dorfuss

I am more of an amateur, so I don't mind. My only ambition would be to become more like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit

The abundance of online resoures is a mixed blessing - there is so much interesting stuff out there that it's enough to spend your entire life exploring all of it without realising your primary goals.

Think about it like this - if you are a doctor, it's not enought to say you want to be "a better doctor", or "a better sportswoman". Such goals are meaningless, because each and every one of us wants to simply be better. Does becoming a better programmer mean you understand the given technology better, that you code faster in a language of your choice, colaborate with others more efficiently?

You are talking about your career here so I'd approach the problem from the standpoint of the value you bring to the market. On a meta-level your general goal should be acquisition of such a skillset that would be valued and allow you gradually achieve such a high position that would secure your income for the years to come.

Going to a school certainly helps you limit the scope, time and effort you have to put into the task as well as it gives you a diploma that always could be of use. (The market is still unsaturated with coders of any level, but if the demand for manpower dropped a diploma could be important while competing for employment). Schools are also good about teaching more general problems such as math, algorithms and computability theory, these however have imho little use in front-end development.

Try asking people around you what things they think you should learn to perform better in the specyfic set of tasks you are dealing with on daily basis and focus on them. Your employer will be happy to hear you want to improve your skills.

Apart from that try learning something really challenging, something you really don't like doing (assembly? scala?), or something fundamental like TCP/IP or SSH. Personally my weakest point is math, so for me discrete mathematics would be best.

TL:DR Be specyfic in your goals whether you decide to go to school or not.

Blew my mind:

"...this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.

"I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it’s taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.

"It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient."

Should I assume that C projects are generally more hierarchical in nature, with one leader who orchestrates the entire production and where it would be rather difficult for team members to "freely" commit a module or a function here and there like you would with adding some sub-class in OO, because then it could ruin some other parts of the code?

Could this be also understood as a reason why Linus doesn't like C++, because it promotes higher flexibility and less carefully designed architecture, that in turn leads to security/performance issues?

Three psychological factors before they got to the highest echelons: they were efficient, they knew the business VERY well, and they liked taking risk (many did extreme sport like freediving etc.).

Have a look: https://youtu.be/OvYPB_1oPos?t=18m14s

So what I am going to do now is to record this piece on a Mac using QuickTime and SoundFlower, which allows me to capture any audio output. If I am lazy I'd record the entire video and later cut it into pieces with Audacity. The thing that this method is lacking is a way to keep notes about the sources, such as the address, performers' names etc.

I hope it helps (and enjoy the music :)

I know that this issue has been discussed here on HN in extenso, but again: my situation is different, because I am not a professional counting on the bigs bucks to come. The reason I am so much concerned is that I want to share my work as an open source, free project, not only for my private satisfaction, but primarily so that others would be able to use them or possibly continue to build them if I come across some hard problems I can't technically overcome - without needing to completely refacture/re-write the code.

Any suggestions?

Would anyone take me under his mentorship (maybe a skype once every two-months?) to help me make the right architectural decisions?

And finally - I am a bit scepticall about using GitHub. Isn't it a bit of an overkill for a one man project? Is it really the only right way to get noticed these days?

Best regards,

I'd add: 1) Being able to sell. That means a lot of things: sell yourself (write a good CV, perform well at interviews, lead the team, convince others to your ideas).

2) Work hard. That does not mean work 20h a day (some people do, though, like Bill Gates in his early days or Elon Musk), but make the best use of the time you have, keep focused, be persistent, find the right people to share your workload with.

Books, with rare exceptions such as that of K.J. Rowling's and Dan Brown's, are not a global phenomenon, draw less attention, making the crime of piracy less tempting or less lucrative. Books are more elitist and TV series more vulgar. That's also the reason why it's more profitable to harvest clicks on porn or pirated music than on metaphisical poets such as John Donne.

Since there are fewer book pirates it's also easier to track them vs. millions engaged in pirating movies on P2P networks.

My second guess would be that e-books are quite a new phenomenon (in terms of the recent surge in popularity of e-paper readers and tablets) compared with optical drives and tapes that were around for a couple of decades. DRM techniques were much less advanced and so piracy could flourish. The market and the music or film industries were so badly hit that they had to find a different business model to make ends meet.

Kindles and iPads are made with DRM in mind, the techniques are more advanced today, and the publishers have not been threatened by piracy so much as by the shrinking readership. Also scanning entire books could not have been done so massively and easily as copying music or films.

Finally - a word in favour of piracy - I can imagine, although it's just a guess, that it was exactly the piracy that drove evolution and innovation in film and music towards more spectacular entertainment, 3D, iMAX, 4D, live performance, stand-up shows, HD tv screens, VR goggles, 5.1 stereo, group gaming, motion sensors etc. etc., because watching flat, low res. series or films is not considered a proper fun anymore (even The X-files seems boring today, not engaging enough, from a different epoch, like ballet).

