221 karma · joined January 27, 2011
I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.
When I googled the extension, opening the extension's page in the Chrome store returned a 404. I haven't been able to get more information about what the vulnerability is.
1) Being in debt sucks. Become incredibly passionate about the idea of never being in debt again. If you don't have a giant student loan weighing around your neck, you are far more free to pursue work that interests you. So what to do? Come up with a plan in your favorite evolution of Visicalc, complete with how much debt you're going to pay off each month so that you can put a date on the calendar about when you're going to be debt free. Even if you're doing soul-draining work, knowing that that work is getting you one step closer to being free from debt should help.
2) Your current situation isn't as bad as it seems. I work with a ton of devs for whom working at a cool startup was their first real job. Awesome for them! Also totally not in line with most people's reality. Most people start in some version of "the bottom," whether that be in terms of low salary or poor culture, and then they maneuver their way through a couple of jobs until they find work they really enjoy. If you are smart and get things done, you'll do this too.
So your interviewer lied to you, exposing a toxic part of the company culture. They'll probably lose you over it and you'll eventually end up in a place you prefer to work.
Just come up with a plan to get out of debt. That can move your career a lot closer to freedom than you may think.
You can probably learn everything you need from Googling for solutions to problems, but that book was great when I was committed to working with Excel and Access for a while. It covers a lot of things you're not going to think to search about.
Go back in time. Read classics. Re-read the stuff you glossed over in college because you didn't have the time.
Specifically, check out https://trello.com/card/i-want-early-access-to-these-paid-fe....
A one-time forgiveness of debt is a generous gift to be received, but unless you have the habits to avoid debt again, it will just grow back again over time.
Where I can I read more about annual billing decreasing churn? I've read your blog post (or email?) about switching to annual billing to free up revenue to acquire new customers, but I don't remember reading about how it decreases churn as well.
Later, after coding for a couple of years and picking up .NET, I eventually learned LINQ syntax and really started to appreciate the expressiveness of chaining methods together to iterate over collections. It was a nice addition to my tool box, but it still took some practice more me to grok it. If that had been my first exposure to loops, it likely would have been a stumbling block to my learning.
I started off in VBA hacking recorded macros. I would then write hundreds of lines of code into a single function (usually named "DoSomething" or something equally vague) and then I would live and die by the VBA debugger, tweaking the function when it broke. Over time, I learned the value of encapsulation and how much easier it was to debug my code if used smaller, well-named, functions.
When I started a different job and ended up doing a lot of VB6 programming, I ended up reading a lot of others' code. I would stare at functions that were literally 1000+ lines of code an painfully difficult to debug. The purpose of the VB6 code was to print barcoded shipping labels in a specified format, but the ZPL print instructions were heavily mixed with business logic. It was a nasty mess. The single greatest thing that would have helped me would have been encapsulation. Even if the developer hadn't separated the business logic from the ZPL code (which would have been very nice), small, well-named functions would have made the program so much easier to follow.
The reason I mention encapsulation specifically is because of how much you gain as a developer. If you learn nothing more than basic encapsulation as a VBA/VB6 developer, you'll do wonders for the readability and maintainability of your code.
I love this line because it implies that you can actually become a good VB6 programmer. Sure, you may not be able to sort a linked list, but you can still learn about encapsulation and ... actually, just start with encapsulation; that's going to make your code SO much easier to read :-)
"If you are looking for a free solution, you can read the Posterous API documentation to create your own backups."
Well said and great job on the tool Chad! If had a posterous blog, this would be a $9 no-brainer.
One thing I like a lot about the culture in younger companies, especially in tech, is that while we are conscious of the appropriate financial ratios, we're not driven by them. For example, Fog Creek, while profitable, isn't driven only by profit, and happens to be passionate about giving developers a great place to work and helping developers create better software (among other things).
Looks like it works fine on Firefox 6.0.2, though.
I don't know that I necessarily code better when I'm standing, but overall I prefer it to sitting.
Thanks to Fog Creek providing adjustable-height desks for every employee, this was really easy to do. I started with 2 hours each day one week, then 3 hours the next week, etc., until I'm now standing the whole day. I love it.
I cut my teeth on VBA in Excel, and for all of its weaknesses (and the fact that it just. won't. die), it was still a very powerful platform.
While it's obvious that this flawed logic existed five years ago before the bubble burst, I'm surprised at how much of it still remains. I'm surprised that consumers are still trying to play numbers games to justify purchasing homes, but perhaps as the OP suggests, the supply of buyers is less than before. If you want to buy a home for lifestyle reasons, great, but make sure that's clear; there are so many people who are stuck in their homes without a job because they thought they were clever at math.
When my wife and I were figuring out what to do with our lives, we decided to put my finding a good job above owning a home. Because of this, I was able to accept a job in NYC and move from the suburbs of Atlanta without worrying about selling a home in a horrible real estate market.
We'll consider buying a home after I feel more rooted in the tech industry, but for now, we appreciate the flexibility that renting affords.