hippee-lee

Never sold a start up but I left a career in biotechnology for web programming. Have bounced around some small agencies with saas apps and code bases I would describe as corner case hack on top of corner case hack.

After the last one ended badly I started my own thing and am reaching out directly to find some customers who don't care about changing the world, they just need some solid web help but not a full time web person. I'll be honest, I'm not sure where it's going to go.

I did identify with some of your comments thugh. All the contract/fte job descriptions I see theses days are looking for experts in a wide range of technologies (frontend ninjas and backend rock stars ...) for jr to mid level positions. I just don't get it. When I was in the lab, even the sr research associates took several months before they had learned enough bout the way the group operated to take projects over in full. I started out of college, had a great mentor in the lab and it still took a year to learn stuff you can only learn on the job. Is programming different somehow? I dont think so but I didn't start dabbling in computers until later on in my twenties.

( note - anocedotal evidence of one) There is a weird dichotomy in tech. It seems that there are two perceptions I see. The first is that it is really hard and complicated (it is but no more so than analytical chemistry and LC-ms/ms) and the second is that everyone from jr level up should be figuring it out on their own from day one. I find this odd but I may not have worked for the most skilled companies in software development. What's frustrating is that no one else would call me back so I think for now, I'm going to go to focus on what I can do well and reach out to businesses in my area and see what they need done.

If you want to talk, my email is I my profile I don't know if I can help or answer your questions but I am happy to listen.

iPad 1 crashes s well.

I'm 36, took the 'safe' route through college right after high school and then, through a round about cross country jaunt, I went on to a safe place in a large company after that. So take this for what it is worth to you.

If you can get a year to do something you are interested in or passionate about go for it! Formal education will be here for a while even though the alternatives like Kahn and udacity and others are validating a different path.

In the places I have gone, since college, I have always met interesting people with unexpected backgrounds. I highly doubt that you have to go off the beaten path or to the far ends of the earth to find interesting people with a story to tell and worthwhile work to do. But it is exciting to travel 'On The Road' style and i'll bet it sounds cool when you tell stories to your kids or friends over beers years later.

In retrospect, I could have done the cross country trek before college but that may have changed where I went to college and where I worked after college. If I change that I change meeting my wife and miss out on my daughter. The flip side to that is that for someone who is at a stage where they just want to experience life and people and learn more about the differences in the world; now is the best time to do that. Be it on the other side of the world, in the run down part of large city near them or a rural countryside - what will make the decision worthwhile are the people you engage with and what you do for them while you are there.

Things have changed a lot since I decided to go right into college and perhaps it is cheap and easy to find work on the other side of the world these days. I believe that meaningful work to fill a gap year could be found anywhere.

You don't have any contact info in your profile. I consider myself a web generalist with experience in php. This (web) programming being my second career I'm not sure how to rate my ability but if you have a well defined spec that won't change I can provide a solution ...

Anyway, I'm not so confident that I have deleted my LinkedIn profile. In fact I am working on building my soft skills and that site has been very helpful to me lately. You can easily find me there or with google. Maybe I can help you?

I think it depends when and where you discuss a negative experience. Sure, not a good idea in an interview.

But what about doing a personal reflection, say a blog post or something on your own time about the observations and lessons learned with regards to things like culture or development philosophy directly related to that company? As long as you do it in a way that doesn't break any non-disclosure agreements why should you be punished for it and do you really want to work for someone who would look negatively on you for expressing what you have learned from a bad experience? Even more important - perhaps the employer doen't know how bad the culture is inside or worse they do know and rely on you not ever saying anything to continue recruiting others similar to you?

Then, during the interview you can find a way to bring a summary of the negative experience into the conversation without it looking like you want to trash or burn your former employer or manager. There are many opportunities for this, a common question one gets asked is to describe what you have learned from mistakes on the job. This is open and general and one could easily work programming specific or soft skill lessons learned into the discussion that do not paint your former employer in a positive light. And if your former employer has not earned the right to a positive reference you should not be required to give it to them just because you want to continue working.

