635 karma · joined August 27, 2011
Otherwise, it's just people trying to take a temperature. It doesn't bother me, as the polls I notice are typically in some way relevant to the community at large.
Primarily a .NET developer, the lure of Node and Ruby have been calling to me lately
Edit: I should specify we'd need to obtain a multi developer license, and that comes with a large cost
I don't have an account and would never think of using FB as a platform for learning about programming news / information (barring if I needed to learn about their APIs, naturally), but I disagree with a statement that includes the phrase "No real programmer".
Then again, it's Monday morning and I'm tired and cranky.
12 inch laptop monitor?
You'll pry my 17 inch or higher "standard" from my cold dead hands. My current work laptop is a 15 inch, and it is in no way big enough for me to work effectively while undocked.
I constantly have 2 IDEs up, a SQL Management Console, as well as something I'm googling to research about what I'm working on. Let alone the occasional things I'll need up, like NHProf, a command console or two, Notepad++, and an RDP window that. That barely works on a 15 inch monitor (and by barely, I mean it doesn't). No way in hell will it work on a 12. You can context switch till the cows come home, but eventually you spend more time switching between windows and applications than you do actually getting work done.
I appreciate the ideas hes putting forth, which are to make more from less and really prioritize what you're putting your screen real estate towards, but 12 inch monitor as your day to day work screen?
That dog won't hunt, Monseigneur
Nice work
Not saying it'll be like this for you, but you need to decide when its time for you to call it quits, and not necessarily get trapped into thinking you can single handedly hold up a sinking ship
I believe it's "Quartz" specific (a scheduling framework) so your mileage might vary
But that's testing. Your QA team (even if its a team of 1) should have access to some kind of Mac environment. That doesn't mean your devs need to use Macs.
Ideally, anyways.
Safari?
Don't forget the reason why Mac Development is so vogue right now really does have to do with the fact that the OS is based on BSD now, and thus it's a lot easier to get things from the wider Linux world onto the Mac platform. The Linux platform has really been exploding lately, and that's helped Mac out tremendously (In my opinion; Please let me know if I'm talking out of my ass here).
However, don't just go get a Linux box either.
Find what works for you, and go with it.
If anything (like another poster here have mentioned), Linux seems to have the most advantage out of "The Big 3", but it really doesn't matter in the long term. You should try to be fluent in at least one environment (OS) , and capable in the others.
Thanks to virtualization, you can run Linux or MacOS on Windows, or any vice-versa-ed combination you might choose. Pick the platform that has the best tools for the language you want, and go with it.
One caveat: If you work in an office with all macs, don't be the guy with the windows machine making the rest of the teams life more difficult. Same goes for an all Linux or all Windows shop. For your professional development needs, you should strive to work in unison with your team.
Personal needs? Go with your heart.
Axes are terrible, btw. I only started losing once I somehow got some Axes. Gotta tune those.
There are no magic bullets. Regardless of how bad you might think something is, someone else out there can give you a wide range of reasons why it should be used.
That said, Node is fun, but its no savior.
I'm fairly new to working with Node, so any kind of context for use-cases around some of these libraries is always a help
It feels very websocketish, but with some more infrastructure around it. Would people use this instead of something like socket.io, or are the 2 solving different problems?
Looks pretty cool, either way.
Of the ones that work: Cool
If people actually think Rails VS Node is an apples to apples situation, then the real problem is that they see the world as full of hammers.
These are all different tools for different purposes. See them as such, use them as such. You wouldn't drill a screw into the wall with a level, you wouldn't hammer a nail in with a plunger, and you damn sure wouldn't try to tighten a nut with a chisel.
BTW, this overabundance of Node love is fairly new to this week. Last few weeks, we saw a deluge of "Node is the worst thing that ever happened" posts. Let that be a lesson. REST hate also seems to be a new topic this week (Although it's not really "REST" they're hating on, just how people are using it in a half-assed or improper implementation - but I digress).
Don't listen to the hype, and don't listen to the doom and gloom. Research, find out what will work for you, and run with it; But don't be afraid to change course when you have to. Theres no shame in admitting you made the wrong choice, so long as you can fix it down the road.
I mean purely the shell of the U/I - Although it would be good if both of those things were configurable in the same way, so you could truly share a completely customized and tuned color scheme
I don't find the colors of VS2k10 "distracting" me or making it "difficult" to find things at all. I am glad, however, they're removing a bunch of those useless buttons by default (of course you can always remove them yourself, but I digress).
