HN user
Taught myself to program BASIC on my TI-83 graphing calculator. Dad taught me VisualBasic, took high school classes in C++/JAVA, and taught myself Python, JavaScript, and Ruby while working terrible hourly jobs.
Now do full-stack Rails development for a startup.
Some of your :hover transitions are a bit wonky in Chrome.
Hovering over, say, "JavaScript" under your TeamCoco job bumps your span.label from 70px width to 72px width. My guess is that this is from Chrome rounding partial pixels weirdly in your transitions, but it's clear that you didn't mean for the other elements in line to move.
Also on Chrome, not sure you've got your Fjalla One font included properly. Even though computed style is showing that as first choice for your header elements, my machine is defaulting to Helvetica Neue. This is due to you calling it "Fjalla+One" instead of "Fjalla One" in your css.
Some of the shortcuts taken by these quick studies are always really interesting to me.
First, I wouldn't assume the same career duration for both GEDs and College Grads - generally, a dropout will start working earlier.
A general "GED average" also pretty highly weights the comparison for other reasons - poverty, area (areas with higher education and wealth levels have higher average earnings, even among those with GEDs), career type. It's an okay generalization to make in this case, but it does bias the results somewhat. People with similar levels of education/wealth tend to group together, which means a lower salary in a poorer area may have similar buying power to what seems like a higher salary in a more expensive area.
Unfortunately what might be the most telling metric is much harder to define: how much would person X make in her lifetime if she went to college, and how much would she make without? Even simplifying to the same field (their strengths would be similar in both cases), it's extremely difficult to plot her career trajectory.
Of course, this may all be due to my personal bias - college dropout, doing fine, and making well above the average starting salary for a CompSci grad by age 25. Decent savings, no debt - it was a much harder road, but I'm not sure I'd make the tradeoff knowing what I do now.
Personally, though, I can't discount the value I've felt in not having the average $27,000 in student debt hanging over my head [1]. It's enabled me to take risks, try new things, change career twice, and follow my passions.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/pf/college/student-loan-debt...
Get help. Call a hotline, and see a doctor.
Medication for depression isn't a sign of weakness - it can seriously give you your life back. Been where you are, made it through, happy to chat if it helps.
If your 'culture fit' doesn't allow this, it's time to build a new culture.
Assuming equal skill levels, sure, I would.
PivotDesk (www.pivotdesk.com)
Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku. PostgreSQL.
Queuing is handled via Redis/Resque, and we're using Pingdom and NewRelic for primary monitoring.
SendGrid powers our email, GitHub hosts our code, and we use Campfire + PivotalTracker for day to day coordination.
We use Haml for templating, and SCSS for styling. [edit, forgot JQuery]
S3 for image storage, we'll probably be moving the whole app to Amazon's cloud in the next few months as well.
We've also made a couple tradeoffs in terms of browser compatibility, including using some CSS3 animation features not fully supported by IE9 and under. We'll see if that works out for us long term.
All in all, a pretty standard setup for a Rails startup.
Yeah, it's pretty common practice to disable the root account from SSH access/never log in as root.
Linode has a pretty good getting-started guide for basic Ubuntu VPS security: http://library.linode.com/securing-your-server