mattiss

Be careful though, it will take over your life! I am constantly battling between working 100% on getting a startup off the ground and selling all of my possessions, buying a van, and driving around the world climbing.

It is not an easy choice.

Get hobbies that correspond to the lifestyle you want to lead. If you aren't having fun, you won't keep with it.

As a corollary, if you have an active hobby and any sort of drive to be good at it, you will train yourself as such. So if you take up say rock climbing and like it, then you will get lots of exercise as a direct result of climbing, and lots more to train yourself to get better.

Unless you go to Stanford, MIT, etc. most people you will meet will not be interested in startups.

My advise is first, stick it out. You are pretty far along, no sense in changing now. Second, go to your CS department and hang out, I'm sure there will be at least a couple top notch hackers regardless of where you are. If that doesn't work, try to meetup with some people outside of school via tech communities or events. Djangopeople, meetup, HN, etc. that kind of thing.

Very cool, hope to get there some day myself :)

Hey jacques, great article! I am thinking about making this jump soon, but am wondering how to be proactive in finding customers? It's one thing to drop a line to all of your contacts saying that you are a freelancer, but how does one actively go out and find jobs?

Did a quick search for Eduset. From the blogs I have read this dude Jeff just spams "Rip off of Edmodo", "Not impressed", etc. everytime somebody posts about this thing.

I have no relationship to either, but pretty scummy practice IMO.

You are talking about minifying, which is great for bandwidth reduction and I suppose obfuscation.

However this post was about JS design principles.

+1 for jQ

A big exit gives you freedom from everything. Want to start a new venture? Do it. Want to sail around the world? Go to town. Having to work every year, albeit for 2 million a year, still means having to work.

Damn this is tempting. I have a free plane ticket I need to use. Anybody up for a meetup?

Sure looks sweet. I would totally be interested if I had work connections down there. Good luck!

I would never trust an exploding knot while rock climbing.

Can you quantify why it is better?

Bowline -- outrageously strong, simple to tie, easy to undo, can tie it around things.

What can be better?

Go to your city's rec center. They offer courses for under 200 bucks that will show you the ropes (no pun intended (ok pun intended)).

Knowing how to tie a few useful knots is surprisingly empowering. Cinch things down, strap things to your backpack, hang a tarp, fix broken items, etc. etc.

I highly recommend learning to rock climb or sail as you will most definitely use the knots you learn on a regular basis.

Thanks! Anyway to jumpstart PR about it?

EDIT: Just checked out trailbehind.com, looks interesting! I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Not to derail my post, but is there a way to filter by additional criteria other than genre of activity?

For instance suppose I would like to see all 5.11 sport routes near Philadelphia PA. Is there a way to do that?

Also is there a way to specify sort criteria?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc spot on!

I remember reading an article about fish population simulation in Scientific American a while back. Modeling how fish swim together with external influences like currents, predators etc. etc. Each fish was modeled independently with knowledge only of the fish surrounding it.

The results were very interesting given that the school did some pretty complex things while each individual fish was pretty dumb.

Who exactly would I pitch to? Someone I would be working with, or the company I would be contracting for?

Not really a trick, but something not everyone knows

appending & to run as a background process

./some_app &

Congratulations man! Way to not let rejection knock you down one bit!

I don't think that is a fair comparison to make.

Current PHP openings are more than likely for legacy web development.

I would meter Mindshare as the number of new applications being developed in each of the respective frameworks.

I'm not a big fan of the current color scheme.