stewiecat

The only thing I work on that my job provided is the laptop, which they purchased for me after realizing my own was a bit too old. External monitor, mouse, keyboard, stand, etc. all came from home.

Even in shops where software is the business I've been given a standard Dell laptop for development. The IT folks didn't want to bother with procuring different laptops for different business functions, so everybody got the same thing.

It could be abrasive if the rapport isn't there. But a good manager will build that over time until the point were blunt honest questions can be answered bluntly and honestly with no cause for concern.

I use both. Time machine in my home to back up mine and the wife's macs and Arq to offsite backup a subset of my home directory (docs, music, photos, settings).

Google has the same thing. Larry, Sergey, Eric all have shares that carry 10x the votes of regular Class A shares so they can still exercise control if their holdings fall below 50%.

It's 3 committees + Larry. This was the case in December 2009 when I interviewed there.

Local hiring committee, regional hiring committee, HQ hiring committee then final sign-off by Larry himself.

In the book "Voyager : seeking newer worlds in the third great age of discovery" they said that as the crafts got further out they had to use large radio antenna's in Spain, Hawaii, and Australia to lock onto the signal, creating an Earth-scale virtual antenna.

Truly amazing stuff.

I worked for a guy that called us all "button pushers".

This is the battle I fight every day. I'd rather have a workload that's 110% of my capacity than be at 50%, which I generously where I'm at now.

We're an "agile" shop that grossly under-allocates out of fear of failing a sprint.

Indeed it is. At home I don't have my office neighbor yelling questions through the wall at me.

Retirement savings is the longest-term of all long-term investments.

My 401K got torn to pieces during this recession. My first reaction was "How can I buy more?". That's when I started maxing out the 401K and buying additional stock in the form of index funds. Those actions have made my personal recovery from the market plummet much quicker with the upside that I now own stock with a lower dollar-cost-average.

* 401(k) through employer, maxed out (or close to) every year.

* Additional $200/month into a (taxable) mutual fund

* Whole life insurance through a solid insurer (Northwestern Mutual in my case).

* Rolled over all old 401(k)'s into a rollover IRA through my financial advisor.

Plan is to not have to work past 55.

I prefer Textual. Open source if you want to build it yourself or throw the dev's 5 bucks and get it from the mac app store.

Same here. My alma mater, Stevens Institue of Technology, isn't listed on the site anywhere and it's a pure engineering and science school.

I've seen similar things with my gmail being fast while my lower-volume hosted gmail accounts are slow. The converse also happens at random times.

We did this in high school back in '95. We got the regular chemistry teacher to sign it to the chagrin of our AP chemistry teacher.

My employer's been trying to hire a tech writer for two months now. You happen to be located in Philly?

I did a pseudo-agile process for a project where I was the solo developer. A lot of agile practices scale down quite nicely: defined scope, sprints, unit testing, etc. The key is to keep everything small: short sprints, small features or small parts of large features. ALWAYS deliver a shippable product at the end of each sprint, even if its just for morale purposes.

Yup, in Mahwah area, up Route 17 near the NY border. The NYSE built a massive data center there specifically for colocation of high frequency trading operations, even going so far as ensuring each customers switch runs are the same length. It was on 60:Minutes a while ago.

I got screwed by a policy like that years ago when I moved from the DoD back into the private sector. I was honest (and naive) when filling out the HR paperwork and listed my low gov't salary. Come to find out later they knocked 15K off the salary.

I can't wait to see the DHH post on the 37signals blog about this one.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

I lived in Hoboken and worked in Manhattan for years with a shorter commute than most folks who either lived in Manhattan or Brooklyn. 10 minutes apartment->PATH, 11 mins PATH (Hoboken to WTC), 10 minutes WTC-> Wall & Water sts.

Hoboken is crime-ridden?? I spent 6 years there from 1996-2002 and have friends that still live there and can say that crime is not an issue in almost all of Hoboken. Sure, if you go to the projects on the back end of Hoboken things get rougher, but I never, ever felt unsafe there.

Even JC has cleaned up a lot, especially the areas by the PATH trains like Exchange place and Newport.

My wife has them for work: similar to a pinned nametag but with a magnetic backing that goes under your shirt/lapel that the name tag sticks to. This way you can put it where ever you want without punching pinholes in your clothes. The magnets are quite strong too as my wife fastens her name tag to her visor brim without falling off.

Don't watch TV.

My father never watched TV. He finally put a tv in the living room of his home long after all three of us were out of the house. Growing up, I'd be doing homework while my father read and smoked his pipe, the tv downstairs off.

He'd unplug for a week/month as punishment for even the smallest mistakes, but he would always bring us to the library.

Our cook in college would use the most beat up cheap aluminum pots, pans, and roasters but he insisted on bringing his metal briefcase of knives with him to work every day.

Took me just about 7 years. Had ~27K in debt.

The key for me was locking in the low interest rate when I consolidated the 8-10 federal loans I had into one big one at 4%. Made the payments automatic and threw in extra cash when I could. Once I was above the cutoff for being able to write off the interest I started tripling and quadrupling the payments.

In hindsight they should've been done with sooner, but I got into a really expensive hobby after college (long-course and ironman triathlons) which ate into my disposable income.

Same here, we had to take eight 3-credit humanities courses to graduate. I ended up taking history, literature, and some sociology. We even had to take physical education for 4 or 6 (I forget) semesters at 1 credit a pop.

Philadelphia, PA

Around 10 years experience, mainly with java but also flex/actionscript, ruby, Objective-C. Unix experience as an admin at a few companies when I was in college/recent grad. Experience with both commercial and F/OSS tools/stacks.

Recent work: Building java/flex applications on a completely open-source stack (Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, BlazeDS).

Past work: Building enterpise-y systems on WebSphere and JBoss. Also spent a few years as a java application performance analyst and tuner.

http://www.github.com/mikereedell

Another MS mouse mac user! I absolutely love MS mice and have two identical models at home and work. Their OS and office software may suck but the mice are awesome.