> The people who learnt to program computers in the 70's and 80's ...

I agree, but that kind of programming is very different from the type of programming that will be useful to non programmer kids when they grow up. There is also google, stack overflow and a waltz of easily accessible information on how to do X in language Y that was not online then.

I am drawing a distinction between coding and programming. Let me explain - When I graduated from college in 1999 the career office was very assertive that I should use and describe my ability with the MS Office productivity suite. When and how it had become an important enough to include on my resume doesn't matter, it was an important skill to have for the types of jobs I was going to be applying for. So programming and programmers will always have to dive deep and be able to develop complex systems. I am using the word coding in the same context as what I started with: I worked in a laboratory and collected lots of scientific data. I learned how to automate the tedious parts of manipulating, formatting and emailing out the results to save my time and reduce the errors I made doing it manually. To me, this was a self taught journey to learning to code with vba and even back in the first half of the Aughts there were decent places to figure things our for VBA.

I think in the future, kids or prospective employees in general that are not programmers, being able to put "can write JavaScript and VBA to automate repetitive tasks" will not be required. But, the candidates who can will have a marketable skill that sets them apart from their peers even though they are both trying to get a job in Supply Chain or Regulatory Affairs.

And these days, JavaScript is very easy to get started with, fire up a modern browser, open up the console and type in your program on any web page. It's been a while since I worked with VBA but I assume it is discussed on stack overflow.

My take on the article is that she had a problem - she needed to better understand how things worked underneath the web software that is Wordpress. The meeting she wrote about helped her do that. It also raised (meta?) questions related to gender issues in the technology field.

As the married father of a four year old daughter, I do get the sense of comfort that is prevalent in ladies clubs. Watching my daughter play with boys and girls, just boys and then just girls I have observed a noticeable difference in the intersections between the children. I have also noticed the differences in my wife's book club (all women) when its her turn to host. It's not that they exclude me or the other guy's we are friends with but, the books they read are not to my taste so I would not be able to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. Although I do still need read The Girl With THe Dragon Tattoo book on their recommendation.

So reading about an women's club where they go into the basics of coding is a good thing even if most of the members never become elite programmers - they will have learned a valuable skill in a comfortable setting. That is something they can take back to work and apply now: how to talk to the programmer in a meaningful way. For my daughters generation (not just girls) I am coming to suspect that a line will be drawn between those who can make use of the technology underneath the productivity tools their generation is raised on (web/office being the most prevalent today) and learning to code in anything is a step towards being successful in any field, not just web and software.

It's emacs for me but I agree with your thought on the patient practitioner and the mind editor connection. I also think a decent keyboard is part of that connection.

I did like the article; the graphic was a good image to see where I may have some holes and gave me some ideas for how to fill them.

Hi, I'm Matt Hippely in Erie, CO (near (Denver/Boulder). This is my second career and I am a web programmer. (php/JavaScript/css/html). I have worked for several of the boutique web companies around Boulder doing things like: legacy bug fixes and enhancements to Zend applications, writing PHPUnit tests for an existing application, design and implement a customer catalog that can 1) be administered with a (simple) custom cms and also takes advantage of localStorage when users iOS device is offline. Other web stuff includes debugging cross brewer functionality and display issues. For database stuff I have always used MySql.

I have also done basic sys admin stuff - compiling ffmpeg for web and iOS optimized videos, integrating LibreOffice into an application for converting MS Office documents. I am comfortable on the command line and use emacs to edit most files.

I'm also open to remote but don't have any real experience on remote teams.

My previous career was in Biotechnology. I worked in the small molecule/drug discovery department of a large company and ran an LC-MS/MS instrument, collected data and compiled spreadsheets. That is where I learned about the power of automation with VBA to generate my run reports and set up my email releases to the team.

While at the large biotech company I did go back via night classes and get a second degree in comp sci; with regards to programming, I am self-taught.

