scottndecker

Trello

TFS/Visual Studio Online/Visual Studio Team Services

I learned a little C in college, then taught myself Java in the evenings while working as a ME, then got the job and learned the C# .NET stack, and now my latest client is back to Java. I'm missing .NET terribly but luckily my startup uses it so I still get to stay up on it.

I did. I was one of the youngest people in the company (250+ person company) and worked in the R&D department. There were several rounds of layoffs in the year I worked there and I survived them all and was given a raise.

I simply found ME to be too slow on multiple dimensions.

Just curious, how old were you when you hit the 6 figure salary and which city was that in?

Went to Dartmouth College, double majored in Mechanical Engineering and Economics, wrote my Masters thesis on mechanisms for creating uniformally distributed bi-disperse emulsions, was a mechanical engineer for a year, then applied for a job at a software company after realizing that's really my passion (friend of a friend worked there). Worked for them for almost 3 years. Now I've moved to Denver, started my own consultancy and my previous employer has hired me back as a remote contractor. I'm also working in the evenings on my own startup and hoping to launch a beta group in the next 6 months to a year.

Lessons I learned as Tech Lead:

http://scottndecker.com/blog/2015/04/04/Tech-Lead-Lessons-Le...

Please submit suggestions through the online form or via comments! Would love feedback!

The first four points are summarized in "Email is better than verbal communication." While email definitely has advantages, there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication. It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc.

The last three points are much better (though I can't attest if they're true or not).

Nope. Dartmouth.

I have an MS in Mechanical Engineering from an Ivy League university. While I got my degree I too learned Matlab as well as C. I wrote my masters thesis on a controlled mechanism for the breakup of microdroplets in a bidisperse emulsion.

Eight months after graduating and working in industry, I came to the same conclusion as you: that I preferred writing code to working in the mechanical world. I started learning Java and wrote an Android app. I'd stay up late at night and on weekends pouring over examples and hacking stuff together. Six months into doing that I got an interview at my current employer. I got the job. That was two years ago and it's been one of the best decisions of my life.

The key to doing it:

1) Prove to yourself and others that you want to be a programmer, that you actually enjoy writing code for hours a day

2) Have something to show that proves that

3) Find a company (like I did) that is more interested in finding people who know HOW to think rather than WHAT to think. As engineers you and I are very good at solving problems. Find people who care about that rather than the programming languages you know

4) Once a company takes a chance on you, seize it and run like crazy. Learn as much as you can. In a year or two you can be highly skilled and highly employable in this field.

Best of luck!

I submitted a request for quote for hdd.com They replied back and said they'd accept nothing less than $100k. Seems ridiculous based on the numbers I'm seeing here.

Interesting. Not sure I agree. I like the directive but you're crossing industry growth (an economic term) with personal growth (a non-quantifiable, non-economic term). Personal growth may lead to economic growth, but lots of other things lead to economic growth as well. I like the idea behind the article, but only in so far as it spurs me to learn more. I don't think it stand up to rigorous analysis as a direct relationship between industry and personal growth.

I wasn't grandfathered in. I did a similar process to what the OP did. My point was just that you need not use mailgun. All you need are the settings from your smtp to plug into gmail and that's nothing new.

This isn't new. I purchased my domain through NameCheap and have been using custom domain email through gmail for a couple years now.

* Internet of Things will start coming into its own with some really cool stuff coming out at the end of the year

* Big data will get even bigger

* Companies will continue to become more comfortable with their data not being on-premise and cloud will grow larger as a result

Site is down. Anyone have a cached version?

Great post. Wish more people would be honest that we aren't invincible. Use things, love people; not the other way around. Our society needs more influence on family. Good work.

I continue to use Dropbox

I really like this idea. I'd love to see this at a larger scale as well (i.e. hundreds of teams) as part of a conference or something.

Great article. Love that the author put some time into the research and links.

Bit on Practice also dovetails nicely with a post I wrote (much less scientific in nature):

http://scottndecker.com/blog/2014/04/25/Never-Solve-the-Same...

Cool tool. Good work! Feedback: I agree w/ other comment...the palette options I get don't seem to go well together. Maybe you're trying to include too many colors in a palette? Also, I'd center the checkboxes on the button when picking a palette.