tylerFowler

+1 on learning by doing. And for me at least it's definitely a "use it or lose it" kind of thing. If I don't work with a given language for more than a month, when I get back to it I'll have to look up basic syntax for a few days until I pick it back up. Though I find this is less of an issue as you learn more and more languages.

Not more than seeing that an existing function you're extending or otherwise working on throwing its exceptions and saying "Ok I guess something above this will catch my exceptions" and learning to take that at face value. Or at least that's been my experience working on large scale Java projects with teams.

From my experience with Go I find that only these lines fade into the background: something, err := someFunc() if err != nil { return nil, err }

I find that whenever any actual error handling logic beyond forwarding tends to really jump out at me in code reviews and such.

I worked at Ant Financial for a time (startup acquihire) and spent some time working in offices in both Beijing and Hangzhou. As an American 996 was surprising but also doesn't quite live up to it's name, or at least not at Ant afaik.

In practice the typical "996" day would usually go something like this: - ~9:30 - 10am Arrive, commutes could vary as you might imagine - 10 - 11:30am Morning meetings, usually a team stand-up or two - 12 - 1:30pm Lunch, typically 1.5 hours - 1:30 - 7pm Most work is done during this period, with some meetings later in the day - 7 - ~8:30pm Team dinner, sometimes in the office and sometimes at a nearby restaurant* - 8:30 - 9/10pm People start to leave

* - I was a visitor in the China offices so that could've affected how long we spent at dinner or how often we actually left the office for it

On top of the large breaks it was fairly common that the work day was filled with breaks and naps and such, so I didn't really observe people actually working for much longer than most western offices but it did tend to increase the bonds of teams by keeping them together for the entire day. As for working Saturdays... I asked various colleagues about it and was told that it was rare, only when it was absolutely necessary to ship something on a set schedule.

Another thing I found interesting was that our office in the US had Tue/Thur work from home days and when folks from the China offices would visit they were just as surprised as I was when I first heard about 996. Some of them asked me how I would get any work done from home or how management could enforce it. In general I saw that management in China placed a lot of value in office time even though the levels of productivity seemed to match it even less than in western offices.

I feel like Terraform would be a fantastic tool for this but never found the time to look into what it would take. Less so for complex data changes maybe (or maybe not) but for things like basic schema changes certainly.

Well looking at the form the other operations (map, reduce, filter, etc..) are they usually describe what is being done to the source as a way to describe the output. As opposed to just describing the outcome. That being said there are some weird ones like "some" or "every". Regardless though some other well known FP languages use flatten so it lowers the barrier to entry on the API for people familiar with them.

Personally I somewhat lean towards the side of breaking the library in question, which could be ok if enough warning is given. They mentioned being worried that not everyone would fix their unmaintained sites but I don't think unmaintained sites make a lot of long term promises anyway. Space Jams aside of course.

So while I don't necessarily agree with the decision I completely understand it, their motivation is very noble. And again, it's not that big of a deal as a one off decision.

I'd consider 'flatten' a common, somewhat agreed upon term for that specific operation. Which is why I find this annoying, not a huge deal, but certainly annoying. The perfectionist in me though is most annoyed that calling flatten 'flat' feels like calling reduce 'reduction', it's just not consistent with the other methods.

My experience with .NET was quite frankly awful (and very dated so it might've gotten better). C# on the other hand I always found to be a joy to use, and always equated it to "better Java". Though most of my college courses used C# so I might just be partial to it.

This also happened to me once on an older LCD monitor.. damn thing was stuck in there forever after I managed to squish it

Yes! Depends on the company of course but if you have a decent amount of equity it could be profitable for you. And sales don't always mean you're out a job either.

Of course it's a gamble since the company might not be worth anything..

Totally agree, I think pen and paper makes me think more about what I'm writing. I still use digital note taking (recently ditched Evernote for Notion – which is wonderful), but only as a sort of "overflow". In my original post I mentioned I don't move everything over each week if it's not relevant at the moment, that usually means I add it to a digital document with some longer term tasks or ideas.

Since college I've been using Moleskin notebooks (though lately Baron Fig notebooks) to manage my tasks/time one week at a time, moving over tasks every week that I didn't get done the previous week and evaluating whether I still need to have it at the top of my mind for each unfinished task. I find that it works extremely well for keeping relevant tasks in my head and only taking on larger projects one week at a time.

The system I use is loosely based off of the Bullet Journal method (link below), highly recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it.

http://bulletjournal.com/

No option for Go?

