Sure thing, have plenty more thoughts to share so feel free to ask anything else...believe it or not, that was a trimmed down version of my responses. Let me know how things turn out for you. I gave my little sister the lay of the land right before she left for college and she's killing it (in *very* small part thanks to me), and I'm always happy to pass on what I can, so assuming all turns out well we can talk more re: prep. Caveat emptor -- DBC has changed a lot since I finished, but I am back there weekly now so I still have a decent pulse on things.

Agreed re: market inefficiencies -- those of us coming through these programs are direct beneficiaries of the U.S.' inability to adequately educate students to the point where they feel comfortable pursuing STEM degrees. Unfortunately, I don't think that aspect is going to be remedied in the very near future.

My application video is somewhere on my old laptop at my apartment -- on the off chance I don't go horizontal the second I get to my room tonight, I'll let ya know, otherwise will in the next couple days.

Sure thing, have plenty more thoughts to share so feel free to ask anything else...believe it or not, that was a trimmed down version of my responses. Let me know how things turn out for you. I gave my little sister the lay of the land right before she left for college and she's killing it (in *very* small part thanks to me), and I'm always happy to pass on what I can, so assuming all turns out well we can talk more re: prep. Caveat emptor -- DBC has changed a lot since I finished, but I am back there weekly now so I still have a decent pulse on things.

Agreed re: market inefficiencies -- those of us coming through these programs are direct beneficiaries of the U.S.' inability to adequately educate students to the point where they feel comfortable pursuing STEM degrees. Unfortunately, I don't think that aspect is going to be remedied in the very near future.

My application video is somewhere on my old laptop at my apartment -- on the off chance I don't go horizontal the second I get to my room tonight, I'll let ya know, otherwise will in the next couple days.

soooo I just placed in my firm's apprenticeship program. Here's the catch:

I didn't get my first choice and I'm nearly positive it was mutual. The company emailed me today saying "Hey, we got matched with YYYY for the summer, but really liked you and want to work with you blah blah".

Basically, I read it as "we put you down as #1 and dunno wtf happened"

Here's what I think happened: the coordinator wants to maximize the number of matches and is willing to sacrifice quality of match to make that happen. The person who got this company told me "I'm glad they liked me cuz I didn't really have any other options".

I wanted to be like "uhhh, that's why you got it!"

I think it's BS, esp since none of these apprenticeships are binding and the company can just arrange hiring outside of my program...

Thoughts on what to do?

I just responded to their email expressing surprise, saying I wanted to work with them, blah blah.

Ugh, hate situations like those. Impossible to say without knowing the specifics, but have to consider how much you value ties to your firm and how much you think the company does. The fact that they emailed you in such a manner suggests that maybe they're open to rocking the boat a bit.

Without having seen your email response, if it was written in a way such that you're expecting a response, let that response inform your next actions. Seems like the first couple rounds of tit-for-tat were solid, the next email should let you know if there's an opportunity for something here or if they're just looking to maintain the relationship for down the road, which companies always are in talent-starved industries. Give them a chance to play their hand and re-evaluate whether you need and want to take things into your own hands if they aren't going to.

Yeah, ultimately decided not to rock the boat / screw over my friend. On a diff note, employer I'm going with asked (in the interview, before extending apprenticeship offer) how much I'd consider for a FT salary. I gave some vague "whatever's competitive with the market blah blah" answer but what should I look at, roughly?

Or is there a better way to handle this?

Also, any idea why sh** randomly breaks when uploading apps on Heroku? A bunch of my friends and I are running into this and no idea why...

sqlite3 locally and postgres on heroku? Problems precompiling assets? heroku logs to the rescue?

postgres throughout. nah, more that it looks like it works but then you go to use the app and you get errors like "page inaccessible" or w/e the case may be

i tried creating a new git repository and then pushing to Heroku but same issue

What do the logs say?

Heroku is a bitch to get right at first, but once you get it, it's pretty easy. Sort of like getting your mind wrapped around github.

-- Do not upload more than the critical files.

>> The logic of this is multi-fold, which you'll see later, but the main idea is to consider Heroku a "real" user. If you were to upload your project to github (which is what you are doing here), you would not upload the entire RoR project, you'd only upload the critical files that include the project file and the files that you wrote. You'd expect the user to know the incantations to setup, install, and compile a RoR file. The same idea applies here.

-- Create a whole new directory, and only copy the critical files over, ie, the bare minimum.

-- I'm assuming you already uploaded your pg.dump to EC2 and you have this hooked up to Heroku. This was the most difficult part for me to get correct, so you may want to run through their tutorial again to make it correct. The final thing you want to note is that Heroku won't understand your username / password combination. You'll have to log into Heroku's website to gain access to the path, username, and password. Copy / paste all of that to your db connection files.

I'd probably just delete all of the Heroku programs that I've created up to this point. I'd nav to the new folder system with the critical files, create a new project, then do the Heroku uploads from that folder.

So, basically, you should have two basic folders: one will hold what works on the machine with all the extra "stuff" that allows it to run on the local machine, and the second folder has the bare essentials to allow Heroku to run / compile / etc to get the project up and running.

So I don't agree with this; no one in my class / none of our instructors did this. we always pushed the entire project to Github and then the entire thing to Heroku...

There are several reasons I suggest doing it like that, if for nothing else, you have a limited slug size, but there are a few other reasons.