I can appreciate what they're attempting here, but why go this far without a road back? If you're going to completely overhaul the look and feel this much, and go so far as to let people choose between 2 different color schemes, why not at least give people the option of using the classic scheme, or allow for custom user developed schemes (which would invariably give rise to a few "classic" ones anyways). Maybe they mentioned this and I missed it... I hope thats the case.
I've always felt the U/I got better with each iteration since the original VS, but this is the first time I'm not excited to get my hands on the next version based solely on the look and feel.
Of course, I'll have to reserve final judgement for when I actually get my hands on it.
Simple as that
One of my first work laptops was a handed-down lenovo, so that may or may not have been lenovos fault... However the person doing the handing down was certain not buying a new lenovo. It performed ok, but never anything stellar.
It had a lot of weird quirks - it would suddenly flip it's CapsLock state, so i'd need to turn it on to shut it off. It would stay like that till I rebooted.
Eventually, the red button died... but it didn't just die, it forcibly dragged my mouse to the bottom of the screen. I had to fight with the thing to find the option to disable the button in the control panel before I could regain control of the computer. Plugging in an external mouse didn't help, the red button overrode all mouse commands.
Finally ,the thing all but gave out on me. I got a 2nd hand me down laptop, a Dell, before finally getting a real PC to work from.
That was my old job...
This current job, I have a T410, and I hate the thing. Everyone here has the same laptop (one guy has a slightly better model, but he hates his as well). They lock up, they have poor performance, they come with worthless bloatware, things fail for no reason... it goes on and on. Here are some examples:
Performance: It came with 4GBs of RAM. My old Dell had 4GBs, and I could keep 2-3 Visual Studios open at a time, no problem. This thing struggled to keep a single instance open. Keeping 2 open, damn near unusable. It would routinely take me 40-50 seconds to switch applications around (this is not an exaggeration. It would lock up and become unresponsive for a number of reasons, mainly switching between applications). For a developer, this is killer.
Sometimes while typing, the USB port my keyboard is attached to will die. Sometimes redocking fixes this. Sometimes I need to reboot.
Same thing for my bluetooth mouse. Sometimes I can pull the nub out and re-insert it and fix the problem, other times I have to reboot. Unlike the keyboard, the bluetooth nub stays with the laptop itself, so it isn't just that the dock has issues (Although it could... it was made by Lenovo)
Speaking of undocking, sometimes the screen goes dark, and never comes back. Other times, when I redock it, it's forgotten the video settings. Occasionally, it will only partially forget them, and turn on one of the 2 external monitors. I'd say I need to fix the monitor setup atleast 2-3 times per week.
Sometimes when it goes to sleep, it can't wake up.
When it isn't docked, and I'm using the built in screen, the color pallet gets off-kilter, and there is massive dithering over wide portions of the screen. Whole swaths of things get dithered, with green and red dots filling in the blanks. The severity of this seems to change day to day - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's the entire screen, sometimes it's just a portion...
This isn't just my issue, mind you - Every single person in our team has these laptops, and experiences these issues.
ThinkPads used to be great, when IBM owned the brand. They were rock solid tanks.
Lenovo destroyed the name and the quality.
If I never use another Lenovo for as long as I live, I could die a happy man
Sadly, the only advice I have is: Anything but Lenovo.
I've had a few over the years from different jobs, and they typically always seem to have exceptionally poor performance.
Teach them the core basics, and give them a template they can use to get new programs up and running. You want to teach core programming concepts, but not lose them in the overwhelming nature of getting going from scratch.
Once they have the basics grasped (base types, variables, setting values, comparisons, arithmetic, etc), give them a small project based on something they're interested in. Maybe it's sports, so have them write something that would help a manager keep track of his players, their stats, etc
Maybe its cars, so have them write a program that helps someone keep track of car parts, or car information, etc.
The key will be engaging them and getting them to understand how to apply what they learn to real world situations and needs.
Just my 2 cents
The people I want to stay in touch with, I stay in touch with. Those I don't, I don't.
It really is that simple. You don't need facebook, or anything else, to stay in touch with the people who are important to you.
I call shenanigans on anyone who thinks facebook is a required part of life. Or Twitter. Or any other "social network" for that matter.
If you use it and enjoy it, that's great for you. Keep using it, keep enjoying it.
I'll stick to emails, phonecalls, IMs, and text messages. Hasn't failed me yet.