stirno

Thats a very good insight that didn't occur to me right away actually.. Android dev has lots of opportunities in general.

Ya I understand that, if you can get in the door. Those same companies are also the ones I've found more likely to automate rejections of applicants who can't check the right boxes though, making it harder to get in without experience.

Nearly 20 years in now as a self-taught developer.. and I agree with most of what the post says. I would just add that a young person should continually keep trying to get a job, any job, building software. The process of applying for these kinds of jobs helps you identify areas to focus on.

I think the biggest thing that keeps people from being successful is the assumption that, even with all the effort they are putting in, their potential peers are better at the job. In some strict sense that is true but delivering customer value is number one. Keep your focus on that, people will want to work with you. Ignore any feelings of being an imposter.

I got my first contract development gig at 14, first salaried position at 17. Stick with it and make it happen. Be confident. Don't be a dick.

Also, the original question talked about using Java. There is nothing wrong with Java and there are a lot of jobs in that space but I can't imagine a harder place to come in as a young untrained programmer than Java Enterprise development.

There is a pretty important distinction here -- We have seen in the US consulting market (at large corporations) an influx of 90s style contractor arrangements for staff augmentation. This is basically the counter to failed outsourcing efforts. These contractors almost entirely work for large groups like Robert Half, Tata, Infosys, Tek Systems and others.

We also still have a very very strong consultant labor force making 2-3x what W2 full-time employees can pull in. These consultants generally work through smaller consulting firms that take smaller cuts for the placement/handling billing and invoicing.

Using an admittedly expensive Asus RT-AC88U with my MBP connected over 5ghz, I can get ~900mbps on speedtest.net using my gigabit connection.

Example test below [0], admittedly the downstream results aren't the best but I've got some rather large downloads and streaming going on right now. Upstream shows the capability though.

[0] http://beta.speedtest.net/result/4980829561

When teams have problems with remote v local employees, I've found this to be because they actively treat them differently, sometimes without realizing it.

It takes work to establish your culture to work remotely well -- if you just hire some people that you only ever hear on Skype during standup and give them work, they don't become enmeshed in the fabric of the company. Cliques form everywhere but they can be especially brutal in excluding remote workers from the 'core' teams that are seen as successful within a company.

I'm sorry to hear it hasn't worked for you. If you attempt it again, make sure you evaluate whether you've built a culture based on 'being there' before hiring people who can't be. Lots of people make this mistake and just see cheaper workers.

I think your last point about data retention is really the big question. Given the ever-growing use of Parallel Construction in making cases from illegally obtained data (or data authorized only for a different use), its not enough that all these policies be stopped -- we need to address how long they can keep the fruits of their labor.

Once we get our plugin repository ready to go, Scrawl [0] will have some support for Rust as well, thanks to some great community projects.

Paul did a quick POC today [1] that added autocomplete, go to def and some basic code intel tooltips.

[0] https://fluentco.de/ [1] https://twitter.com/pzumbrun/status/599017886276026369

If things go as planned, this pricing will go away before the v1.0 release.

Our prototype had functioning debugging with breakpoints/locals/etc. It will find its way into the main branch in the next few weeks.

Screenshot of the prototype debugging a scriptcs .csx file: http://i.imgur.com/NMK00Jc.png

When we hit v1.0 we'll have a trial download available.

Thats pretty much the plan, we have some fun ideas here but I need to prove out the UX before I can share much more

We're building on/and hoping to contribute to the community Code Fixes/Code Actions being built for Roslyn as far as refactoring goes in C#. We have some plans of providing a similar interface for other CodeEngines to implement diagnostics/fixes.

The font is Input Sans [0]. Great font. We wanted to try and package it with Scrawl but we never heard back from the author. Its free though, go try it out!

[0] http://input.fontbureau.com/preview/?size=14&language=python...

We've got more direct support for Angular, Knockout and React in the backlog but I don't want to lie to you and say its happening tomorrow. Soon though. Thanks for your feedback!

Founder of fluentCODE here. Really happy to see this posted, we just pushed really hard last night to get the site up. Lots of good comments -- I'll just add that we will be a lot more than just a C#/VB/JS editor. We've got plans to build CodeEngines for F#, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, CSS/SCSS/SASS/LESS, PHP, python and lots of framework specific bits for each of those.

We're a small team working hard on a product we believe in. Ask anything and I'll try and respond if I don't fall asleep!

Our backlog includes support for a PHPCodeEngine and framework support for Laravel and Symfony. Its not the first thing on our list but it will happen!

We had package manager support in our prototype and will have it in the main branch again for the v1.0 release. First nuget, then npm and bower. There will also be extensibility points here to introduce new package managers easily.

An F# CodeEngine is currently in the backlog for the v1.0 release. It'll be the kind of thing that evolves quickly I think. Thanks!

Theres a good bit discussing the modular nature of how we're building Scrawl on the site but we will have a complete, very powerful plugin SDK.

There are several groups working to fill the gap left by VS not running on non-windows platforms (including my own company). There will be options!

Just as a comparison.. In my city outside the valley I'm confident that with at most a week, I could land a brand new gig that meets my previous rate requirements.

And the same is true for virtually everyone here currently playing the software game.

Many very good job markets exist in the US.

I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect..

ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase.

I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing themselves as one thing but preferring another in any stack. This is not indicative of anything more than someone needing a job and meeting the requirements of a posting.

Licensing costs can vary. Between BizSpark, DreamSpark and other programs you can get dev tools out of the way quickly. They also provide Windows licensing for the period you're in the program.

The areas where you can get in real trouble as a startup with Microsoft are the add-on product stacks like SQL Server and BizTalk (shudder). I would avoid these in a new product but do not fear building with the .NET platform.

The current version is .NET only, but we're working on Mono support thanks to some work by the scriptcs team [1]. I'd expect a package in the next few weeks.

[1] https://github.com/scriptcs/scriptcs/issues/80

Just to start this discussion off, PVC is a new project that is a great opportunity for people to ease into writing OSS .NET code.

I believe in the .NET OSS community. Its small but growing and we need to bring more people in. I believe in watsi. We're hoping that helping others is a good motivator to get someone to take that first step. For me, that was all that was needed and I've been contributing to open source for 5 years now!

For people interested in these things - another patient that I love reading about is Henry Molaison (HM). A coworker (a neuroscientist) told me a bit about the man and his condition, very interesting case.

The domain name is bound to be confusing to potential customers.

The stored/versioned queries and views discussed - are these essentially just views or stored procedures?

#100 here. Watsi does great things for people and I hope to help as much as I can.

Edit: Its up to 115 people now. Glad to be a part of this community.

This mirrors my own experiences using Gherkin syntax in other tech stacks. The most workable scenario I've come up with is to focus on simple, terse syntax that is still readable.

Build reusable page objects, keep your actual tests short and things get nice and easy.

Lots of good options in this space. A few years ago I built FluentAutomation [1] to solve this issue in the .NET community.

[1] http://fluent.stirno.com/

Become an independent contractor - easy path to similar numbers.

Apologies to the mobile users who check us out, waiting on some invalidations in the cache. ;(