salehhamadeh

The friendship with Albert is a shallow one that the main character is not interested in. The "friends" you are referring to are people you admire but do not know well. I definitely have some of those friends, some who are a source of inspiration for me. With these people, it's easier to enhance the friendship over social media than in person. For example, people who are into painting or photography upload their work online. Viewing, liking, and discussing their art would teach me more about them than talking in person.

I like your idea of "real friends" VS temporal friends. One problem with only having "real friends" is that people get hung up on them, and if circumstances separate them they'd have a harder time acclimating with the change.

Last week I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes waiting for a Zipcar rep to answer my call. Creating my account was as simple as taking a photo of my license within the app and getting into a car. Companies that make signing up easy and cancellation difficult are the worst.

And $20,000 to get someone who knows how to install such a system to do the job.

This happened to me last year. I am an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science. Last year, I got a part-time internship at a company that makes school applications. Work was monotonous, every day was like the other day. The people I worked with never challenged me to improve my skills. All they wanted was to get the job done. I started despising the moment I open the IDE. When I moved to BrainJocks, a web development company, I loved computer science again. The team are all enthusiastic and young. The company divides my time into learning, working, and exploring new things. They gave me an account on PluralSight.com to learn whatever I like, and they encouraged me to explore new tools and propose them to the company. This new internship invigorated my love for software development. Of course, every person has his own circumstances. If you find that your workplace is the cause to your problem, try somewhere new, even if it pays a little lower. The benefits you can get in return may be worth much more than the money.

Thanks for sharing Ghost. I did not know about it till now. It looks pretty neat, especially since it runs on my favorite stack: Node.js and Handlebars :)

@wyclif Thanks for letting me know. I added this box last week. I used a jQuery plugin called Tweetable that grabs tweets without authentication from www.getmytweets.co.uk. I noticed that this is very slow. Over summer break, I plan to write my own Twitter API wrapper for unauthenticated requests that is fast enough to cover my blog's needs.

Hey pothibo. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Honestly, I chose not to go with Wordpress for 2 reasons. First is that it needs a server. Using Jekyll, I am able to leverage Github pages to serve my website for free. The second reason is that Wordpress is not easy customize (from a programmer's perspective). I tried to learn Wordpress themes but stopped after sensing how much time this would take me. Jekyll's themes were self-explanatory code, allowing me to plug my website's same CSS files and HTML template into the blogging platform. For Wordpress, I had to use PHP and learn theme functions and learn how to package the theme beforehand.

I know Wordpress has wide collection of plugins, but coders like me always prefer to write their own stuff.

It may be evident for you since you probably have seen many frameworks and implementations. Before hearing about Jekyll, I only used Blogger and WordPress, which relies on the database for almost everything.

That's a good point. In my opinion, HTTP's success is due to its platform-independent nature and its simple yet effective text-based communication protocol. Standardized solutions are the way to go.

Flash died because it was private and for Adobe. Java will not remain a strong web language as long as it is for Oracle.

I predict a great future for HTML5 WebSockets, as well as other open-source API's and protocols.