mcantor

An ironic plight.

When you find a company worth working for, they won't care about the gap on your resume. They'll see you talking passionately about a personal project and give you exactly as much consideration as the shiny guy who's bored with his lame-o Fortune 500 gig. The right company won't turn you down for the wrong reasons. (They might still turn you down, but it will be because someone else felt like a better fit fair-and-square: Just like you'll feel at the place you finally end up working.)

   (if (eq username "mcantor") set-no-frontpage)

Obviously, saying that creates a degree of investment in this other person that isn't required. But it's a middle ground. Everyone seems to think there are two options: peace out completely (zero investment), or do business without saying anything (100% investment). If you just point out the behavior, you put the ball in their court. It's scary because you risk pissing them off, but really, what does that matter? You already made up your mind about not doing business with them.

There are two likely responses to such a judgment: the angry/confused/awkward denial ("What the hell are you talking about? I'm a precious flower and everyone loves me because they are so blessed by my presence! Now run away, and never return!") or reflection ("Really? What made you think so?"). If you get #1, well, you're no worse off than when you started, except some douchebag with a lot of money doesn't like you. But if you get #2, you have a real opportunity to nudge someone in a more compassionate and healthy direction.

It's up to each individual person, of course, but I think the potential opportunity is worth the risk.

This is true for both CoffeeScript examples he gave and their resulting JavaScript.

    To make things worse, the experienced person hesitates before wading
    into an Internet debate, while the inexperienced fanatic takes typing
    classes so that he can reply to everyone within 6 seconds of their
    posting a comment. So the debates are dominated by the people least
    able to offer insight.

Oh, dear.

The installation appeared to proceed successfully, but when I started emacs, I got errors about "ignore-errors" being void, and there was also an error in one of the various buffers about not being able to find "el4r-setup". I'm running OS X Lion, I created a new rvm gemset with 1.9.2-p290 to do the gem installation, and I didn't have to "sudo" anything for any of the installation steps.

Also, your install documentation could do with more hints on what to do once it's installed to figure out whether it's working or not. I started emacs, typed "ls" and double-clicked it, but I had (and have) no idea whether nothing happened because I was doing something wrong, or because it was broken.