If you are near the mountains you can get some epic night turns if you ride or ski. Berthoud Pass anyone?

This was behind a registration page for me.

>Yet, I must admit that if I were to have my salary doubled today, I would stick around

Only if it were doubled - I haven't worked at a large company that would do that. But, you should still be able to profit from what you know and do for the company. Why not take all the things only you know and batch them into several groups. For the next few years, at your annual review (or if they don't do those, schedule a meeting with your manager once a year) go to your boss and tell them about this other stuff that is not sys admin work and only you can do. Ask for a raise, or training or more of the work you still find interesting. [edit] and less of the work you do not find interesting.

At the large companies I have worked at (not tech) they do annual reviews and bonuses based on performance. My raises were between 1%-4%. I think this was more dependent on who my manager was than my actual performance but I am biased when it comes to self-assesment :) However, I have never worked myself into a position where what I knew and did was as valuable as what your situation sounds like. If you are the only one who can (and does) do some of these things you have great power with which to negotiate with and even if they give you annual raises you should try to leverage your power to get a few more percentage points added. While they likely won't double it. If the average raise at your company is ~2.5% and you are able to get 5% because of what you know and do, after 10 years you will have ~25% more than if you didn't say anything.

I switched careers a few years ago and have often felt like this.

I also read Steven Kings book, "On Writing." Even though it's about prose, one of the most important things I took away from it is this: if I want to be a good ______ I need to show up, every day and _______. Usually, I won't know when I did good ______ until after the fact and if I don't ______, every day, I won't be able to measure myself and improve on my previous efforts.

This has helped me continue to plug away (at work, on my own time) and seek out interesting challenges that will help me to mark small, identifiable milestones of improvement.

I see this in many things, not just programming or writing.

I liked your story, though i am not really a hacker.

Regarding your story, it illustrates an issue I have been thinking about lately. Some background on myself so you know where i am coming from. I started in biotechnology running mass specs in a small molecule analytical lab. Later, when i moved to an area with very little small molcule r&d I took a job doing web development.

Here is my observation. In highly technical fields there are a lot of people like those on the 'Black' team who would rather make someone look bad by knocking over a box because they can than patting them on the back and telling them, hey nice code - we can't find anything wrong with it. I saw similar behavior in Amgens R&D department time and time again where the people tearing each other down were very smart and passionate about thier jobs but unwilling or unable to be civil to the competition.

"do not expect companies to call you back, or be overly timely on most contacts."

So because thechnology gives us the excuse to be rude? Just opinion here, but if a business takes the time to bring a candidate in for a day of interviewing they are obligated to fnish the process which incldes delivering the bad news i they are not selected. I feel that anything less is bad manners and unprofessional, even if that has bcome the norm.

s/language/religious/ and wars over religion have been going on for thousands of years. I don't think that explains it but the mentality seems very similar to me.

What if the list on my phone is out of date?

You can cancel cable/satalite and still get local/national news and most sporting events. I use a $35 antenna. All the sporting stuff is in hd now the other content is hit or miss. When i get some extra cash i am going to get a mac mini for the tv shows i like and the downloadable neflix media. I was also able to get a naked dsl line from qwest for A decent price.

Impromptu is scheme. It only runs on osx. Sadly i can do nothing close to what the creator can.

I am using mysql. Maybe I can figure something out and post it back here ...

Thanks for the hints.

If you like scheme and can use osx try impromptu. When you google it it is the third link i think. The video below is pretty cool but the author also has a video called 'day at the triffords' (that may not be exactly correct) which is my favorite. I also really enjoyed 'a study in keith'.

http://www.vimeo.com/2502546

We had to write an awk script for a class a while ago that used the output from du for a given folder. The output from the script was a dot file with the directory structure and memory used for each node below the given directory argument. Mine was pretty simple but one student figured out how to make each node look like a folder and color coded the nodes based on the amout of space used.

Would you mind sharing your Script for parsing the db schema?

If you don't mind me asking, where/how do you find projects to bid on?