My opinion and experience is that attorneys and law firms are there just in order to prove their usefulness - nothing more. And they are not useful at all. It happend SO many times that an agreement (not necessarily NDA) was kept by the "lawyers" for 3 weeks and then returned with some realy idiotic comments, exposing genuine iqnorane of the project we were working on.

Often, after the lawyer's review, they don't even put project leader's names, dates, bank account numbers, payment time, currency, phone numbers or other details in the agreement and such papers are later signed by CEOs (I wish I could one day show you these documents).

It seems to me that very often clients keep the documents for weeks, delaying the project launch, supposedly scrutinising and reviewing the paperwork, but are returned without being read at all.

We are now trying to sell our product to a minor supermarket chain and they asked us to give them source code to our software platform. When we told them it was impossible, they said that they get the source for every piece of software they use. That's nonsense, we replied and asked if Microsoft gave them the source code for Windows.

The same goes with NDAs - they think that their systems or business processes are so important and require special protection as if it was some kind of serious secret although it's just some simple intranet or knowledge base portal that we build for them.

Clients, negotiators, buyers, lawyers are incredibly ignorant when it comes to technical stuff.

* - (I'm not saying that agreements or legal advisors are wrong in general, just that very often the protection measures and suspiciousness are blown out of proportion)

I believe it's so much more worthwhile to be supportive. When you have any kind of an adventage over others such as when you know something better, have move experience, have more money etc., you have these two options: either use your adventages to help, or to bring down.

To ridicule is not the best method of educating others either. And a person who feels strong doesn't have to show any sign of superiority, because with true strength comes security.

I wish the author of the original question will not find it too difficult to get back on track after loosing the bag. Good luck to you.

I'd dessuade you from living in the Northern Europe.

I lived in Denmark for a year and I'd not go to Scandinavia but for holidays ever again.

The taxes are so high it's almost not worthwhile to make any effort or try harder.

These countries have one of the smallest income gap between those who earn the least and the rich. On the top of that it's dark, cold, the language is difficult to pick up, stores close early on the week days and are closed on Sundays.

Read about "Law of Jante" on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

Everything is damn expensive. Owning a car is a luxury.

People are friendly, but that means just "helpful" kind of friendly, not necessarily friendly like in "warm, carring and thoughtful". At least that's my impression.

They drink a lot and drinking is a must if you want to socialise. The stereotype of drinking Russians should be superseded by the drinking Danish youth. Perfectly dreadful.

The original Legoland in Billund is closed in winter :(

And trains are often late.

However, the nature is fabulous, and the streets and houses are meticulously clean. And these countries were not destroyed during the great wars - the last time Copenhagen was besiged, bombarded and plundered was in the times of Napoleon in 1807 - unlike Berlin or Dresden. That gives the city a special ambience.

On the other hand in Provance it is warm most of the year and you can easily get to Rome or Paris, or pay Spain a visit. And it has Alps and Mediterranean and palm trees all no further than 70 km drive!

It's not actually the matter of importance but rather of which e-mails can wait. There is a client, a global corp. interested in becoming partners with us who's willing to add our software to their products, big bucks involved, and no matter what I'm doing at the moment I will answer their e-mails right away when they come in.

On the other hand I have a small client who's not in a rush and I know I can wait with him till Monday.

The bad habit is using the inbox as your to-do list, but that's what has actually become. Certainly I should answer all the e-mails promptly, as waiting for answer is really frustrating from the client's point of view.

Internal communication is most often the least important like what's for lunch or who's going to play the ball after work, and most of this stuff should be completely separated from e-mails sent by clients.

I think there also should be a text field for notes next to the e-mail's title so that I could write short notes on how to process the e-mail once I have time.

When I know I won't have time to answer a particular e-mail later I try to answer it instantly, but later I might forget to follow up. If I don't have time it's also good to know to whom I could forward the e-mail and know that the person will 100% answer it on the very same day. Nothing is worse than telling a Client someone else will fix the problem and then a week later you learn that your colleague actually didn't get in touch with them.

Search for elections results, weather/climate change, air pollution, crime rate - there's a lot of it online.

JavaScript lets you control HTML elements, so it would be rather hard to begin with just JavaScript. Styles in CSS are currently indispensable when writing any HTML unless you want to rely on crude default formatting. That's why it's HTML -> CSS -> JS and not the other way around.

Moreover you have to understand that JavaScript is a client-side scripting language, that is to say that your scripts will be downloaded and executed solely and entirely on your computer. You will not have any way to open, read and write to files (except for cookies), because your script "lives" only inside the browser.

