I used to work for a small company and was their only IT person. This was an internet business with a dozen employees and I was responsible for taking care of the office computers and network, as as well as taking care of web properties they had and maintaining an e-commerce platform from the late 90's. The whole period was terribly stressful. I worried a lot about everything I couldn't fix quickly, and lost every bit of work life separation possible.
There's nothing wrong with learning bleeding edge--it's fun! But don't bank on it to provide a job. I'm not a front end dev, so YMMV and etc, but I think it's always good to learn a popular language/framework and then play with the new and fringe stuff. At the very least, you'll have another bit of knowledge to compare things to. At worst you'll have had some fun learning something new.
If you get really good with whatever you're learning, you can just bid on freelance contracts where no language or toolset is specified.
Weight lifting specifically, but trying to be more healthy generally speaking. I'm addicted. I feel great, and am starting to change appearance. If anyone is interested, I use bodybuilding.com's excellent database of exercises and try to avoid injury with good form, low weight at first, and watching out for bad pain.
Highly recommend it to all. Especially mostly sedentary knowledge workers like myself.
When I signed up for their business class service about a year ago, it was not required that I use their modem, but they did suggest it (noting that any failure of equipment would be taken care of on their end). It was the bosses dime and my time if a failure happened, so I just went with their leasing options.
Thanks for posting this! I skimmed through the paper and it seems like this is geared towards users who are completely blind (or at least those with poorer visual acuity than myself). Still, fascinating work. Best of luck to you and your team--this has a lot of potential to help people.
My supreme thanks to the author for writing this and to all those who have submitted additional items to the list in the comments here. I'm writing my first few Django apps in series and have found this bits of advice to be very valuable.
I'm looking for a Python+Django developer who can help me with a project. Would prefer someone who has intermediate to advanced Django knowledge, very readable code, good documentation skills, and good Django practices in general so that I might learn some of them along the way.
Shoot over your githubs, demos, portfolios and hourly rates to M8R-6sn1py@mailinator.com (sorry about the disposable email).
While I am on a budget, I'd gladly pay a higher rate to a good dev and have fewer hours of work each week.
If the US were to integrate coding into the school curriculum, our K-12 schools could rise to the global ranks that our university system currently occupies. But it can't just be an addon elective, it needs to be integrated across many subjects. So much of learning that's considered to be dull or boring can be made fun with programming. Write a program to simulate a ball flying through the air and aside from giving students the building blocks to make their own games/animations, they've also learned about gravity, projectile motion, and maybe even calculus. Add some wind into the mix to learn about resistance. Write a simple program that simulates cells dividing and you've got some biology and math happening. Creating some basic tones and sounds with code is a frighteningly tiny distance away from learning about music theory.
The software platform could be open sourced. Maybe even written in the programming language that students work in so students could modify it and submit patches, but also to mess with their little minds and get them thinking about self-hosting compilers.
And how much would this cost if done correctly? It's probably a terribly small figure per student over the course of their education. It may even save some money on textbooks if it's a tablet device to double as an e-reader. Maybe even more if those textbooks were open sourced and not sold at laughable prices... It's amazing how far we are behind at present.
My fear is that people assume (good or bad) that every student will come out a programmer, which is just missing the point. EE/CS degrees would be worth even more in such a world.
Your examples of dull and boring subjects seems like a list of interesting and exiting projects.
Newtonian physics (generalized from projectile motion): Using with these 3 obvious facts (maybe a historic tangent on how they are not obvious), we construct new rules that describe the way things work. Don't believe the results? You agree with these 3 assumptions right? Is their any flaw in your work? Then your result is correct, is their a way we can go about testing it?
Good job working with Newtonian physics. Now, say that their is wind blowing 5 mph east, how does this effect our results? Well, the coefisiant of wind resistence for sufficiently slow speeds are _. Wait, we already know how to do this, this is just another force, moving on...
If you take a code first approach, you routinely miss the good stuff.
Why are Javascript CRUD apps more interesting than learning how the world we actually live in actually works? I don't know, seems subjective to me.
Most of this "math is too boring for anyone to want to learn" stuff is a cultural issue anyway. It also might be a mass education issue. Either way, programming is not some special snowflake subject to solve such issues.
Hah. PHP brain rot. But alas, I do know many other languages. I'm a professional programmer. I was just using that as an example I felt meaningful at introducing myself to other programmers. Your suggestion is a good one though-I do need to start playing more with my coding time.
I've been looking for django books that use 1.4 but didn't find anything, so great news for me. Purchased it right away and can't wait to give it a read this weekend. Thanks!
