julsonl

True. A lot of my closest friendships came about from me just being in their repeated general proximity for a long-enough period of time.

This is the book I wish I had 5 years ago.

I'm not arguing against writing integration tests, they are as important if not more important, as you've said. Maybe I've only seen badly written ones, but my issue was against integration tests that check for example if this ever so important, but hidden, flag is being set properly after an API call when that can be checked at the service level. Someone eventually decides that flag is unneeded, and a whole host of tests fail and someone has to dig several levels deep to figure it out.

I guess I shouldn't have used the word 'brittle', but this is what I was thinking of.

And of course, I think unit testing anything and everything is absurd and not a good use of developer time.

In my experience, it's usually not the existence of unit tests themselves that's causing an issue, but that most of them are badly written. One telltale sign is when writing the unit test becomes overly painful (like too much code setting up mocks), it usually means that your class is not simple enough or has too many dependencies.

Proper unit testing also complements integration testing in that corner cases can be handled at the unit test level, therefore reducing the amount of integration test code which arguably is much more brittle, runs slower and more complicated to write.

I'm doing the exact same thing! (quitting end of this month too). While I haven't decided to completely leave tech, I'm planning to do a couple of 3-month furniture intensive classes for my sabbatical this year. I'm also going to apply to the College of the Redwoods. It's kind of a moonshot though, given my limited woodworking experience, but I figured it's worth a try. What's the duration of your entire course?

I'd suggest finding a hands-on online course that gives you a tiny portfolio in the end. A lot of the fun with programming is seeing your work come alive and seeing all the projects you've completed. Assuming you haven't programmed before, I wouldn't go with buying a programming language-specific book to start since those can be pretty boring to go through. Books will start to be useful as you develop a lot more curiosity and want to fill in your knowledge gaps.

My friend's learning from the ground-up and he's using Code Academy (https://www.codecademy.com). If you're a little more serious about this, you could also look into Udacity's Nanodegree program.

Wow. You've described exactly what goes in my head during parties. I've been better at faking it / being able to emit short bursts of real gregariousness, but I've never been able to completely get rid of the anxiety.

Just Effin Do It?

Even so, the GWT creators ended up recognizing the value of presentation markup and introduced the UIBinder system (HTML markup + XML for custom widgets), which arguably made my life a whole lot easier when I was working on a moderate-sized GWT codebase. It's definitely better compared to mucking around with Swing-looking code soup.

Having local storage is good for services like Spotify though, especially for those long road trips where the signal can be a bit spotty.

That looks narrow-minded for those particular employers though. The leadership might have made a lot of questionable decisions, but I don't think that should affect the quality of the engineers from that company.

For games, Chris Granger and his team have coded up a prototype game in Clojurescript using the Entity-Component-System architecture, which seems to be a good fit for functional languages. It might be worth checking out: http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/12/11/anatomy-of-a-knockou...

One thing I've learned from trying to learn drawing is that there's value in creating rough sketches in order to capture a certain form or gesture. It feels like coding small-scoped side projects is the coding equivalent of this.

Other than improving my programming skills and learning a bit more computer science theory in general:

1. Music. Learning to play the piano

2. Drawing and Painting

3. Cooking

It depends on the company. The company I work for right now had a software architect that worked 3 days a week only for a couple of months or so before going full-time (I think he was building a multi-monitor helicopter flight sim setup if I remember it right). From my talks with our CEO it seemed like he was open to that idea.

I'm definitely going to do something like this in the future though, but I'm still contemplating whether the 20-hour, 50% salary cut idea is better than working full time and taking a sabbatical afterwards.

I'm not actually part of the hacker school batch (though I wish I were). I might try my hand applying for the next semester.

This sounds awesome! I've just started learning about Clojure and Clojurescript and have encountered a lot of David Nolen's work. It'll be amazing to be able to hack with and learn from him for those 3 months.