If you want your code not to be seen by a visitor of your website, or if you want the code to be executed before the page is downloaded and displayed in a browser, you need a server-side scipts like PHP or ASP so that for example the visitor has only access to the parts of the website you want him/her to read, or display content depending on the user login and password.

Later you will see that for storing and manipulating larger amounts of data you'll need a data base server, which makes sorting and managing information much easier and faster than if you'd accessed files directly from your servers' hard drive.

PHP and MySQL are for free and therefore they are recommendable for beginners - alternatives are Microsoft's .Net + MS SQL and many many other, which are arguably more robust for commercial, enterprise level applications.

Node.js is however a more modern way of doing things on-line, PHP belongs to the 2000s.

jQuery is good once you realise why plain javascript s*cks a great deal ;)

Staring your journey with online tools such as JS is ok, but it may be difficult to later jump into more... how should I put it... "serious?" languages - once you want to build your own standalone application software that runs outside a browser (not only because you have to use a compiler, but also because you have to pay attention to more details and plan ahead). For instance it's not impossible, but it seems that, switching from strong typed languages like C to weak typed is easier than the other way around.

Please do never underestimate or neglect learning about design patterns, data structures and algorithms no matter what language you're using or intend to learn.

http://www.w3schools.com/js/ has a very clean, straightforward tutorial with complete reference. My advice would be that as you learn you should take notes in form of questions, so instead of writing: "To declare a function: function name (...) {...}" write a question: "How to define a function?" Then rewise your questions after each chapter and write your answers on a piece of paper, not into the computer - you'll memorise the syntax faster and better.

After reading the entire tutorial you should have about 8-10 pages of notes with questions. If you don't remember how to write something, go back to the online tutorial/reference and find what you need.

At the beginning don't spend too much time on the Math or Date functions, as these won't be that much useful. Focus on Strings and Arrays instead, regular expressions are also fun to play with.

And after you're done with the basics you could try the Design Patterns: http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...

Thirdly: as you learn you should try to build things that could be useful for yourself and that you would enjoy building. For instance you could try to make a simple flashcard system or a little script that could strip a given string from HTML tags, or a script that would create numerated footnotes on your website. Something like 150-200 lines of code.

Your could also play with manipulting SVG elements with your JS - it's very rewarding and I believe that as for a beginner it's important to SEE the effects instantly.

- 5,5 - 8 hours - if there is less then 7 h I usually have to take a short nap in the evening to keep me going until bedtime

- usually I sleep from 11:00 pm till 6:30am, almost every other day I jog 6 to 12 km before going to bed, I work out in the mornings every single day for about 30 minutes

- 8,5 hours is optimal, (meaning that if I am not exhausted and I sleep uninterrupted I'd wake up naturally after 8,5 hours). Btw: ear plugs really make me sleep deeper and wake up better rested.

- I've never drunk coffee in my life, but I consume loads of caffeine in teas and yerba mate, I try to cut the intake to about 5 servings a day but when I'm at home the entire day I drink one after another like a chain smoker. I don't think a coup of strong black tea in the evening would have any effect on me. I also can't see any effects on my performance if I don't drink tea at all.

I'm 28.

See http://www.fonerbooks.com/ on self-publishing. web 1.0

In the future you will have client's who are idiots, and business partners whom you cannot stand, and tasks that are just repetitive and uninventive. So treat this last few semesters as a good training. Observe your self, see how you react to these obsticles, try work out a strategy of dealing with such hardships. It'll definitely be useful and make you a stronger human being.

The things you talk about are quite ambitious. Let's make a comparison with filmmaking world. If you are about to graduate from a film school, you are not supposed to make your first movie as good as some of the Old Masterpieces, or a big budget Holywood movie. You are supposed to make a soap opera episode - just get things simple and right - correct shots, correct lighting, well paced, clearly structured plot. And so should be the graduation work you are facing now.

And finally - there are many moments when the formal diploma is required from you. For instance immigration and changing countries. Being an engineer opens a lot of doors, makes it A LOT easier to get a working permit/visa. There are certain types of jobs that require formal education - and without it you will not even be considered a candidate. Right now you are probably young, single and it's not a problem for you to be a contractor and have less stability, but later you'd get married, have children, take a mortgage, and then having a well paid job and organised life in a big corporation is not a bad thing at all.

And moreover catching up with the degree later in life is really difficult.

So, honestly, just finish it. It doesn't have to be spectacular. I've made this mistake, you don't have to.

There is a book out there called something like "Curing factors in psychoanalysis" which ends with a sentence: "Well, we know that talking to a person certainly has some impact, but what impact, how and why, we're not sure at all."