hipsterrific

I use Amazon Glacier storage for my backups. It's pretty cheap, I backed up 161GB for around $1.70/month. Since I took an Amazon AWS survey, I received a $25 promotion for AWS so my Glacier storage is paid for the next 2 years. :)

OS X is free now on the condition of using only Mac hardware. Windows is the only OS that isn't free and their market share has been gobbled up by Apple in the last decade or so.

I think the only place where Windows is still pricey is the enterprise, but Apple has made it a point to give away their OS completely free to everyone. Apple got out of the server game mostly because Linux has and will take over in the long run (especially with platforms like docker which should make it easier to deploy apps).

The austerity measures was the only rational thing that Greece did and even then they complained.

There's really no out for Greece on this one: their economy seems to be dependent on tourism, they have little to no manufacturing, probably little exports, and imports many of their goods. Greece's economy was never stable to begin with and I do think that they ought to exit the Euro not for Greece's sake but for the Euro's sake.

The issue of tax burden is that the only loser are the people. Government issues taxes and can enforce it violently, so Government is the only winner in the tax game. For the wealthy, the move to a FairTax is neutral they don't benefit from it just as they don't have the same negative effects that a progressive system has with its loopholes. Also, we need to stop thinking that our economy will get better if we somehow increase the tax burden on the rich. What we need to start thinking is how to improve the plight of the poor and the needy.

The reason why I supported the FairTax because of the prebate and it increases the purchasing power of the poor. When the poor can keep 100% of their pay, they control what they can spend on. For the middle class, the same deal: we can have families improve their lives, save up for college, be masters of their spending, and pave the way for more charity. The rich will continue being rich, regardless but if we can ease the tax burden on the middle class and the poor by removing income taxes it'd be a big break.

The FairTax replaces all taxes and the prebate makes it progressive. The rich actually have no net benefit because in the income tax world, they're still rich and in the fairtax world, they're still rich. What progressive income taxation says is that you want to pull down the rich to bring up the poor. We need to pull up the poor and leave the rich alone. The rich have their wealth and will continue to maintain it. A tax plan should be transparent and it should allow the poor to save money and invest their way out of being poor.

Same here, the FairTax is a pretty good idea. I believe that Bill Gates even advocated that the US shift away from income based taxation to consumption base. If there's anything our economy that we can bank on, it will be consumption.

I found that communication in projects and time-off is important. A company I worked for had unlimited PTO and it worked because we all planned accordingly. I took a three week trip to Europe in 2013, no one else took anything more than a day off when I was gone. My other colleague took a three week trip early in 2013, I didn't take any time off at all.

When we can, we also managed remote work. So I would go back to Chicago for one week stretches to hang with my family but I would work during the day. Even though it was a trade off (work remote or wait until another time to go back) it wasn't nearly as bad. We also communicated with business when we would be gone which really help manage our backlog.

As a team we communicated our time offs to each other. LIke we would go into each other's office (since my team was small, there's three of us) and have discussions as to when we would be gone so we each knew and expected it. It also helped us manage our sprints.

Unlimited PTO requires a bit more dancing and managing than having it tracked, but honestly, the pain is worth it. I never had to worry about being sick because if I'm sick, I'm encouraged to take time off to get well. It made it less stressful and, coincidentally, could de-stress faster in my vacay than I did when I had limited PTO.

I think many companies dive head first into unlimited vacation policy without really thinking things through. I had a job where we had it and it somehow worked (despite the CTO's inability to follow any kind of project management structure).

Our PTO's were scheduled ahead which was policy. So if you took a two week trip, you filed it three months in advanced. You let your team, your PM, and business know you'll be out of town so they can manage expectations (e.g., less work). Our sprints were based on how much work we can do based on the existing resource. My team had a team of 3 so we never scheduled PTO's were two or more people were off for any prolonged period of time. Sometimes schedules collide, but we do our best to be transparent about big trips so that we can all plan accordingly.

You know, it worked well. I'm glad it worked well for you at Trulia (which, btw, helped me butt loads when I was shopping for a home, so thanks!). I'd work for you guys except I'm not a mobile dev, I like where I'm at, and I'm not looking to move. :)

Try and not all web apps should have a mobile web app. But there's are instances where a productivity app will benefit from having a mobile app than just a responsive website. I've worked on a couple of web apps that made mobile-first their paradigm and it sucked. Testing sucked. Dev'ing it sucked. We had to sacrifice a lot on usability and experience which sucked a lot. A mobile app would have made more sense than a responsive site. Then again, I used trulia and having them ask me to download their app was just stupid as the app provided zero value to me (their responsive site was perfectly fine).

People often forget that testing cross platform functionality is difficult and time consuming. It can easily tie down designing and add more constraints than necessary. This is why I advocate focusing on essentials like usability, experience, and functionality rather than some gung-ho attitude of "we MUST be mobile first regardless."

I personally make decisions based on what the project requires rather than some template. Most websites for me are informational, so mobile-first works well. Not a whole lot of functionality to test so we can focus on building the website and make it look on any size device.

However, apps are a different ball game. I'd rather focus on usability, experience, and functionality. I'm not going to try and hobble the app by trying to beat a round peg into a triangle, square, whatever shaped hole. I find that most web applications which have large swathes of functionality benefit from native code, so I usually skip mobile-first design and just do a native app (Xamarin or Titanium works). Why? Because I don't want to sacrifice usability, experience, and functionality. Most apps, I've found out, have different experience, usability, and functionality on difference devices.

