dorkrawk

Whenever I work from home I make sure that I set a cutoff time or clear stopping point near the end of what I want to be my "work day". Then I remove myself from my computer, take a walk or cook dinner or watch a movie or do anything that isn't code/work. Then if I have other work to do at night (for my job or for my own projects) it feels separate.

I did the sub-40 hour thing for a while at an old job. I was starting to go to grad school full time, so I asked my company if I could could move from being on salary to being an hourly employee and work about 20+ hours a week. Because it was better for them to keep me on in a limited capacity rather than spend the money hiring and training someone new they were really cooperative. The extra time flexibility was great, I got to keep my insurance with them, and got out of grad school debt free!

If you can find yourself a good non-standard situation that works well for you (and your future) take it!

I agree, the lack of comments stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise interesting proposal. There's no reason to take out the existing comment system from WP. It works! The option to disable comments or easily use something like Disqus seems like a fine idea but if you're hosting your own blog, there's a chance you'll want to host your own comments, too.

The real problem is that it's REALLY hard to tell which is the better idea when things are just at an idea stage.

I bet that when they were first proposed (before building anything or seeing adoption numbers) WebTV seemed like a MUCH better idea than Twitter. (not that they're comparable services just that if I told you that I wanted to let people use the internet from their living room, that would sound more exciting and useful than creating a service where people write 140 character blog posts).

Quality of idea just might not be a valuable metric.

And I'm guessing that Microsoft has enough smart business people to get a pretty good estimate of how many enterprise customers will stick with the recently released Windows 7. It was going to be hard to make a product that gave IT departments a compelling reason to upgrade from 7 which makes Windows 8 a great time to test the water for things like mobile. Enterprise isn't jumping ship on Microsoft and they're going to use that stronghold to attempt to gain new markets in an "off-release".

'Immortal Programmer' might have been a better title for that section.

If you push the deadline back, everybody gets the extra time. People affected by the storm get a break. I see no harm in it.

Things like version control should be taught along with the "first week setup" stuff in courses that cover CS topics. For example, in your CS101 class you should learn how to do some basic version control while you're learning to write your first Python/Java/whatever "Hello World". This way you can all be learning about Git (or whatever is being taught) together and students and maybe TAs can help out with skills (though email, course discussion pages, etc) so that the professor can spend more time on course content.

One of the big values of college is having a lot of other people around you learning the same things at the same time. This can be helpful when learning about subject matter and about tools like version control.

No, I think that it's natural to be tempted by immediate gratification (watching stuff on YouTube, checking Twitter, reading xkcd archives) even when you really care about the delayed and more satisfying gratification of progress on a long term project.

When all those distractions are easily accessible from the same place you work (your computer) it seems ok to take measures to offload the task of avoiding them.

I think this really captures what a lot of tech-savvy people overlook about companies like Apple. They have their market. They make a ton of money selling to people who (mostly) don't care about being able to take their devices apart. Maybe those customers care about the consequences of this, but not many will think of the connection. They care about them looking cool and being fun to use and catering to this has been very good for Apple.

Apple is a hardware company who likes full control of things. It seems naive to think that they will make a big effort to be hacker or DIY friendly.

I'm 29. Since I finished my undergrad I've gone to grad school, done work for huge companies, small companies, universities, and worked at a startup. I think all of these first hand experiences will prove to be very valuable in my future entrepreneurial endeavors. As always, YMMV.

Guilt (or at least empathy) can work in a similar way. My girlfriend is in grad school right now and always has a ton of work to do at night. I feel bad spending my nights goofing off or watching TV while she's hard at work, so I've been really good at getting real work done on my projects while she's doing homework.

I wonder what % of each artist's total income these Pandora numbers represent. Is Pandora (or any other streaming service) a sustaining financial source for many of these artists when compared to music sales, touring, licencing, etc. or is it just a drop in the bucket?

I've always thought that a good programmer job interview challenge would be to hand the candidate a laptop (preferably with their OS of choice) and have them build something simple but new. For example: "Have you ever built a web scraper in Ruby? No? Ok, Ruby's installed on this computer. Here's a CLI, a text editor, and a browser with Google open, feel free to make use of existing language resources, build me something that pulls some text off of www.example.com"

I think it's good to see how people learn new things and to see if the candidate looks for existing libraries rather than writing everything from scratch. You'd need to be able to give the candidate some time but I think it would be a valuable exercise.

A bit of a tangent, but whenever I hear people complaining about greedy professors scamming students into buying their books I think about how much more money many of these highly educated people (particularly STEM people) could be making if they chose not to teach. Most people didn't become professors for the money.

No, it's not good if educators price students out of education, no it's not simple to find funding for education, but we shouldn't expect our educators to be martyrs and then bemoan our declining global education rankings.

A lot of things that are built on Django probably use Python: Disqus, Pintrest, Instagram, Fitocracy, some Mozilla stuff, and a lot of news sites (just to name a few).

While these sins are good things to be thinking about when building a site lists like this can be dangerous if they cause people to make a fundamental error; assuming you know what "most users" or the "average user" know or want without actually doing some basic usability/UX testing.

One of the most important things to consider when thinking about usability/UX is that if you built it then you're not a good authority on what it's like to use it.

I use Fitocracy mainly to track my running, but also for some other workouts here and there. I just like having the historical data of how far and how fast I'm going each run (in fact I wrote a simple API to get at my run info out of Fitocracy: https://github.com/dorkrawk/unofficial-fitocracy-runs-api ). When I'm training for a race I have an idea of what I need to be doing each week so it's nice to have that data in one place. I also appreciate seeing what my friends are doing because it acts as a motivator for me to not slack off.

The trick is to filter the cartridge opening with your shirt THEN blow into it.

There's nothing wrong with wanting recognition for work that you do. Especially when Github is a great way to show future employers your contributions to OSS. Why make that harder to see?

This is like saying Chemistry should be merged back in with Physics as one is just a deep study of the application of the other. The edges between related departments are always going to be blurred, but it's still practical to have things separated out into different departments. I think that we'll just continue to so lots of faculty with joint or honorary positions across several departments. Hopefully this will also encourage students to collaborate in a more interdisciplinary way, too.

Not a full fledged IDE, but Panic makes a beautiful iPad version of their editor/ftp client called Diet Coda http://panic.com/dietcoda/

Wow that's some of the nicest generated code I've seen. This could be a very useful tool.