sghill

> I really don't understand why co-op hasn't been adopted almost universally. It's hugely beneficial to all parties.

I completely agree. I went to a much more traditional school in the US, but recently got the chance to visit Waterloo to do a guest lecture. It feels like the university of the future. In the classroom, students were having discussions with opinions backed by actual work experience. After spending the day there I wished I had known about it or looked for a co-op when I was looking for school.

Great post. Thank you for sharing this.

> Surely, I would fill my days with an eclectic mix of hobbies and spontaneous travel, funding the whole thing with the ultimate passive income stream.

Was this the original goal for not having a 'real' job?

> But for some reason I can't do that. I'm not good at using my free time for hobbies. I typically spend it thinking about work, or prototyping the 'next thing'.

This part was most attention-grabbing for me. Did you have many hobbies before you became so deeply involved in tech?

I like to think I'd be outside playing golf a few times a week, but that's something I used to do before getting a tech job in a city.

He's done some really great work in engaging the public with the ISS. He has a bunch of videos on the Canadian Space Agency YouTube Channel[1]. Wringing out Water on the ISS - for Science![2] was the one that got me hooked. Hopefully the next commander keeps these excellent videos going.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/canadianspaceagency/videos?view...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8TssbmY-GM

> It doesn't even register on my offensive scale

Does it have to? In my experience, taking into consideration how the message receiver might be offended is more important. I'm not personally offended by the language of the tumblr, but I still wouldn't bring it into a business setting because of how others may feel.

> did we have this same hand-wringing over zed shaw's programming motherfucker website?

To me, the target audience of this site is far different. Some of the same rules apply, but Zed Shaw's site is unlikely to be the basis of an argument for or against any sort of business-level decision. With that being said, I probably wouldn't point an aspiring programmer (or anyone) toward Zed's site unless I knew they were very casual with profanity.

That'd be great! If it's possible to throw something on the footer of the page, that would also be useful to people who don't happen to find it through HN.

Nice work in collecting all of these. They make for a great showcase.

> This guys is totally free to make his points colourfully and passionately however he wants to.

I agree. He's created a very good and useful showcase of a specific frustration that many of us would prefer to never implement or deal with. For an exercise in venting, this style makes a lot of sense.

> His word choices are not hate speech or discriminatory so the fact that they may offend your sensibilities has precisely zero relevance to anything.

The language chosen to express his feelings means that I can't reference this site to anyone I work with in the enterprise world. For giving people materials in fighting against implementing these things, it collects a lot of great examples of why this is frustrating. Unfortunately, sharing it with the people who make these kinds of decisions has "career-limiting move" written all over it.

Maybe it will be (is?) licensed in a way that allows for business-friendly adaptation.

> It could also be that Spring works better with the waterfall model

I've used spring mvc in an agile setting a couple times now, and it has worked fine. It doesn't tend to make developers all that happy, in my experience. If you're in an enterprise full of spring, starting up the next app with it can be attractive -- there likely already exists a bunch of tooling and knowledge around spring.

I wouldn't use spring directly if I were trying to build something quickly for a startup. I'd be more apt to reach for grails (which wraps spring), dropwizard, or any of the other rapid-development frameworks.

Nice work on an interesting project! Google Maps' urls were always hideous for sharing before they introduced the shortener.

Maybe worth noting? I opened this up in Firefox (Aurora) for Android, which changes the URL bar to show only the page title until you tap it.

If you're interested specifically in building web services, I've had some good trials with Mozilla's cornice[1][2], which is built on top of Pyramid.

[1] http://cornice.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html

[2] https://github.com/mozilla-services/cornice

I would have described my work the same way, even if that's taking a bit of poetic license. I started developing in Aurora about six months ago to try out some of the new dev tools. The question of why is a surprisingly regular conversation with anyone who notices, starting anywhere from "Why don't you use Chrome" to "What the hell are you using this for?"

Timezones in javascript. We ended up stitching together 3 libraries into something that sort of looks like 10% of joda-time. Definitely not a solved problem.

The choice is less clear obvious when you've started to ask why use server-side templating at all? I've spent quite a bit of time on both Rails and Java webapps. The conclusion I've come to is I'd really rather the server just returned JSON and rendering happened client-side. I'm not working on Twitter-scale stuff, though.

The first one was the dealbreaker for me. I signed up using part of my real name instead of my full name. Within hours I was blocked from adding anything to Quora. As a result, I haven't been back since signing up.

I find the discussion over profanity in posts on HN interesting. When I initially read the post, I expected similar comments about professionalism and unnecessary vulgarity.

Instead, just about every response (save one on the actual linked page), addresses the issue at hand. It seems to suggests that there is an appropriate level of sensationalism to get your message heard. Anyone have some sort of algorithm that rates a post for how attention-grabbing vs. off-putting its words are?

My first degree was in Economics, and I graduated in an economically depressed area of the US. I quickly figured out I wanted to try my hand at development, so I went back to school the next year for a CS degree.

I really doubt I would have been granted the interviews or handful of offers I received if I didn't go back. Even with the degree my 'unusual schooling choices' were commented on by virtually everyone.

Timing/location matters quite a bit. Having been in the industry for a few years now, some of the best coders I've worked with have degrees from other tangentially-related fields.

I used Python for the first time to copy the information from one of my required timesheets into another required timesheet. It uses BeautifulSoup, mechanize, and selenium.

Just about every developer I know has Firefox on their machine, but that's just because our automated tests tend to be written for Firefox. Almost none of the teams I have been a part of use Firefox for development, and even fewer for personal browsing. Chrome's market share grab has been quite impressive.

My most recent experience was with a client who was locked into IE for years, made the switch to Google Apps, and subsequently discovered the speed of Chrome. Phrased as "lots of our users skipped Firefox," it sounded like Firefox was in no-man's land.

Really excited about the potential of the Model S and electric cars generally, but a little disappointed to see this marketing angle. Carreras aren't exactly known as supercars for their speed. It's a full second slower than everything making the Wikipedia list of fastest production cars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_cars_by_acceler...)

I've had my latest Apple laptop for a year now. I recently tried to burn a DVD for someone and realized the drive just immediately ejected everything I tried to put in -- blank DVDs, commercially-pressed CDs, etc.

I don't know if it's been damaged during or travel or it simply never worked, but the fact that it took me a full year to find out means I'll never put an optical drive on a "must have" list again. I think Apple is making the right call.

Seconded. The design is just great.

I also tried drag and drop. Both between today and tomorrow and a way to change the ordering. It'd be great to see that functionality.

Really nice work, guys!

I have the same first two questions as you, so I'm glad you asked.

I can say a large part of me starting developing with Rails is the community. Many, many publishers have books. When I was in school our library had more material on Ruby/Rails than anything else in web dev. The online community is also fantastic as you've noted. Example: someone has taken the time to make ASCIIcasts out of Railscasts is incredible...and very helpful, as I'd often rather read than watch.