zpk

Financial industry as a whole is under a lot of stress right now. The jobs opps out there are shrinking...Banks talk about going lean, AKA layoffs. If you can't get into an investment bank, go for a tertiary opportunity. Try retail or some insurance company for a year or two.

You need Java or C++. Web/SOA/ and for some reason they all want multithreading experience, even though 80% of the work is server side. Familiarize yourself with the Java Concurrency package.

I love IntelliJ, I sound like I work for them. I don't.... If you do Python web development, specifically Django you can debug your application with that. Never tried straight Python, but probably that too.

Unfortunately I can't gauge that at all. They don't pre-announce, I got my license of IntelliJ last December...I discovered the news here. I think they have a twitter acct which you can subscribe to, and they mention sales on that.

"I also bought a bunch of other IDE's on JetBrains' end of of the world sale including Intellij Idea, WebStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm"...RubyMine and PyCharm are IntelliJ plugins, check them out before dropping $$ on the license upgrade.

IntelliJ, for almost everything...best $50 I ever spent. Seriously, Java, PHP and even my first Rails project. Missing my favorite MVC framework(CI) for PHP though.

Wait for the sale.

Glad you mentioned this, the point often gets missed...Colonel Sanders didn't start KFC till his 40's. Dangerfield didn't get into comedy(again) until he was in his mid 40's. I wish we could find some examples in the tech arena, to break this under 30 stereotype... Actually one person comes to mind, Larry Ellison, he found Oracle in 1977 ~age 33.

If there was a real talent shortage and a real Visa need, then we would allow H1-B's to self sponsor. Let the company elicit one visa and employee, and have the Fed gov garnish 5-10k over the first year from the employees' wages. After that he/shes a free man/woman to look where they choose. Stay employed, stay out of trouble, and pay another 5-10k and get an additional 3 years. The visa is tied to the person, which is the way it should be. That's a semi compromise, but I still would keep the # capped at < 100k new per year. As it stands with 8% UE we had an increase of 110k in 2010 to 129k in 2011 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_Applications_App....

Oh, oh! Can I get some more details? What's bad about Cloud Sites? Does this mean you are using Cloud Server? Did you deploy the web and database on a single instance?

If you want a good start to Django follow this guy's setup. The virtual env made managing my libraries a lot easier.

http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2012/02/09/starting-a-django-p...

Rails the framework I think is better than Django. I just found conceptually it had more of what I wanted already in there. However coming from a Java/Perl background, Python was easier for me to grasp and read over Ruby. And timing wise, I wouldn't deploy or upgrade a Rails app until I felt comfortable with the security issues being addressed. Hell, I wouldn't want to surf the internet with an app running on my computer today.

The replies are true, but to your question, yes. Right now would be a good time provided you were on square footing with both.

I want this, but I want job postings relative to me. What I mean by that is my preference for location, salary/rate, my skills, telecommute.

Now I know you are doing this manually initially, but will you be organizing the jobs, can you do something to give us that info up front?

Hmexx, I'm so late to the game responding here...but I like this idea a lot....From the investor side. I am in a similar boat as you, maybe we can pool resources up the ante and invest in several mvps. Let me know.

"What's actually said is more like, "Take a few months and a backpack and go travel somewhere" or "start a company with no idea if it'll pan out". Party. Start a band. Chase some girls [or guys]. Read a lot."

I am in my 30's and I hope to continue/start doing some of this.

Here's a fifth

So we are going to ignore the 800lb gorilla? We will ignore the fact these firms which are the largest applicants for visas are being investigated by the FBI. And conversely think that Microsoft is doing this not for cheap labor, and there is no PR spin whatsoever around the 'Engineering Shortage' topic. I couldn't buy that.

I could not agree with you more. It's literally part of the business model for consulting firms here.

If we are using anecdotal evidence, I knew several paid less than their colleagues at my last job. And they were hired, because of that very reason, cheaper restricted labor. Its not hard for me to imagine in a country where labor force has been at odds with employers the last 30 years that employers would want to import in cheaper labor. India has been exporting cheap labor for the past 200 years, in fact its part of the Tata and Infosys business model here. Using the guise of an engineering shortage goes over a lot better than saying lets suppress wages by importing talent.

