typicaljoe

I find F# very tempting as a gateway into .NET. Anyone used it with MVC?

Ideally build some of your main functionality as an extensions. You'll quickly discover pain points if you have to live with the same API and contexts as a 3rd party. I just recently rewrote TaffyDB to a version allowing extensions and a key goal was to build most if not all of the public default methods as extensions.

Thanks for the bump. Creator here, feel free to ask me anything.

My wife and I give. I think it is one of the most positive things you can do. We give to several faith-connected charities, children's hospitals, etc. My new "favorite" charity is charitywater.org. They have a lot of good things going for it not the least of which is that they are about as close as it comes to a "startup" charity in terms of innovation, marketing, etc.

Thanks for this!

JSConf was a blast.I walked away with the feeling that JavaScript was going somewhere beyond the web. With Canvas, Server Side, DBs, etc it feels like JavaScript is slowly and irresistibly going to take over everything.

What browser are you using that the editor stopped working? You can do any subject you want, in fact I may even add it to the list. I added the box on the left to give the site some initial focus.

Yeah, the reason "why" is something I've struggled to communicate. The core idea is that if you personally are a power web user and are interested in a topic (let's say apple products) than you probably filter through a lot of feeds, videos, news stories, social links, etc. Much of that content isn't worth paying attention to, but some of it is gold. If you could find the apple "gold" and put it on one page it would be a very valuable and useful page. Consider the fact that any time an Apple story breaks all the major tech blogs fill up with posts and commentary. Little of that commentary is original or useful, but some of it is. If you regularly filter the Apple news feeds to find the good stuff then creating a page to highlight this information would be very useful to folks who don't want to do the same filtering.

Being degree free myself (and knowing others in the same boat) let me put it this way: with four years of school you may be able to start at $50K a year. With a good head and practice you may be able to get a job at 20 for $50K. With 6 years of school you may be able to start at $60-80. Again, with practice, a good head, and a good company you can be in that range by the time the schooled person is ready for the work force and you don't have the debt.

By and large programmers solve problems. If you can solve problems well enough they'll pay you. They may pay you more when they see that magical degree on your resume, but that doesn't mean you can solve their problem any better than the person without a degree. Likewise if by the time you are 30-35 you can be at or near 6 figures the actual pay difference you could earn matters less and less.

There is a lot of value in a formal education in computer science or software engineering. So much so that I am tempted to go and attempt to get a degree in one or the other. But it isn't so I can work in the field. There are so many lazy people that if you just show up and dig ditches you'll find work and become important to the company. If you think a degree (or even the ability to do things text-book right) means anything to a firm that just needs an apt to store customer contacts than you are fooling yourself. I doubt I could ever work at Google, but I really don't care that much about missing out on that rat race.

JavaScript really isn't that bad. It is different to be sure and lost when it comes to OO. But like "The Good Parts" book explains, JavaScript really isn't about OO. Or strong typing. It doesn't need to be. It would be nice if the certain features worked correctly and it worked the same in all browsers, but I'd rather have less features and not more. With closure and first class functions you can get most of what you need once you learn a basic model for building apps.

I wonder what other creative uses there are for this. For example, if someone visits digg you know they are likely to be a techie. If they visit seattle.craigslist.com you know they are likely to be in Seattle. If they visit drudgereport they may be a news buff. You could create a collection and if there user uses your site a lot you could try hundreds of things and pass them back to the server....interesting...

Best comment ever

Setting up a cash bonus plan for my team to clean up our code base. $5 for quarantined methods or blocks that just need to be deleted, $10 for deprecated blocks that need to be extracted from active code, and $25 for useful rewrites of badly designed methods. 3 days cut the fat code cash cookoff!