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Honestly I wouldn't mind if man pages came with ascii art to visualize this type of documentation.

  - Greenshot: Screenshot capture
  - Audacity: Audio editing

Staying in Cleveland depends on if you like Cleveland or not. Unsure about the opportunities there, but I have an inkling that there are more varied and interesting opportunities elsewhere.

Consider taking the opportunity to move somewhere that is going to be a great area for you to raise a child (if that is something in your future).

Not many people have the luxury (as we do in our industry) of being able to (mostly) freely choose where they work.

> starting over

I wouldn't do much differently. Any dev worth their chops can learn whatever the hot technology is these days. I'd focus on learning how to learn, how to communicate effectively based on your audience, and how to find interesting people that you can learn things from.

Run a dedicated server for whatever games you could manage with 512 mb ram.

   javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;void(t=open('https://hn.algolia.com/?query='+encodeURIComponent(q)+'&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story','HN%20Search','toolbar=no,width=800,height=200'));

Despite that, all my code is in git so it is synced wherever and whenever I need it, as long as I am disciplined about pushing to my central repo.

There is some data that I use on both home and work machines (vim config, bashrc, etc.) and that is in an "environment" git repository so it is easily syncable.

However for me the trick is to get that initial push to start the work, even if the effort itself is small and manageable. It's hard for me to get motivated.

XP has a very low adoption rate (1% [1]) ; my guess is because it does things like mandate engineering approaches (TDD, pair programming, etc).

So to state that TDD causes Agile implementations to be more political than scientific, and therefore all Agile should be eliminated, is not 100% accurate (ignoring the assumption that TDD is more political than scientific)

[1] VersionOne's 8th annual state of agile survey. http://stateofagile.versionone.com/

As the article states, Agile has been abused so much, most things claiming that they are "Agile" or related to Agile are actually not fully in spirit with the Agile Manifesto.

Scrum is great to allow teams of mediocre engineers to improve over time, and eventually perform way beyond what they would under traditional command and control management. Scrum fosters a lot of communication which is one way you can develop immature software engineers.

Scrum teams that have Rockstar coders, who want to just code and get things done, have a significant human issue. The Rockstars have to spend time talking to less knowledgeable engineers, to facilitate knowledge spread and get the other team members up to speed. To software engineers who just want to Write Great Software, meetings for syncing up with your team are something that gets in your way. A great ScrumMaster would manage the Rockstar coders in such a way that they produce code but also understand the need for knowledge transfer.

I think of any language as another tool in my toolbox. The better I know a tool, the better I know when and how to apply it to a specific problem.

I'd wager that just one trivial project won't fully demonstrate the personality and capabilities of a language.

Having a different editor for different text documents seems redundant to me. However I'll admit my two exceptions are using Xamarin for C# and ADT for Android apps.

screen, ack, ssh-agent, git.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/47199831543788339...

What if we had a killer phone-over-wifi app, to allow this segment of the market to take off?

This one-time investment would hopefully resolve most of the major/obvious security issues. Then the code could be open-sourced with moderate confidence that a million 0days would not be exploited instantly -- and the community can catch the obscure holes.

I wouldn't base your trade or part of your career on an online course alone. In order for the knowledge to stick you need to apply and practice it (like anything else including traditional classroom learning).

However in my experience MOOCs do give you a decent foundation, and likely put you in a position where you know of concepts being discussed in an area where your specific trade is being applied.

So my (perhaps unsolicited) advice is to not make the assumption that taking an online course will inundate you with useful knowledge to then go out in the industry and practice it. I think it'll give you a good foundation to either motivate you to gain practical experience or it'll make you aware that this particular trade is not a good fit for you.

Edit: To directly answer the original question, yes, I have seriously learned useful things from online courses.