I second this setup. Coming from a Java background IntelliJ stood out over Eclipse for my eyes. I recently purchased PyCharm for my own side project. IDE struggles here a little, because of typing and var declaration( or lack there of). However, refactoring and the line by line debugger helped speed up my Django development. I wish it integrated other MVC web stacks as well.

You're 19, you have so much ahead of your life ahead of you rather than behind. Go look in the mirror and smile...You can start from scratch today, and in a decade still be ahead of 99.999% of your age group, and even people twice that age as well.

So let them, let them have to do that work and share email addresses, which would potentially be a PR nightmare if discovered, and users did not consent. I'd rather do that than willingly give multiple domains my ID letting one service unify them, and share my ID across multiple sits if the service chooses to. And who's to say people don't already use multiple email addresses?

Tons. This work is like art, imagine, create, not finish, and toss to the side.

Here's a few that come to mind:

'07 - A Search Engine that used MS/GOOGLE/YAHOO as my seed and resorted the order based on some composite ranking from comparing the three results.

'08 - An Email Myself Blogging service that took some words, links, and posted it on the date in the email.

'09 - A Local Coupon site to work against Valpak. You could throttle the amount discounted so you didn't have the Group On effect. I came back to this idea 20x, but in order for it to work you have to hit the pavement and talk to store/rest/bar owners.

'10 - Social networking site for fitness with a workout tracking tool.

'11 - Quit a company that got bought by Google (just had to get it off my chest)

'12 - Notes sharing tool that's transformed into something else. I stopped for a month on it, bugged me so much that finally late March I got back on that damn horse. In 4 weekends I have POC (like a lawn motor on wheels) that finally worked...but I'm excited about it now.

In the end that # of projects doesn't count for a damn thing. Everyone of those ideas listed above could work, have worked for someone else. Someone that saw one thing to the end. You aren't alone though, so don't beat yourself up one bit.

1, that's the number I am going to focus on this year. Finishing one idea out.

Coldfusion? You built this with ColdFusion? Damn PUD, you're advice back in the day was to use CF for version 0.1

And still using it, impressive!

Maybe you can advertise the hell out of this, and make a threadless or kickstarter for musicians and take a haircut every month for some sort of product the consumer would pay for, downloadable mp4 at a certain quality?

Or maybe add video ads like youtube, or maybe a radio player for users to pay for to queue up entire albums/genres/suggestions streaming.

I totally agree. And really what is this popularity vote? Is there really a merit to the "popular" brand? The war on Iraq was popular in 2003. If anything Google has done many things to upset the tech-educated population, than inspire them. Personally I think Google represents what Microsoft was in 1999. And I believe, at that time Microsoft, Yahoo were the premiere brands. We all know how they have turned(turning) out.

I wish some of details were spelled out when posting these sorts of e-books. Visual Design, vs. the Design + the JS, CSS and HTML is a significant difference. My guess was that it solely focused on the mockup, based on seeing the psd option. And I would've been upset buying this with hopes of getting the actual code to develop a front-end like this.

"I still have most of my vacation quota unused"

I'm not a doc, and so if someone here thinks this is horrible advice please let it be known.

I think several members here have suggested taking a vacation. Take one, a long one, go see fam, spend it traveling with your GF, or both or neither...whatever you want. Take one as long as you can 4wks, even if a week is unpaid, if you have the option.

Start with that, it doesn't rewrite your life, and let your mind calm down and then start evaluating what you think might work. Talk to people who care, talk to your parents, girlfriend, a buddy, me if you need an ear. Get it out first, then look for a ideas to make your life happier.

Maybe you need better hours and need to tell your employer, maybe a new 9-5 job, and hack away on some side project, or just maybe that bus driver job and to hell with this all, but being hunger-over, crying, stressed, you are in reactionary mode. I've been there for one reason or another, don't make an extreme change in this state.