terryjsmith

I think this is a great opportunity, but is dependent on a good school and/or good faculty to help you out. I usually suggest people take one of two paths:

1) Startup work - This means a genuine interest in learning and doing outside of the classroom because it's dependent on what you've done and what you can do. You have to adapt to changing technologies, but the work (imo) is more interesting and the degree requirements can be substituted for the right combination of enthusiasm, personalily and experience.

2) The corporate route - will require a degree to get past the HR department unless you have a foot in the door. You'll work 9 - 5, be done at the end of the day and will likely have a secure job in either a legacy language or a current language that may become legacy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this route and I encourage most people to take it. You do your best in school and use all available opportunities (summer work, coops, internships, etc.) and network your way into a likely fantastic company.

To differentiate I test most people to pick a project or field they have an interest in and we brainstorm an idea. If they can do it, finish it, and write about or open source it and they're still interested, I highly recommend the startup/aternative routes. If not, no harm no foul, but you're likely better suited for a corporate job.

I think both are equally valid and good, but different people need to do different things, which is why high school is so boring for a lot of people in the first place.

I am surprised by the negative response this is getting.

High school caters to a very broad audience with it's general curriculum and IMO is one of the worst ways to teach kids. I can say without a doubt that I find applications for about 15 - 20% of everything I learned in highschool past grade 10 in my life, but I'd already been programming outside of school since I was 12 or 13. Most things will simply not apply to most students, but the system needs to cater to all of the possibilities. The only reason I graduated high school was with the hope that university would allow me to actually study things I was interested in, but that's simply not the case to meet the degree requirements. In the end, I dropped out of university and got a great paying job in a startup and have done a good deal of contracting work as well; I don't feel my future career prospects are at all hampered by my lack of education.

I agree that most high school students would not live their lives to their fullest potential if they dropped out, but for those that will, this is applicable. I am definitely an edge case, but I feel that is who he is address here, and I wish someone would have told me to drop out of high school and get an earlier start.

I totally agree and I do not believe God doesn't exist explicitly; I just don't rank finding the answer as a high priority in my life right now. Having recently taken up taekwondo, I am intruiged by Buddhism, Asian religions, and other alternatives to Christianity.

I personally find existing religions I have looked at (mostly Christian religions) insatisfactory and haven't found the need to dig too deeply into what else is out there. I am fine with not knowing why certain things are the way they are without replacing it with faith.

As I find with many atheists, I believe there may be some higher power, but it does not affect my daily life (outside of the way in which religious beliefs have become societal norms or vice versa).

If you're a programmer I recommend you (try to) create your own console like Webmin. I learned everything I've ever needed to know about various mail servers, web servers, databases, various configuration files and system level stuff. You don't have to use it or go very far with the actual project in terms of polishing, but it makes for an excellent educational project.

I second this; my wife and I are living apart from each other for a year while I work and she finishes school and I find this is especially important. We talk when/if we can almost every night, see each other twice a month (once I go to her and once vice versa) and on Sunday mornings we put the webcams on and one of us walks the other through a recipe for breakfast.

Edit: For long distance, don't forget to see the same movie on the same night and then talk about it afterwards.

Most countries would define "working" as earning money from an employer within that country itself, hence depriving citizens of that country of a prospective job.

I'm curious as to why you think that; do you have a personal experience with one or more of the team members, is it based solely on their product, is it their handling of public relations, etc.? Make no mistake, IE as a product/team/etc. (and MS in general) have made a lot of mistakes, but "monster" is both ambiguous in meaning and quite damning without any context.

I'm sorry, but I've seen any number of scripts throw a JS error (especially an "Object Expected" error). Maybe an element isn't there (someone missed an if(el)), maybe an analytics service threw it, etc., etc. Microsoft does some silly things, but I don't think not testing is one of them.

Definitely needs a progress indicator and some help with large files. Check out SWFUpload; while finicky, I've had great success with it (as has Wordpress, YouTube, etc.).

http://www.swfupload.org/

Unfair question: I'm a developer so I would very likely to build my own :) But from a business perspective I would definitely consider buying it; Bitly in particular has a lot of valuable technology that Twitter could monetize on.

Bitly seems to be the default in these discussions and it's clearly the market leader, but there are other companies to consider. I think even starting discussions with another company would force Bitly's asking price down considerably. They may talk about how Twitter is _only_ 30% to 40%* of their traffic, but no business wants to lose those kind of numbers.

* http://www.businessinsider.com/google-and-twitter-wanted-to-...

Why would they foster such a strong ecosystem of applications only to stab them in the back? I think purchasing existing third party apps to fill these holes would make more sense both in terms of fostering less ill will the community and getting better apps than they can likely build internall.

Edit: other posts* state that Twitter has not yet decided if it will use an existing URL shorter or build out its own.

* http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/04/15/twitter-launch-link-sh...

It reads to me like he is defending his team. I would bet that the people behind the scenes are feeling pretty down and for the most part unfairly: there was so much hype built up about this company, if they didn't completely nail it the first time they were doomed to fail in the eyes of the community.

I agree with the others here that he would get more sympathy if he was less snarky, but I imagine he's dealing with a lot of emotion from his team. I couldn't imagine trying to build a company with so much pressure, such an intelligent group of people and all of the negative press at the same time; what a nightmare.

Is there a business reason behind playing catch up in big companies? I understand there's a market opporunity, but so many of these "copy cat" products fail to live up to their potential simply because they are side projects (especially something like this to Google). It seems this is quite a trend for Palm, MS, Google and other megacorps and it rarely turns out well.

Updated, thank you.

Same technique, tested in IE6 to IE8, FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera; no conditionals:

    html, body, #canvas { height: 100%; }

    body > #canvas {
        height: auto; 
        min-height: 100%;
    }

    #canvas {
        width: 100%;
        position: absolute;
    }

    #footer {
        position: absolute;
        bottom: 0;
    }

HTML:

    <body>
        <div id="canvas">
            <!-- all of your other code -->
            <div id="footer"></div>
        </div>
    </body>

Been working on open sourcing a PHP framework I created a while back. Uses MVC, but the primary goals are to be lean and schemaless. It pulls columns from the database and assigns them to variables dynamically so you don't have to update the schema and then worry about the database (most frameworks require you to flush and rebuild). More to come in the next week. It can be found here if you're interested:

http://github.com/terryjsmith/jaxified

That's what I figured. Scraping might violate the TOS and would require an actual search bot/crawler/parser as opposed to simple API access. I was more complaining about the limits of Twitter in general; I think this is a huge step in the right direction, kudos.

I've definitely been looking for something like this. Just wish it had access to further history :)

IE8 destroys the design: http://i.imgur.com/qNEW1.jpg

It looks fine in FF, but as a general rule I won't bother using a site that is untested or doesn't support IE (especially without good reason). You're eliminating 70%+ of your potential market in one fell swoop.

Seconded. There is nothing quite so uncool to a kid (or anyone I would imagine) as branding yourself cool :)

We did this with a PHPBB install (which are awful for spam). We added one custom question to the registration (check this box if you're not human) and we instantly got rid of 99.9 percent of our bot spam problems.