no knowledge, etc. and I thought - hey if this guy can do it, I can. I had always wanted to work on my sales skills and have always enjoyed networking and talking with people so it was a good fit.

I made out well in that I was involved with a small company with lots of experience in the management team and they invested in training and helping me get off the ground. That and the commission motivation was pretty nice too.

Now if I got hired on by someone at Robert Half or TekSystems I doubt I would have made it. They are too corporate and too inflexible needless to say.

Having a tech background did help because I could tell when a candidate was blowing smoke or trying to be more technical then what they really were. Other skills that made me successful was determination to succeed (drive), work ethic, ability to cold call (or at least ignore it), ability to shrug off rejection and keep going, and most of all ability to listen and think critically.

Hey all, I'm a tech guy that also spent 3 years as a recruiter and in IT staffing sales/business dev. I know this industry in and out.

I'm going to speak for our location (Greenville, SC). The normal direct-hire % is between 18-25%. If you're doing volume with a company you'll probably be 18-20%. If it's a niche skill or new company then 25%. The days of 30% is mostly over unless it's a retained search or some extremely difficult skill.

This recruiter is on par with his advice. For a direct-hire role it is his best interest in getting you the highest salary possible because he will make more money that way. If he's a good recruiter he will do all the negotiation for you and you won't have to worry about it at all. You tell him what you need and he'll work his magic. Trust me, we are very good at getting those target salaries (if not more) for our developers.

If you are going through a good agency and the salary question comes up then you need to defer that to the recruiter and if your recruiter doesn't know what to do then find a different agency. Lots of bad ones out there.

Sometimes though you have to persuade a candidate even if the salary is not what he wants. As an example I placed a Sr. Architect at an awesome gig and the salary was 15K lower than what he was used to making. He was hemming and hawing and I told him up front that he could continue to look for work for his skillset and not find it in this area (he had been out of work for about 6 months at this time) or take the job at the lower salary with the potential to grow. Needless to say he took the job and has since been promoted (which I knew would happen cause of his skills and knowledge).

No on contract-to-hire gigs it's the best interest in the recruiter to get you to take the lowest possible hourly rate and then he will bill the client the highest he could go. Why? Because it's all based on a Net Margin formula and the more NM the recruiter makes the more commission he'll make. Our firm wasn't too aggressive on beating down candidates but companies like TekSystems are notoriously known for low-balling their contractors and high-billing clients.

Hope this helps some. Not all recruiters and agencies are bad but unfortunately many fly-by-night and sorry shops give the good ones a bad name.

I will say this that 90% of the IT jobs out there (at least in our market) are never posted on a job board. They are filled by agencies because they can get it done faster and more efficiently than a job board and an HR person who's clueless on IT skill sets.

~V

ps On a side note we had a joke in that internal recruiters were folks that couldn't hack it working for an agency. It's a different culture and fast-paced and being heavily commission driven tends to drive a good number of folks away. Why I left was that I placed myself back into IT :) And no, I did not get a commission on that (which would have been nice to boot!) :)

So question for the software devs here. I'm looking for a solution that I can use to track internal projects with non-technical AE's (advertising world). Right now we do everything via spreadsheet and email and it's horrendous. I've looked at JIRA but the cost is a huge factor. For issue tracking we are using JetBrains YouTrack and it's great but for overall project planning, etc I'm wondering if Trello might be a fit?

In that case come visit Greenville, SC. Small but it looks like someone sneezed on a map and drew the road lines from there. It's chaos but you get used to it.

As a note - I've known this Dr for a good # of years. He's part of a dying breed of general family practitioners and sensible doctors that you don't see much anymore.

Nathan,

Great story and way to find a niche that was unserved. There are so many out there (niches that is) with archaic products/services that are begging for right person to come along and improve them.

Good luck with the dedicated venture!

Here in the South (and namely Greenville, SC) we've had a shortage of talented IT (devs mainly) since 2008. Great gigs here and great opportunities but most folks don't or can't relocate (due to being upside down in a home someplace) or can't fathom a 'pay cut' since our area doesn't pay Silicon/Boston/NY rates yet our cost of living is quite a bit lower (at least has been).

If you're a talented developer and out of work more than a month you either are horrible at interviewing, have terrible soft skills, or really aren't that good. Or you might be on vacation :)

I've known the fine folks behind this project for a while and it's exciting to see them launch and gain some traction. It's great for our area and great for them. Congrats again Dodd and team. Looking forward to see more great stuff coming down the pipe!

Now listening to a new band in Spotify. Thanks. Hope the meager cents adds up from hundreds or thousands of users.

I'm actually a part of this survey. I have a SamKnows device (basically a Netgear router with custom firmware) that polls Charter's 'net service and I get monthly details and can even login to the SamKnows site to see how Charter is doing. Pretty slick.

I switched from JungleDisk to Backblaze a year ago and haven't looked back. BB is amazingly fast and painless to use. On top of that the cost is insanely cheap in comparison to using AWS (which Jungle Disk uses).

Good post. I spent 3 years in the Tech Recruiting industry. Did sales, recruiting for both direct-hire and contract. There are a lot of bad apples out there because it's a low-barrier career. But solid recruiters are a gem and take care of their candidates. Most good recruiters make more money than most developers out there and know their industry well. There are those that are idiots and don't know jack about IT (I'm an IT guy so I did well and understood candidates and clients).

Reason I got out of it was that my passion is in IT so I got back into that world. Now I get to listen to shoddy recruiters calling me and I usually laugh at them... :D

So ignore the bad candidates and focus on the good ones. They are the ones that will put food on your table.

I've been in ecommerce off/on for about 5+ years now. The rush is awesome. One of my clients was NASA and they would put in $5K orders every quarter or so. Always got a thrill about that!

BTW, nice gun site too!