trestletech

Alternatively: "students who wait to the last-minute to register for their classes get stuck with the 8AM classes and perform worse than students who registered early."

In addition to the other suggestions here, Academia could be another interesting route. Look at the job boards for local colleges/universities/research centers in your area. They're typically struggling to find technical people to either:

1. maintain and update the main websites

2. administer other IT-related systems on-campus (may require brushing up on some Linux or Windows Server skills)

3. help with the coding side of their research

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit available when it comes to coding needed for a research grant. Sometimes it's just standing up a basic website for a lab, but you'd be invaluable if you were able to help someone scrape together their pile of perl/R/python scripts into something that can be be hosted on a website. And IMHO the bar for quality is usually quite low -- many labs just want to have enough to earn/fulfill a grant and then move you on to the next project.

I'll warn you that there's not a strong career path available for software developers in Academia at the moment. So you may eventually need to break out. But it strikes me as a viable way to get a few years of real software dev experience working on interesting projects which would definitely put you in a better spot to branch out elsewhere.

Sounds like a neat utility but you lost me at "download this shell script via unencrypted HTTP."

The legal change happened last year but it had been kept under wraps until today. Employees did know in advance, so it could have leaked.

I love this. I can't get the newline breaks to work in my QR scanner, but I got excited about the idea of generating recursive QR codes. i.e. QR codes that embed another unicode QR code inside of them.

Yes! A schedule was imperative for me to feel like I had some expectations and control. Waking up with absolutely no structure was just a little too overwhelming for me, so having "naptime is ___, lunch is ___" really put me at ease. I didn't read many books on parenting, but one that was immediately helpful was on sleep schedules of children and how they evolve as the kids age. This helped us figure out a schedule that worked for us.

Another thing we did that really helped was artificially limiting inputs regarding advice. In those first weeks, we had a handful of books and dozens of blogs and websites that all had contradictory advice; it was really overwhelming. We decided we would only subscribe to three primary sources of info where possible: Mayo Clinic online, some book we had on sleep schedules, and our pediatrician. Only having three places to consult when we had questions (as opposed to the entire Internet) was an enormous help.

The biggest piece of advice I'd give is to focus on practicing leadership in your current role. Develop a reputation as the person who ensures that work gets done properly, leads out in process improvements for the team, and demonstrates good judgment. Once you've done that, it will be a no-brainer to give you more leadership and/or management opportunities. Note that none of these practices require that you get a promotion first nor that you be the strongest programmer in the room.

I went through a similar transition years ago and I've started working on writing up some of my advice here. It's still quite incomplete, but might give you some ideas: https://app.tettra.co/teams/rstudio/pages/technical-leadersh... In particular, I'd say the "Technical Team Lead" role is what I'd target as your next step.

Aside: if any of this advice resonates with you, we are hiring and I'd love to chat about helping you go through this transition with us.

About time!

Jeff, PE, MD, CPA, JD, CFA

Came for the video, stayed for the comments.

I feel like we're not far off from a digital version of the Amish. "Technology was perfected by the FSF in 2003; everything developed since is evil."

Amazingly, UberForWar.com is still available.

Volunteers with finite amounts of time.

None of these "TODOs" sound desirable to me...

The older/official Spark integration for R (SparkR) is quite lacking. Sparklyr is newer and makes up much of the ground that was missing on the Python integration. Still a few features that need to be checked off the list, but I think most users will find that sparklyr has the subset of features that they need.

High, by my standards. But was tongue-in-cheek regardless.

My tax dollars paid for 94% test coverage??

Yeah there's a preposterous amount of JavaScript that gets loaded because I'm too lazy to rewrite the interactive graphics. Sorry :(

I'm suspicious that that IP address isn't random at all!

YHat and Domino Data Labs both have commercial solutions for exactly this.

On the open-source front, OpenCPU (https://www.opencpu.org/), Jug (http://bart6114.github.io/jug/) or plumber (http://plumber.trestletech.com/) are all built for this. Plumber has a page to guide you through setting it up on a server using PM2 here: http://plumber.trestletech.com/docs/hosting/

(Conflict of interest warning: I wrote plumber.)

I've been running an API on plumber (with admittedly low volumes of traffic) for months now unattended using a strategy similar to the guide mentioned above. Haven't had any issues yet.

+1 and I really like the idea of that model and wanted to support Synergy in particular, but I almost gave up when I saw I'd have to compile from source, then did give up once I started encountering errors building from source. I would have happily given them money if they could have proven that the product worked on my equipment first (free trial, etc.) but given that it didn't seem to work, I bailed.

I've been working on a lightweight API solution for R recently. Still needs a bit of devops tooling, but I think the code is converging on stability.

Oh, good. Bioinformatics data wasn't big enough with two bits per nucleotide.

That's really nice. I had faced a similar problem a while back and didn't solve the network layer as neatly as you have. But one feature I would miss from this implementation is event "bubbling."

My approach is here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/giza . It would just parallel your storage engine (whatever that is) and not the rest of the project. But I'd encourage you to consider how to subscribe to a channel hierarchy. I find that many of the event-driven projects I touch have at least some components that can be more neatly modeled under a bubbling pub/sub system like this.

I think he all-the-more has a point: that he shouldn't waste his time reading and signing some scary contract to be able to contribute a correction of a typo.

chmac's single, substantive contribution to the project: https://github.com/datastax/nodejs-driver/commit/6f3c6b2f454...

We need a new work for not succeeding at something as unfeasible as this. "Fail" doesn't seem appropriate...

The latest RStudio preview release has Vim mode, if you're interested.

Pure conjecture, but is it reasonable to think that bootstrapped companies might be more likely to be bought out than ones backed by major VC bucks?

I suspect a disproportionate number of bootstrapped companies that fall into the might-become-$1BN category get an offer they can't turn down at some point before they arrive.