Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Pair programming is amazing. Looking at your own codes for hours on end makes you overlook the smallest mistakes. When debugging instead of reading the code we recite it in your mind, because we think we know what we wrote. When someone else sits next to me and point out obvious mistakes I made I yell "fire!" and use the distraction to quicly fix the error. No, I don't really do that, I would have to come up with too many puns and my creative moments are as rare as gold. But I am not afraid of making mistakes.
The notion of working remotely or from home is amazing. You don't have to drive to work, you don't have to think about parking ,you can work in your pajamas, and so on. But do you end up being productive?
When I was still in college, I had a friend who was trying to convince me to get on board for the new life changing idea she had. It was a big secret. She called me into a room and looked over her shoulders to make sure no one was eavesdropping.
What do you do when you hit a wall? When you found a bug and you can't figure out how to fix it. You spend hours and hours in front of the screen and nothing seems to work. Sometimes this can be the worse nightmare for a programmer and putting more hours trying to fix it won't make a difference.
When you are working on your own as a developer you get exposed to many aspect of the business. You don't really draw border lines. As a web developer you blend in all kind of technology and you consider it all just web development. When you work in a big or established company it is a little different. They don't need full stack developers. They have a person or a group of people that work in just one thing; DBA or Unix for example. If you do this for a while you can become an expert in your field, but lose something in other areas.
The tech world has developed a hollywood-ish image over the years. When you say work in the tech industry, everyone imagine a cool new start-up where hip youngsters dressed in the latest fashion thread, program by day and hit the clubs by night. They play video games at lunch and work on cool projects that disrupt big companies and change the world. Maybe that's how it is when you work at Google, Facebook, or some other company, however that's not what I am experiencing.
Getting traffic on your website is one of the hardest things. You read lots of stories on hacker news on what X website did to get a massive amount of visitors in a short timespan. Almost always each articles use different strategies, so it is hard to pinpoint what makes them successful. I don't get much traffic and I do try to follow these advices. However if you ask me how to drive people away, I can definitely help you with that.
Yes, I think it is fair to say that you can learn javascript in just 30 days. At least it did it for me. Not exactly 30 days but it was close enough, so I rounded it to a nice 30. Javascript can be very confusing to an experienced programmer, because it is very different then other languages. However it is not so hard if it is your first language. Learning the basic should be easy, but when you get into scoping and closure it is something else.
In the start up world articles that talk about failure are very inspiring. It is very hard to admit that you failed and move on. On hackernews, these post almost always make it to the front page. There are a lot of praises in the comments section and people thank the poster for being so courageous. But how useful are those articles?
We live in a fast paced world. Constantly checking email, text message, facebook update, working, driving and what not. We are always busy. There is no time to do anything we love, we are constantly on the run. Sometimes we work 16 to 18 hours a day, but does that mean that we are productive?
