donal

I don't believe that "unemployed" in this sense means "without paycheck." I considered myself unemployed after graduating from college because I was making my money by catering. Not exactly why I went to college...

So, with that interpretation; I was making barely enough to pay what little bills I had, I was able to do one of the things on Seth's list: I taught myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and PHP. I built a couple simple DB driven websites for a friend's band. I then started messing around with the Asterisk PBX and foolishly tried to sell one to a company in the area and fortunately was saved a lot of pain and was hired by them instead.

The whole time I was told that I should be trying to get this type of job or the other, but I was dead-set on ending up in doing something technology-based. I think it was a good 18 months before that happened.

I don't think Seth is saying anything revolutionary. A piece of paper alone doesn't make your a good hire. If they aren't biting with what you have, then work on making it into what they want to see. Over simply; stop wallowing, get over any feelings of entitlement that may be lingering, and do something productive.

I'm putting my support behind this interpretation of the complaint.

I spent some time at a gov't subcontractor and the copy-paste version of cya was clear as day. Sometimes you'd see where search/replace failed and there would be other program names.

It was a mess and I'm fairly certain it was because of our size. Fighting a contract in court is an expensive and potentially reputation damaging prospect, so if you have significantly less resources at your disposal it is very likely that you won't be able to fight the baked in vagueness and contradiction.

Oh, that is interesting. It has been a while since I fiddled with... I think it was Fluxus.

It is one of those things were I became insanely fascinated and then suddenly found myself deluged under a ton of other fascinating things. Hopefully I'll be able to make it back to it at some point. Consolidating my art+music+coding together could open the window to doing something crazy like finishing a project...

I've also read of live coding with the language Processing and Python.

I think the limiting factor is the existence of a REPL.

What you are speaking of with the AST doesn't sound very "live", but definitely sounds interesting.

I fall pretty dead on into the Level 1 category, though in certain areas I fall into the 2 and I think I managed a level 3 someplace... But, then I have < 2 years professional programming experience (proceeded by 3 years of management experience) and a masters in information systems, but even that is more management oriented.

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to make up for my terrible education in the areas of math and algorithms.

You aren't alone. If I had access to the book for my Project Management class, then I could give you exact stats for how terrible most estimates prove to be. The numbers are astounding (the studies are dated, but still adequately horrifying).

Even doubling your estimates is unlikely to have any real reflection on reality.

One standard methodology is called three-point estimation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation

How far do you want to go though? You could look up COCOMO-II, I saw someone mention function-point analysis, then you could do monte carlo simulation...

The best way is to compare the task to previous similar tasks, but the trick is making sure that tasks are really similar enough to make an accurate comparison.

It might cut down on the volumes of resumes, but once culled down to actual potentials, I think the effect of the "niche language" is minimal. I spend my time hopping between a bunch of languages and I'm equally mediocre in all of them, but my friend who does the same is amazing in whatever language is thrown at him. I have yet to meet a really excellent programmer that can only program in one language (they might not be equally proficient in all of them).

When hiring for the small percentage of excellent programmers, I don't see language as a barrier. Sure, there will be spin up time, but you'll have that regardless. No one is experienced with every library, framework, or configuration. Adding in a new syntax might compound the issue, but I think that there is the definite potential for long-term productivity gains once the team is up to speed.

Sheesh, from the comments you'd think The Register is known for level-headed journalism.

It is a snarky, piss-taking, grease-trap that mixes news with commentary with little to no discretion or fear of violating "journalistic integrity." Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment.

Just to be contrary, I actually don't like the Aeron.

I sit in one 8+ hrs a day and I don't know if it doesn't fit me correctly (I'm 6'4") or what, but I'd prefer a different chair. Unfortunately the only other chair available to me is some terrible ikea chair that is wrong in ever possible way.

For as much as they cost, I thought they'd be way more comfortable.

