jonhmchan

What I Need to Hear That I Don't Want to Hear

SO dev here. Not sure your size, but your first 10 users are much cheaper. On signup, it starts at $10/month and includes the first 10 users. It's $5/user/mo after that.

If you're much larger than 10 - creeping into the 200+ people, it might be better to go with Enterprise: https://stackoverflow.com/enterprise

I'm curious what you think about remote work and whether it's overall a net positive for companies that are struggling to find talent in their own country.

There seem to be some obvious benefits: no need to worry about getting people visas, expanding your talent pool to beyond your geographic region, and so on. There's also legal tradeoffs: dealing with complicated laws with taxes, benefits, and so on.

In your experience, is opting for remote a net benefit? Or perhaps more fittingly, in what situations do you think it's appropriate for a company to consider building a remote workforce, wholly or partially?

Stack Overflow does. I'm an engineer there and we still think providing private offices to our engineering team is important for their productivity. This includes engineers, SREs, designers, data scientists, PMs, and others.

However, most of our engineering team is remote and if they're not in one of our locations, we give them pretty much what they'd like to build their own home office or go to a coworking space.

For me, I'm actually nomadic, so I tend to work from wherever I'm staying or end up in cafes a lot of time. I still get the support I need if my work "station" isn't optimal.

TL;DR Stack Overflow provides private offices, but is really flexible, especially given its remote policy.

Work at Stack here. We still provide private offices for developers when they're in one of our offices. A lot of the engineering team is remote too, which lets people have their own workspace as well.

I wake up earlier. Both the meditation and pledge to write take up an extra hour in my day. It's causing me to readjust my old habits too: if I don't sleep late and get a good night's sleep, waking up earlier is easier and I can make the time.

I'm curious to see how this evolves in future weeks.

I absolutely love this idea - it solves for a HUGE pain point that entrepreneurs have dealing with the logistical, legal, and financial groundwork for a startup and getting to payments easily. Good lord, if Atlas were around for me to setup my startup, I would be crying tears of joy.

What I'm confused about is why they didn't focus more on the convenience advantages and positioned Atlas as a non-geo tied incorporation/setup offer. As many people have noted, the advantages of doing business as a U.S. company if you're not in the U.S. is unclear. It seems far more appropriate as a side note to the much needed advantages of solving a legal, financial, and accounting nightmare just to get payments. Why emphasize international?

I know I'm walking right into the fire with this one.

Take a look at Bento. https://www.bento.io/

https://www.bento.io/tracks/front-end - front end track

https://www.bento.io/grid/ - all their tutorial recommendations

They hand-pick some of the best free tutorials for each of the technologies you might need (including the other ones mentioned here) and even have curated tracks for front end.

Some differences. Generally, it's been ported over to the main Stack Overflow site with Q&A now.

Discourse was really, really close for us. The breaker was the lack of a real WordPress import support: https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-it-possibile-to-import-exist...

That being said, that evaluation was done before we found out how difficult it would be with Disqus.

Someone else also mentioned prose.io - something I didn't come across when building this. Going to explore.

Our problems actually weren't with Jekyll. Like I mention in the post, much of the functionality came right out of the box. The major pain here was exporting and combing through the data afterwards, and that required some Python to parse comments and convert to markdown. Once we did, that meant less security holes, opening up our content and technology more, among other pluses.

I'm the author of the post and the lead on this project. Many of the costs you mention aren't so bad. As mentioned earlier, we actually consider learning GH and Markdown a plus for non-devs. As for comments and writing Python, some pain here, but were ultimately solvable.

Performance also wasn't the only plus here. Closing major security holes, making more of our content and technology more open, and moving to a platform that our devs liked working in are just some of the other wins.

It's too early to say definitively now, but we think the change is probably a good one.

Similar has certainly crossed some of our minds (I'm a dev at SE)

Also on Joel on Software: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2015/01/20.html

Founder here - would love HN's feedback on the curriculum. Happy to also answer any questions about pedagogy or design.

I'm very impressed with how quickly Stripe has been able to get Apply Pay integration as part of their platform. I'll be looking into it for my own apps.

SEP is easily the best online resource for philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition. It can be a bit dense sometimes, but I've always used it as an introduction or overview of a philosophy text before diving in during college.

Relatively new stack dev here. I came in on the other side of the fence of a lot of these technologies (bread and butter is Python in Flask with Mongo on Heroku on a mac) but since I started here, I've been constantly and pleasantly surprised by how performant everything here has been despite my biases. It's mighty fun.

The CEO of Vessyl responds: https://www.myvessyl.com/blog/posts/9-vessyl-on-colbert-repo...

I'm the creator of Bento (http://bentobox.io/). I think Bento can help - all the resources there are free and curated by developers. Follow the track left to right, top to bottom.

Please reach out if you need any help @jonhmchan

From my own experience, MOOCs are useful to get a base understanding of a particular topic. However, learning the topic at hand is necessary but not sufficient: I don't think many people are getting jobs by listing completion of a course.

As it stands, I think the people that (1) understand the topic well, and (2) are getting jobs are also people that take that understanding and have something to show for it. It's not enough to say that you learned code through Codecademy, you do need to build something of your own to show in order to be employable. I think that's the case even with traditional education: it's not enough to simply have a CS degree, but something to show for it as well.

Excellent - yes, I was hoping I was simply getting a higher exposure to 'learn to code' companies.

I'm curious what proportion of edtech is geared towards teaching how to code.

It seems that a lot of companies in the space (or at least the ones I hear about) are geared towards this one topic, and only a notable few are tackling other areas of academia or infrastructure issues around education. On surface it makes sense - tech companies geared towards education are probably going to focus on technology as the subject. It's also relatively cheap to source material, employees have first-hand experience in the field, and there's high demand with straightforward business models available.

I certainly noticed all these things when I launched Bento (http://bentobox.io/), and I still think about it today. I do try and maintain a healthy skepticism though: is the edtech being referenced in this article still largely in the narrow band of technology, or are we seeing it expand?

I used to help teach the iOS Development class at NYU - I was having this conversation with the professor who's teaching it again next year and we talked about this specifically for new students.

I think that you should learn Swift because it is where most app development will be heading in the future and far easier to pick up than Objective-C. The main disadvantage currently is that the whole corpus of knowledge about iOS development is steeped in Objective-C. My advice is to learn Swift and develop in Swift, but know enough Objective-C to be able to translate it to Swift and read documentation written for Objective-C.

Eventually as the corpus of knowledge in iOS development grows for Swift, this won't be as much of an issue.

Oh I absolutely will. I've featured it heavily on Bento and its entire algorithms and data structures section is basically links to chapters in this book.

This book is how I picked up algorithms and data structures having never gone through a formal computer science program. Glad to see it's still being worked on.

OP here, please let me know what may be confusing to readers - there are a lot of topics covered very late last night.

OP here - something of a follow up to a previous post on my first six weeks here.

Interested to hear thoughts.