I tend to have thoughts that maybe I have a genetic disadvantage that prevents me from excelling from things that I care about (programming, computer science, drawing, etc.), but I would rather die with the illusion that I could succeed in anything I set my heart to, than in to throw in the towel and accept that I'm hopeless. Having that mindset is working out for me so far.

The issue I have with commenting is some people enforce it for the sake of having comments in place, which would most of the time describe the "what" and the "how" of the code, rather than the "why", which in my opinion, where most of the value lies. In Java, the usual offenders would be the getter and setters in POJOs, like:

  * Returns the name
  * @return the name
  */
 public String getName();

If you're getting into mobile phone development (likely Android), then you should start with Java. I think some people have managed to compile/run clojure to run on Android, but there are still some performance hurdles that will need to be overcome (true for dynamic languages running on Dalvik) before it becomes a viable language for mobile.

I never play public games and only play with a group of friends, so I can't comment on that aspect. With regards to class distribution, I have a good mix of friends playing various classes (I think I only know one rolling DH).

I accidentally deleted my post, but what I was trying to say previously (in which the parent replied to), was that higher difficulties require thinking, like dodging an Arcane sentry, or moving away from molten/plague pools. Adding to that, I play a monk in Inferno, and I adopted a "guardian" role during group play: dashing and knocking back enemies attacking our glass cannons, healing our tank, breaking CC using serenity (when fighting "Frozen" bosses) and maintaining damage reduction debuffs and buffs, all while making sure that my spirit levels get replenished (or else I'm useless). There's a whole lot more into the game than just gearing up and bashing skulls.

That's where I think most people are wrong about inferno though. That difficulty rewards proper communication and group play. Sure, soloing everything requires a crap-ton of godly loot, but damage and defenses can be compensated by a proper synergy of group skills. Lack armor and resists? that Barb shout may just solve it. Your tank getting face-melted a lot? You could have a monk stack a 50% damage reduction debuff on the enemy. Your glass cannon wizard getting chased down? Have a witch doctor load up on CC skills. What I'm seeing everybody try to do is to gear up and go berserker on the enemy and it just doesn't work.

I think it still is, especially if you have friends to play it with. With all the vitriol with regards to Inferno being a grind-fest in order to progress, I do think it is a more of a thinking game compared to Diablo 2, with classes being able to adopt roles in a group with ease. The higher difficulties (especially true with Inferno) are much more fun in a group setting and there's a lot of strategy involved in coordinating roles and load-outs between your party members. There's a whole lot of strategy involved than most people think.

I feel that this article is suitable to HN, not for its actual content, but for the intelligent discussions that eventually spring out of it.

Robots. Program their navigation and computer vision capabilities. Develop a base station with some fancy augmented reality overlays.

Another thing to look into would be Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). You can have all your ruby/rails specific dependencies in a Virtualbox VM and not worry about setting it up in your host OS. It also has the added benefit of easily tearing down the instance if you manage to mess up. There's a learning curve to it, especially when setting up chef recipes, so for starters you could just bake everything into the image

I've always wanted to get into the DIY drones crowd, but can't find enough motivation to actually start cranking up stuff. Back in college, I took microcontroller classes and programmed them in assembly, but missed the chance to build a cool robot due to financial issues (parts didn't come cheap where I came from).

I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but a lot of women I know from back home (third-world country, like drusenko mentioned) are excellent negotiators. They have the have patience, charm and downright persistence to squeeze every single penny from whatever purchase they are making (even salary negotiations). It's scary.

With regards to the current classes, it typically takes 2-3 hours to consume the lectures (unless you have ADHD like me). 20 minutes to finish weekly exercises. 1-2 hours to finish the programming exercises in the ML class. The ML class also gave a crash course in programming Octave, which handled any language issues you may have for that course.

I took 2 classes, which is a huge time-sink (I can't even go through the textbooks). I think for a person with a full-time job, 1 course would be enough for a particular semester.