Arguably VB for Applications could come in handy for almost anyone. Though interestingly most farmers, carpenters, and other handy-workers are more capable of performing arithmetic than the rest of the population. Still the power of a well-tuned spreadsheet is quite amazing.

Farmers are also a bad example these days, agriculture is totally high-tech.

I'm currently in a Masters program for Information Systems and one of my peers had the joy of having the professor of the class ask him why his answers and another student's were so astoundingly similar. Having worked with this gentleman a lot on the homework, this particular assignment even, I knew that he wasn't the one cheating. Apparently one of our classmates had asked to see his work to "verify" and instead had copied it. Granted, allowing someone to see your answers could be considered cheating, but one assumes that the other person isn't a complete imbecile and has actually done the work. I think that level of trust is even more likely at the graduate level when your peers are all well into adulthood and should know better.

We were both pretty ticked to find this out. I was mostly ticked because I had worked with the one for several hours trying to help him understand the questions and how to get to the answers (without ever giving him the answers) and so knew how hard he had worked to get that lab done. Having someone weasel his work off of him was just rather foul.

We both didn't understand his motivation either. Why pay close to $800/credit just to risk losing it as well as not getting anything except a piece of paper at the end. I know that paper can get you in the door, but it is also really obvious when you don't actually know your stuff.

This was on of the more technical of the classes. It dealt with web services.

Kento Cho also should get crazy amounts of respect. He just codes crazy shmups for his own amusement. Seems even someone developing for Wii took notice: http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/ZIhL8DajewM6w7pMaFOVrFY...

I love a good shmup.

Check out PyGame. Also check out the PyWeek game development challenge.

Building a game in a week is an invigorating challenge. I learned python during one of the PyWeeks and I'd never made a game before. The best part is that because of the short deadline it isn't some huge amorphous task. Even if the game is crap, you learn something, have some fun, and get to see how more experienced people get things done.

I also like to take a holiday from the languages I have to use for work. I mean, Flash games are pretty hot, but spending some time in a different language is good for the brain. Regardless of tool analogy.

Interesting question, ultimately I think the answer is yes for three reasons.

1) Sharding helps with more than just performance issues.

2) Even the most efficient write performance would still bottleneck at a certain scale.

3) Everyone likes to think that they will reach the scale at which point that bottleneck occurs.

The problem isn't with Nielsen's recommendations, it is his methods. He presents his findings as being based on scientific research, but unfortunately his methods are deceitful.

Have you ever seen the infomercial for "Dual Action Cleanse" with Klee Irwin? Irwin and Nielsen use very similar methods. The make claims that pass the common sense test, then they use something resembling science to "prove" that they are spouting fact. They are both trying to sell you something, Nielsen has just found a much more profitable customer.

I imagine selling super-laxatives to homebodies and the sleep deprived isn't anywhere as lucrative to selling consulting services to businessmen.

The problem with Nielsen is his "research" is dangerous to the field of HCI and usability. Anybody that uses his "findings" to support their own research is building a house on a broken foundation.

For his business clients this "academic navel gazing" doesn't matter, they probably see the results they were looking for (since he already told them exactly what to look for). Irwin's customers probably get the results they were after too, and whether or not the FDA monitors the claims made by "herbal supplements" probably doesn't bother them much either.

The issue is with false negatives (not finding real problems). It is hard to say that 100% of issues were found, because how can you quantify the number of problems that weren't found?

The claim of this article that you can somehow quantify the percentage of usability problems is rather absurd. How can you quantify the total number of usability issues in a program a priori?

Also, I don't think that graph ever reaches 100%, I think it approaches 100% (but then I'm not a math-whiz, so I will gladly accept correction).

They've successfully performed statistical sleight of hand. The assumption that you can quantify the total number of defects is untenable, but they leave that part out of their article and just show the nice charts and math to provide strength to their broken hypothesis.

I think this is unfortunate because I think that there is probably some great insights in this article and the intent is good.

