dleskov

TDD only works in conjunction with thorough peer reviews. Case in point: at my place of work, code and tests written by an intern can go through literally dozens of iterations before the check-in gets authorized, and even the senior engineers are not exempt from peer reviews (recent interns are especially eager to volunteer).

if doing GPL stuff use the open source license from ExcelsiorJET.

Thanks for mentioning our product, but I have to make a few corrections:

First, the Excelsior JET Runtime license is sadly not GPL-compatible. Also, you cannot use it to target embedded systems, unless you buy Excelsior JET Embedded and pay royalties, though we are currently weighing the option to switch to OpenJDK to eliminate the latter.

Second, the Standard Edition is free even for commercial use (the above limitations apply).

Finally, other editions are available at no cost for use in public non-commercial projects. It does not matter whether the (software part of the) project is open source or not.

See https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free for details.

Problem is, the God Folder dates back to Vista and it is the Windows 10 Creators Update that began setting that field to NULL. Apparently the author of that change did not foresee any backward compatibility issues.

Excelsior guy here.

Overall, I would say that AOT suddenly becoming kosher helps our business way more than competition hurts it.

Then, "JDK9 has AOT out of the box" is a bit of exaggeration. Oracle AOT is only available for Linux/x64 ATM, yields huge binaries and may be a bit cumbersome to use: http://mjg123.github.io/2017/10/04/AppCDS-and-Clojure.html

The main difference however is that a binary produced by Oracle AOT is to a big extent just a pre-populated HotSpot cache, whereas Excelsior JET has been AOT-centric since day one. In practice that means that with Oracle AOT you have to ship both the native binary and the original class files to your customers, and with Excelsior JET you only ship the native binary, which makes reverse engineering your application more difficult.

I recall us being quite surprised when a customer survey had shown that IP protection is more important than application performance for many of our customers, even though it was just a byproduct of our optimization efforts.

Author here. Kindly (suggest where to) cross-post - I think it's important for the health of our industry that freeware authors and open source enthusiasts keep getting rewarded for their efforts. Thank you.

Some info for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it:

The entry-level edition of Excelsior JET is free (as in beer) since the end of August 2016. Licenses for the more senior editions have been available for non-commercial use at no cost for many years.

https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free

[0] can be had at $10+ under a charity program at the moment: http://www.excelsiorjet.com/charity

Low/zero cost is a benefit only if everything else is equal. Eclipse and Netbeans are free, yet people pay for IntelliJ IDEA. We use an expensive commercial GUI testing product because all the free and cheaper alternatives sucked big time, and support was either poor or non-existent.

I mean someone who can build support for your shiny new language and/or instruction set into GCC or LLVM and get their pull request accepted by the maintainers.

I am with a small company focused on compilers and managed runtimes (JVM), and I can tell you that _good_ compiler consultants are in high demand. For instance, I had a discussion with a CEO of such specialized consultancy looking for GCC specialists last year, and he said that LLVM engineers are even harder to come by.

I also see processor startups popping up all the time that need compiler/tools engineers badly.

Overall, I'd repeat what others have said: "save a lot and invest your savings wisely."

Just want to make one thing clear: in this particular case the request was to block a specific URI. It is the (smaller) ISPs that do not have a technology to block an URI and the (bigger) ISPs that do not bother to employ that tech who block entire sites by IP addresses.

Just specify on your freelancer's profiles that you are available part-time due to "other commitments". Not all prospects are looking for full-time workers.

The section on résumés in Butterick's Practical Typography book has some decent advice, not just typography-related:

http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html

Have your CV edited by a professional editor. I have seen this working wonders - from no responses to competing offers from two top companies in the field. Editing is so cheap compared to its potential effect on your entire lifetime income that it has a good chance of being your best ever investment.

Emails get lost, most often in Junk Mail boxes.

When I don't hear back from someone within a reasonable time frame, I follow up with a short email asking if my previous email about this and that was received. If I do not get anything back either within a day or two, I call with exactly the same question: "I sent you an email about <subject> on <date> but have not heard back, so just want to make sure it found its way to your inbox". More often than you would think the person I called would either find my emails in their junk folder, do not find them at all, apologize for overlooking them, or apologize for not replying sooner. (And sometimes they would say they replied and I would find their replies in my junk folder.)

My limited experience of disputing a PayPal transaction was exactly the opposite (i.e. I was the buyer).

creating a super-optimized tight loop of a program in C++, C or (better) assembly might be much easier to do than in higher level JITted languages

Sometimes, the situation is exactly opposite, though:

http://pzemtsov.github.io/2014/05/15/how-to-make-C-as-fast-a...