Finally. I'm glad Google's giving Java the boot. I had a feeling they were heading that direction after the lawsuit and the subsequent change to AOT compilation in Android 5.0.

I wish this would happen in Minneapolis. When ISP's get in bed with politicians creating laws that subsequently shut out all competitions, the ones that suffer the most are the consumers. Comcast has been the bane of my existence: slow speeds, high price, terrible customer service. The CEO has the audacity to say that people don't like COmcast customer service? Right, because I enjoy paying $90/month for 50mbps. Allowing municipals/counties/districts built their own will benefit the consumer overall, it might even improve neighborhoods to foster businesses to open up (or local offices, what have you).

Telerik wasn't half bad when I was the only .net developer for a hospital system with 3,000 employees. It made short work for me since building AJAX-y controls meant less time building business rules.

The controls are really bad, they produce a lot of awful JS. Also, with newer frameworks such as angular, knockout, ember, et al...building reusable JS components got simpler. I haven't yet used KendoUI but haven't had a need too, building my own was far more fun (and with OData, not that much time either).

I did use their reporting product a lot but even that was too heavy and cumbersome.

You make it sound so easy when it's clearly not. I've worked jobs where I was the only .net developer in a large enterprise and worked in a team where my teammate wasn't interested in growing.

It takes more than just gumsion to do what you're suggesting, what you're actually wanting to do is add more stress. Case in point, my coworker who wasn't interested in growing: I spent the better part of two months architecting out the service layers...only to have him f* it all up in a week. Refactor you say? Try refactoring code for someone elses work on top of your own.

He can try to outdo his coworkers to which he may easily become unpopular at work. Nothing adds more stress than pissing off coworkers and added more horridness to an already horrid team dynamics.

It's not easy to work in a crappy job. Your suggestions, in my opinion, sound more like wishful thinking.

Nice app! Good to know there are other Christians here in HN. :P I've always thought about building something similar. Maybe I'll contribute, but my Rails skills is quite lacking (read: non-existant, I'm a C# guy)

If I didn't have bills I needed to pay, I would take a longer hiatus. Earlier this year, I was let go from my position as a senior software engineer. My review months before was like "you're a great dev, here's a 4% raise" and then a few months later "Your performance is horrible, you're fired."

Immediately, I began looking for work but I knew I needed to heal from the experience. I have a job now but there are times it crosses my mind that maybe I should have taken more of a hiatus. But I had enough money in my savings for only five months. I like my new job but there are times I get so tired, next year I might just take a month off and get some rest.

My previous job had unlimited PTO and that team sucked mega-donkey balls. It worked despite the culture, here's how:

- large vacation time was scheduled around projects. The SPM gave large priority to devs over the business. Thus priorities were reduced to meet resources for that sprint (SCRUM).

- We had a flexible work schedule so if you needed to be home because the guy fixing your water heater is coming at 3, we made that possible. The philosophy was that as long as you were meeting your targets, everything was peachy.

- We had one guy who would occassionally go on two/three day breaks and not tell anyone - including the SPM. As a team, we just left him alone and if he can't finish his task, oh well, we didn't bail him out.

- Ironically, most of us took fewer vacation days with unlimited PTO. You have the outliers who will gladly abuse it, but prior to my departure, I took a total of four weeks (20 days) of total vacation time. Most companies give that anyways.

Simply put, as long as we gave a long enough notice and put things into the engineering calendar, no one gave a crap. A lot of our unlimited PTO success boils down to prioritizing resources and expectations with the business. This company is around 300 people, so not a small company by all means. We just ensured that we all gave appropriate notice. For me, my formula was 1 month advanced notice for every week I wanted to take, so three weeks off meant three months ahead.

When I was 15 I started having major mood shifts and quickly realized that I have a personality disorder (I'm manic and suffer from bouts of mania, thankfully hypomania). I've contemplated suicide before, while I never got into divying up percentages here are somethings I realized:

- It's ultimately illogical and selfish. I got into computers because I loved solving problems and I had a problem. The problem was that I couldn't solve my problem...at least not on my own, and not yet on my own.

- I've had no less than three panic episodes and emotional breakdowns where I would weep uncontrollably for hours. This is typically the culmination of an intense sadness, loneliness, and apathy.

I'm 34 years old and am still battling manic-depressiveness. Still waking up feeling like I got punched in the face, there are days I write shoddy code, and there are days where I do get feelings of suicide. But the reason why I never acted upon it is because there's always the light at the end of the tunnel...the issue isn't if there is a light, the question is when will the light come about. And yes, it does show...for me, it took a while but it came and it came beautifully.

For starters, I targeted behavior that I knew was self-destructive. I began practicing religion again (or whatever you're into), I began practicing martial arts - going to the gym was, like you said, a distraction. Martial arts is a community workout, everyone participates and you can't help but build friends. Since I'm a practicing Christian, I found a church and began meeting people there. In short, I looked at self-destructive tendencies and reversed it. Because of my introversion, I simply created borders and notified people that, sometimes, I like to be alone. However, I made sure to be around non-technology people (which gets me out of thinking about work) and I like to find people who are eccentric and outgoing (extroverts, especially).

Even small changes that I've implemented in my life have made huge impacts. I forced myself to be less shy, I would gladly pay for a friend's dinner if it meant not eating alone, and I got better at planning outings because I know that it's easy to slip into apathy and depression. So I surround myself with people, build trust, and create lasting friendships.

You honestly can't quit your job just now. First you need to build a support system before you do that. Believe me, there's hope, there's always hope.