__ingrid__

I think you are misinterpreting that advice. I have always heard the full saying as "hire slow, fire fast" and if you are seeking to build a good culture, you probably want to keep turnover reasonable low. Seeing many people come and go will wear on the people you chose to keep, and it will be counter productive to building a good culture. Obviously good is a bit subjective when it comes to "culture" but I assume you are aiming at least for an environment where people are somewhat happy and strive to be productive.

The article is kinda ridiculous, but why are you bringing gender into this discussion? It is irrelevant.

I am in the same boat as you (dropped out after 2 years, then started working full time). I prefer to leave it off my resume because I like to address it myself in conversation (also I know who cares based on who asks), but honestly either way works. So long as your resume is not barren I do not think it is that big of a problem to leave it off.

As far as responding to their question, just be confident and direct. "I left university because of X, and I do not plan to complete my degree at the time/until I do Y/whatever". The reason you give will be a lot better than the possible reasons they might think up, so do not worry about it. There are many legit reasons for dropping out, including that it just was not for you, all they want to know is that you did not drop out because a personal flaw that may make you a bad employee. If you dodge the question, give a fishy response, or make too many excuses, it may seem like you have something to hide, and they will start speculating.

One last thing, do not put too much weight on this question. While I personally do not want to work for a company that has a strong degree bias either way (I left my last company, which I otherwise loved, on a sad note because of this), I do not think that this is that a definitive indicator that a company looks down on people without degrees. I have found that sometimes either someone who is not that technical and who's opinion is not that important (HR person or recruiter) is asking because they do not know better and are just compiling information for a higher up who did not specifically ask about your education, or sometimes an interviewer will ask it because they want to know how you will respond (whether you will be silly and apologize, or be confident in your skills, what's your view on education, etc). It is one of those questions where you can just say "No, I did not graduate" and it is not a big deal and you move on, or you can start to sweat, give a long winded excuse, and make your interviewer worry. If they do have a degree bias and do not hire your for that reason, well, then you dodged a bullet.

The Echo Nest (http://the.echonest.com/)

I think "throwing in sex" and "throwing in derogatory content" are a little different. I didn't mind his writing style but the pictures (sans the monkey shot) and captions took away from the article. He's free to do as he pleases, but I respect him a lot less for choosing to use such content. I don't really want fat chick jokes while reading a game development article.

EDIT: Whoops, spelling.

I'm a bit weary of video game development marketplace websites, as there's a high noise level, but I've had good experiences with the game dev classifieds reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevclassifieds

A lot of posts there are for people looking to do contacts for custom work, but don't be put off by this. People there also respond positively to posts with links to premade work for sale.

I know some emacs users who post their config files on github (myself included). You can do a quick search for "emacs config" and get a lot of results, some better documented than others.

See: https://github.com/search?q=emacs+config&type=Everything...

I'm not going to post my own because I'm still new (and it is in some serious need of documentation) but here is a link to my friend's configuration, from which I got most of my stuff. His file organization is a bit intimidating at first if you're not used to it (each addon that has more than a few lines of code gets it's own folder), but it's actually great for outsiders reading his config, and it makes it easier to leech just the bits they want of his config.

https://github.com/bmac/emacs/tree/4999800dd54975fb5222d30d5...

If you're coming from vim though, I'd suggest googling emacs versions of the plugins you already use though. Almost everything of that nature gets ported, whenever I see a plugin I like for editor (x) I can usually find an emacs version in minutes.

I would guess that's for other reasons. I often associate Haskell and Lisp with academics, and emacs with a slightly older crowd, and there is some over lap there. Of course, I don't think they should be strictly limited to these crowds, this is just a guess based off personal observation.

I agree. Expanding your horizons is great, and if you get to do it with a loved one, that's even better, but it's not a necessary part of every relationship. I've dated guys who knew nothing about programming, and I wouldn't be ashamed to take them to company parties to mingle with my fellow programmers, and I don't look down on spouses I meet who don't program either, they're often interesting in a different way.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

I don't think meetups are a great place to ask about entry level positions. I tried this while looking for a technical internship, and I was most successful when I could talk about/show a project that particular founder was interested in. When they weren't interested in talking about my work, one of two things would happen:

1.) If they were a well established company they'd just refer me to their jobs site and probably barely remember afterwards so it was almost starting from scratch.

2.) If they were a small company still getting started they would remember me because I said "intern" and they thought that might mean "free".

I feel like you're going to get a lot of these kinda reactions if you're just mentioning her, because there's not much to say about her if she doesn't have some solid experience you can mention. If she's really into start ups and is a good conversationist, I'd just bring her to mixers if you can. Don't mingle with her though, you two should split up and she should strike up conversation on her own, if she's with you all night she may get treated as arm candy.

Other than that she can comb the Who's Hiring thread for smaller companies that are just getting started and that she'd be interested in, research them, and email them saying she found them on Hacker News, and why she thought she as neat. Her lack of experience will be hard to get around, but showing genuine interest in start ups outside of employment is always helpful.

My personal experiences are as follows:

1. I was also in a couple of gifted programs in school that didn't do much. They were fun at the time, but I don't really think they helped me develop much personally.

2. I participated in some out of school gifted programs that helped me tremendously. I also just learned things on my own time for fun.

3. I went to 2 different middle schools and 3 different high schools (one of them being the school recieving the lowest amount of funding among all the schools in the state). Most of them were really tight on money and were cutting a lot of programs, both academic and otherwise.

While I do wish that school sponsered gifted programs could get more funding as I know gifted programs can be great, if money is tight, I'd rather money go to other programs. There are many ways a gifted child can learn on their own if they choose to, if some one has an undiagnosed learning disability they can't just change that on a whim.

Really I wish schools just got more funding in general. It varies greatly from school to school (I reccently saw my partners old high shcool and I was amazed at how nice the they had proper gym equipment and clean facilities, I don't know about their actual programs, but it looked like they'd have the money to spend on gifted programs), but at the schools I went to there simply wasn't enough money to go around.

I agree with other comments you need to change your wording on the home page. I'm not really sure who you're pitching this to, but if it's to a non-technical crowd you need to simplify it. It would also be great if you made a page with examples of how to use OpenPhoto, because there seem to be many possibilities, but reading the home page didn't make me think of them.

That being said, I majored in Game Development and I could definitely see the artists in the program using this for their portfolios. Most of them use Deviant Art portfolios (http://portfolio.deviantart.com/) which is not fully customizable and doesn't look very professional. Some of them bug a technical friend to help them make a real site but then it becomes hard for them to maintain it on their own. There are artists at my schol who make their own site, but it is a small group, and an even smaller subset of them have NICE looking sites.

EDIT: Oops, typo.