Excelsior guy here. Actually, Excelsior JET is a proper AOT compiler. That is, a developer or build enginer runs it on their workstation (build server) and then ships a native executable to the end users. We used to have a caching JIT, and even an option to recompile the cache into a single binary, but concluded it is not worth the hassle, and deprecated it last year.

Most of the Java security issues only affected applets, not standalone apps. And the larger and the more sophisticated a standalone app is, the less desirable is running it on the system-default JRE.

When buying a cup of coffee, I am normally pretty sure that I am going to get a cup of coffee that I will enjoy to a certain extent.

When buying a mobile app, I may be buying myself a waste of time. Which is double loss.

Most, if not all, of the mobile apps I've bought so far either have free Lite companions or come free with an option to unlock all functions via an in-app purchase.

Out of all those graduates, the number of which we are told is 2-3x the number of open positions, are really qualified to fill in those positions? Passionate about their field of study? Intended to get a job in that field in the first place, as opposed to getting a degree in something they can (afford)?

Our own experience is that even internships do not always yield good results. And the level of most applicants, many of whom are recent graduates, makes me sad. They manage to find work at some other company in the end, but only because we are in IT and IT is big at our place...

I am afraid that the bias of the "1000+ club" will silence many comment authors whose views and opinions are substantially different. The result is you will have a smaller community, the member of which are in agreement with each other, so there will be less interesting discussions, and the disagreed ones will flock away, having no chance to be heard here.

I certainly would read the comments less frequently.

I second the first and last statements. As far as compensation goes, here, an average Java developer makes a least 3x of what is the average salary for the region in which I live. Yet all local companies are complaining about the quality of job applicants and interns. Those high salaries seem to be attracting quite a few lazy people seeking easy money.

Have you ever had to wrestle with the consequences of the complexity of analyzing a not-so-simple-and-well-researched data structure for which no generic implementation exists in any language?

That's crazy life you live in the Valley. We are nearly as remote from SF Bay Area as a place on Earth can possibly be (18 hour net flight time with two stops) and do not have many perks, but I would be very surprised to hear about a non-technical person being deprived of something because of being non-technical. Has do to something with our not-so-distant Soviet past, perhaps.

As far a job titles go, I read an article a day ago where the author suggested that when it comes to salary negotiation and you are not quite happy with the monetary part of the offer, you should at least demand a title that would show progress when put on your resume.

I see, still thats quite a bit especially when need to hand over a large chunk on any sale from Irish/EU28 customers in tax!

I am not sure I understand what you are talking about. If we set the price at $1K, we get from FastSpring $1K minus their commission, whether the customer has paid the EU VAT or some sales tax on top of that $1K or not. And it is FastSpring that does EU VAT remittance.

To me, the key phrase is

"My favorite job was probably the year I worked at Apple retail in college, because I got to explain technology to people and change their lives in some small way."

I moved from programming to techsupport and ended up in marketing exactly because I liked helping people troubleshoot and/or make the most of our product, and now I like telling them a product exists that solves their problem. I feel great reading customers' emails with praise of our product, even though I have not written a single line of its code. (Full disclosure: I either wrote or edited most of the documentation.) I also do a bit of programming every now and then, either for our Web site or to automate my or colleague's work.

So can you think of some other job where you would change people's lives while still doing some programming? Maybe for some non-profit/charity? There are quite a few startups in this area too these days, like Watsi.

Solely from the taxation perspective, my home country now looks surprisingly friendly for small IT businesses.

We have a so called Simplified Taxation System for small businesses (not just IT.) Basically, as a company we can choose to pay either 6% of annual revenue, or the bigger of 15% of profit and 1% of revenue. That's it, no VAT or anything.

As far as wage taxes go, there is a 20% Unified Social Tax charged on the wage amount before income tax. Moreover, there is an annual cap on that tax, which a senior developer in a big city is likely to hit as early as mid-year. Otherwise, small IT businesses can qualify to lower that tax to 14%. All that's left after that is the income tax - 13% flat.

Which country you would ask? Russia. That's why I wrote "Solely from the taxation perspective" in the opening statement...

re: fastsrping

"You have the option to pay either 8.9% flat or 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction. "

Wowza, thats steep!

FastSpring customer here.

First, they handle lots of boring and complicated stuff for you, not just taxes. How much would it cost you to accept all major credit cards, PayPal, checks and (international) wire transfers, and provide customer service for all of those transaction types?

Second, if you sell the more expensive B2B stuff like we do, and/or sell lots of your stuff through them, you can ask for a custom rate.

I recall coming across a web site aimed specifically at connecting entrepreneurs with engineers, designers, etc., willing to work for equity, but cannot find it now.

There are http://www.equitive.com/ and http://www.kaywebangels.com/, but that's essentially outside funding.

Look up a post by JangoSteve below, saying "...We act as CTO and development team for hire for early-stage startups..."