Our hours for developers are 10am to 4pm, which is because many of our customers are in China so people often have to work and attend calls later at night. So of course if you leave at 4 then it's expected that you're making up the extra time at home. Though a lot of people (particularly those with kids) make it in significantly earlier than 10.

I use Terraform, which allows me to visualize my infrastructure as it stands. Though I must admit it's not too pretty.

I'm using Sequelize with a pretty good amount of success. It offers a really nice way to build models and has a nice syntax. And best of all is based on Bluebird promises :)

* disclaimer: the app I'm currently using Sequelize on doesn't get a ton of traffic so I can't speak on that

I think I accidentally overstated the coursera thing, I should've wrote that it will help make up for it, not definitely. My line of thinking was to show that I may have dropped out of college but by no means have stopped my education, and as an added bonus I actually learn the kind of stuff I specialize in as it's not really taught in most colleges.

For the first year I was absolutely dead set on not going back to school and was very ok with that. Though like you say, people being hired over me was indeed a red flag for me (this happened recently) and has definitely made me question what I thought before. Frankly I haven't really thought about the management positions that will come later, for my first year in the industry I'm doing well but honestly I don't know the management game at all. Much like the OP, I looked at this situation as a way to 'get ahead' but looking at who I work with and talking to them I question how much it would really give me an edge. On the other hand I think I would have an edge getting my degree, and already having a couple years of practical experience. So for now I don't regret taking the job and dropping out regardless of whether I finish the degree or not.

I do know that a degree typically isn't a sign of knowledge per se, though I've been hearing more and more that tech companies are putting less of an emphasis on using a degree as a card to be played. So on that front what I'm really trying to figure out is if that trend will eliminate that as an obstacle later on, and I've heard it go both ways. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on this especially going forward into the next few years.

Reading a lot of these answers is pointing me in the opposite direction, but like I said above, worst case scenario I've take a couple years off of school.

Honestly I'd say feel it out. I don't know about you but for me it's fairly easy for me to go back to school, which is a very real possibility for me. I mean worst case scenario I take a year or two off from school to make some money and work the very job I'd be hoping to get after graduation, which makes me an even stronger candidate if I get the degree. But my biggest fear is ending up missing out on opportunities when I'm 40 and wishing I had just taken the 2 years to finish. For me another fallback plan was to get experience and then if I go back I could easily find clients freelancing instead of working the usual waiting jobs during school, which would make me substantially more spending money while in school, but it sounds like you're already there. So I say try it, for me it was very refreshing after being tired of school, and then go from there.

I'm in a similar sort of situation. After my 3rd year of college pursuing a CS degree, I realized I was learning more on my own than I was at school. I too had started programming early on, teaching myself C++ at 14.

I'm glad I went to college but after a while I felt like it had served it's purpose for me, I had already completed the major courses (data structures, software architecture, etc...) and pretty much just had courses like Compiler Construction and OS Design left. So I had an internship at a startup the summer after my 3rd year (summer of 2014) and I was immediately placed as the only developer working on a web application for analyzing our production logs. I did well and near the end of my internship I was offered a job... and I took it. So I dropped out and for a year now I've been working at the same startup and am now the lead (and only) developer on all of our web services. I don't regret not finishing school, though it's been a little bittersweet watching all of my friends graduating in past few months.. My view is that you should get all you can out of college while it's in your best interest, I just didn't feel it was helping me as much as a job in the industry would, and I'm certainly doing well enough. Not to mention the fact that most universities don't even offer a real program for full stack web development. I've even been getting a lot of interest from recruiters (on avg. about 4 positions a month for a year) despite not having a degree.

That being said, something I've heard a lot from the developers I work with is that later on it could be an excuse for employers not to pay me as much. Even with this first gig I'm seeing that I'm getting paid less than new employees with less knowledge & experience than me and for a lesser position, simply because they have a degree. The approach that I'm taking is to ride out this job for a while longer and then getting another job, and if me not having a degree poses a problem in any way I'll just go and finish my degree (which will take about 2.5 more years due to a transfer after my sophomore year). I'm 22 right now so it would certainly be better for me to do it now rather than later but I'm simply not convinced yet that it will be a problem later on. It's also worth noting that I'm taking a lot of courses on Coursera and am going through the web specializations to add the certifications to my resume, which will definitely help to make up for not having a degree and are much more manageable while I'm working full time.

All that being said, I'm highly interested to hear what current employers have to say about someone having ample experience/knowledge but having no degree, especially when it comes to equality of pay vs. coworkers with higher education degrees.

Mailbox was great... until this last update

+1 on this. Would be extremely helpful due to slow download/upload speeds over the wall. I've heard tell of this but can't seem to find much about it.