It sounds like you know what you are doing, and assuming you made no mistakes, this is an issue with Heroku. What you are describing happened to me one month ago. The only thing I was able to do at the time was roll back to a working version. A few days later, an email came in telling me that the issue was resolved.

You do not need to edit your database.yml file, heroku handles that for you, here is the standard for what to check in/not check in


https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/gitignore

when you start talking about API keys and such:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars


after your git push is successful, make sure you migrate your database, if you still get 500,

$ heroku logs

that will tell you what's wrong. And....it's going to be your assets, it always is lol, especially if it runs locally but not remotely.

Limited slug size really doesn't matter all that much, there is no correlation between slug size and page load/site speed (although, it takes a little longer to deploy/scale it)

What do you mean about the pg.dump and EC2? Are you accessing the EC2 instance on amazon directly?

Most of the database stuff should be handled through the heroku gem (polling the database, migrations etc), and heroku also handles the production connection for you, so you dont need to fill out your production database section in your database.yml file (you typically do need a local production pg database though setup, or else certain stuff wont run locally)



Git is your control mechanism, everything should be done in the same directory, things that you do not deem necessary to upload, should all go in your .gitignore., what path/user name, keepign two separate directories and keeping them in sync defeats the purpose of git.

Fair enough. I guess the instructions are different depending on what language you are using. I didn't consider the fact that some things would be automated with RoR, though now that I think of it, that's like "duh, of course."

What I meant about slug size was nothing about page-load, just that there is a maximum slug-size and it would suck to max it out and not be able to deploy. I just figured that if you have a bunch of non-essential files, then at some size, you'd have to strip it down, but perhaps that is an unfounded fear on my part.

I still think his issue is just something funky with Heroku / github that is likely out of his control.

Ah, I didn't realize you are coming from a different language, that makes more sense, I really haven't ****ed around with anything but rails on heroku (and a wordpress deployment).


any chance you want to put a 100$ down that it's his assets, or something I could fix pretty easily? (it's late, and I'm bored as ****, can you tell lol)

lol. I'm not a gambling guy (but, yeah, I'd probably back you if I was).

This thread kinda sucks. I'd like to contribute but in order to do so I'll need everyone here to do a couple things first:

1. Google your problem before you post anything here
2. Stop posting code directly in here. Use one of the many snippet sites and link to it

You'll thank me later.

#1. Be glad to get $60k. But you're in SF so you'll probably get $80k at a start up who is great at spending money that isn't theirs (it's one of the two easiest things to do

#2. Heroku has mystified how computers work by coming up with fancy terms for how servers work. The short story is that every time you deploy your application to heroku your code base ends up on a different "dyno" (which is usually just an Amazon EC2 instance that is running Ubuntu 10). In order to do this stably heroku has "build packs" (more fancy lingos for things that download code from git repos and install binaries and dependencies) that decide what your app needs to run in any given brand new environment. A trade off of this is that non-codebase critical files don't get committed and the only two directories that are write-able are tmp and log. tmp also gets wiped out in between requests.

Heroku is a gateway drug and a dependency. It's great for fart apps that you need quick hosting for but anything of importance should be handled else where before you end up with a huge hosting bill for Heroku + all of these other SaaS companies that you have to use because you don't have permanent write access to your server.

Lol, what a joke.

What do you mean by point 1, I don't get it?


irt two, that is pretty spot on

I am currently in the middle of building a service, that will let you have heroku like ease of use, but allow you to choose your cloud provider (starting w/ rackspace and amazon, then eventually adding others like linode etc).

1. 9.99/mo per server (you pay hosting costs directly to the cloud provider)

Login to my site:

1. Enter the github URL for the app

2. click "deploy a server", one deploys, with sane defaults, based on your ruby code, and best practices for servers

3. provides you with a git repo, of all the chef recipes used to deploy so you can customize the server yourself if you want.


the "deploy a server" part will have options for postgres, passenger/nginx + postgres, passenger etc etc, eventually moving onto to other stacks/combos (php, HAproxy etc).




Do you think people would pay 9.99/mo per server for something like this?

In regards to #1, I was a bit crude. I don't know the salaries of anyone who have come out of those bootcamps. If they stay in SF I'd imagine $60-$80k. I have a friend who finished Dev Bootcamp recently and he is still searching. I'm not sure what their placement rate is either. I imagine each extra class that they graduate will be less effective than the previous.

So $9.99 a month so you can create a library of common Capistrano deployment recipes but the user gets to keep full control over their server? I could see a use for that and some people digging it.

lolno

The avg. junior rails dev in NYC is 94k, the avg. for the pilot Dev Bootcamp class was ~83k, not sure what has happened since.

For those who are interested, I started my apprenticeship this week and it's going *relatively* well. Some pro's/con's:

Pro's:
1) Engineer I work with is a complete boss and really great dude
2) Learning PHP/MySQL, stuff I've never seen before
3) We're pushing code that's being used instantly
4) v. good chance of FT offer (from talking to ppl at co)
5) Great hours: get in around 9:30/10, leave anywhere from 5-7.

Con's
1) $3.5k/month
2) PHP/MySQL

How long is your apprenticeship supposed to last?

$94k seems awfully high for an actual "junior" dev. What would someone with a few years experience be making? I know NYC has inflated costs of everything, but still.