Usability and Human-Centered Computing/Human-Computer Interaction has a tendency to suffer from this type of "pseudo-science" of using fuzzy statistics to present great sounding finding. I was made aware of this trend by the following article:

Wayne D. Gray and Marilyn C. Salzman, "Damaged merchandise? A review of experiments that compare usability evaluation methods", Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 13, pp. 203-261, 1998.

Most definitely, otherwise you are really just eye-balling it and you don't want to find out that your small sample-set wasn't representative of your actual user-base.

This is important considering that during early stages you could have early adopters and other more tech-savvy types using your site more heavily than what you will end up with.

It was the one feature my household used the most, but whatever, I guess we'll just have to manually interleave our movie queues.

I think they just liked the picture and they didn't get exclusive rights to it.

http://www.yiyinglu.com/sc/illustration/personal-illustratio...

Having someone who has successfully been published by the journal you are submitting to review your article will greatly help your chances. It will also probably smooth out the process some since each journal has its own little quirks.

Hmm, I wish there was aggregation for search trends, I'm curious to see Baidu's statistics.

I'm a little surprised by the comments lambasting the lack of China's presence in the stats. Google isn't the dominant player in the Chinese search market and I don't think there is an entrenched competitor in the Indian market, so of course the results are going to be skewed.

I wouldn't use it just because the keyphrase is mutable. It is bad enough that TinyURL obscures the destination, but with the possibility for the destination changing without even the submitters knowledge makes the service completely untrustworthy.

Maybe I'm missing something...

My buddy switched someone's explorer.exe with a Mac OS 7 emulator.

It was hilarious.

Isn't being able to easily "get rid of" bodies the whole point of looking for outside help?

I guess I come to the same conclusion, but without the cynicism. It isn't exactly profitable to not care about utilization rate of bodies, but then a small web dev house has to pump out better stuff faster than the other guy (and there is always an "other guy").

I mean, if your product isn't selling, then you should probably find a new product, right?

If you go the wxPython route, then there is wxGlade to make designing the interface easier. http://wxglade.sourceforge.net/

Oh how apt your timing is, Jeff Atwood just wrote a nice article on his Coding Horror block titled:

"PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter" (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html)

Why introduce regressions and headache by switching to another language that I'm guessing you don't know as well as PHP.

Jeff says it best in that article: "building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language."

Personally, I'd just keep plugging away in PHP. It isn't my favorite language, but it has yet to fail me. It is like the farmers rusty pickup truck. Not very flashy, but it gets the job done.

The opportunity to bang it out in one year is something that shouldn't be passed up lightly. Going back after being out for a while is hard.

I'm getting my masters now (graduated undergrad in 2003). It is difficult, but then I'm working and going to school.

The one thing going for taking time off and going back is that you are amazingly focused because you know why you are there, but then if you are graduating from Stanford and considering a MS, then I don't think that is really a problem for you.

I don't think the MS for you would be as much about career options as it would be being able to get even more in depth with subjects in a way that you really don't get much opportunity to do later in life. At least for me it became become fluent enough in subject n+1 to do task x+1. The queue only gets longer and I never have managed to go back to any one thing that has interested me.

I fall into some grey area...

All I can remember is waiting for my dad to bring home the latest "3-2-1 Contact" so that I could look at the basic program that was in it. Then my dad broke the computer and it wasn't until 10+ years later that I was in a C programming class in college.

I kinda skipped all the good stuff, so even with an early start I'm playing catchup.

Be careful!

That might lead you down the path of <gasp> learning to program, or worse liking programming, or even worse yet changing jobs so that you program full-time.

Pretty much the path I took. Though, seems to be working out, particularly with some startup plans slowly taking shape.

Hmm, I don't know if I'd necessarily call it a "disadvantage," it is a difference however.

Not being up on the merits of different legal systems, I'll avoid demonstrating my ignorance and just refrain from making a decision I would not be able to back up. I am now curious though, so I guess you just grew my "to research" list.