yak shaving is the most dangerous, and perpetual, hazard of modern JS development.

getting something done ****ty is the move, for sure. eventually you do want to learn some of that stuff, but the choice space is overwhelming, and sadly choosing the largest / most popular projects is not a safe heuristic.

also, compiling es6 so it's safe for older browsers, and using modules that get bundled together into a single file, is a single of a code with browserify. that's really all you need. but you actually don't even need that. you could start with one big file and commented sections, and just support chrome/firefox. you wouldn't need anything to do that.

Thanks for the advice. Onward, to writing some ****ty React and seeing what happens!

Lots of talk above about what bootcamps obviously should be doing for job outreach. I'm sure they try; they have demo/job fair days and such, but I've heard many instances where not a lot of companies show up. (To be fair, one particular top SF bootcamp I know had a very understaffed careers department.)

But bottom line is that there are too many students and too many bootcamps for connections like this to be widely successful.

Yea, definitely ignore low levels of experience (if it's 3+ years of industry experience required then maybe don't waste your time, but there's always a chance there's another job open or they can't find somebody with experience) and certainly education.

I'd say a little more than "minimal" effort. Have your generic cover letter. Take a look at the company. If you can think of something relevant to talk about, do some quick edits to one paragraph of your cover letter. That's if you have experience in their area, if you're truly passionate about their mission or can fake it well, or something else about them is appealing. If the company is stupid/boring to you, just apply generically. Don't let your lack of inspiration for a unique cover letter stop you.

Apply to something like 8-12+ per day, every day. I prefer something like 8 every single day (get a streak going that you won't want to break), but you could do like 15 only on weekdays or figure out what works for you. Keep churning them out even when you start getting deep with companies; if you're too overwhelmed with a high response rate, slow it down, but do not stop until you're signed somewhere.

When companies have coding challenges as part of the application process, do them. In general, this and the overall interview process makes you better at coding and better at interviewing.

Spend X time per day on continuing to learn, projects, etc. (I'd space time between straight-up reading, actual "learning" of new things, and working on projects).

Go to meetups for food and try to talk to people. As I wrote about elsewhere, I got contract work from a random non-professional coding meetup at a bar that turned out to be vital experience for my full-time interviews.

Biggest goldmine for me was the HackerNews monthly job postings thread or whatever they call it.

Sure, in most cases. So is writing company-specific cute or relevant or "passionate" things in your cover letter/resume, in most cases. If you have an unremarkable resume there's only so much you can do to hide it, and time spent laboriously reworking resumes and cover letters for every single application is not time well spent. It's a numbers game; give yourself a small EV increase if you can do it quickly, otherwise just fire one off.

FWIW, it is illegal for schools in California to promise results or get you a job. They can do a fair which leverages connections, but they can't call up Mr X and say "hey, I got 12 programmers, you wanna talk to them?"

I know Victor is in Ohio, and if I recall, he was hired into a company who supported some continuing education for him and his classmates. This wouldn't fly in California. As much as SF loves "disruption," there are legal limits.

Moral of the story: if you want some guarantee, don't go to a bootcamp in California.

So is mithril a joke, or a joke that turned real, or what? https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/0...tm_medium=feed

Seems like a April Fools joke, but the git hub repo has a ton of commits and resolved issues. https://github.com/lhorie/mithril.js

The code also seems completely real. I guess the joke is basically that all it does is wrap regular HTML and vanilla JS?

Is it an ongoing joke or something? Pull request history goes back two years.

mithril is real, gaming_mouse uses it and has talked about it before. It's a bit like a lightweight version of React.

Also, **** Java date handling so ****ing hard.

That is all.

The worst bit is the smug tone of people answering Java date related questions on StackOverflow. A tone implying incorrectly that any of what they're saying makes the slightest bit of ****ing sense.

Not super knowledgeable about Java, but as I understand, Joda Time was the de facto standard for JDK users (clj-time is wrapper around Joda Time).

http://www.joda.org/joda-time/

However, caveat emptor, there are problems...

http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr...time_4941.html

Though Mr Colebourne seems to approve of it despite not putting in the JDK.

The current JDK API is apparently inspired by the Joda Time API:

http://blog.joda.org/2014/07/threete...joda-time.html

The documentation on Joda Time and the ThreeTen looks pretty good.

just to clarify, bolded was not the case. we were not required or asked to attend any sort of continuing education.

Random question for you guys. How are promotions handled where you work?

I'd say 95% of the technical promotions at the companies where I've worked have been w/o an application process. Someone is just told they've been promoted. Like a team needs a new lead, someone is picked. Someone's been doing a good job, they're told they're now a senior developer. Stuff like that. Even for lots of more senior roles (directory / senior manager) someone is just picked/appointed without any sort of process.

It's totally different for my wife (non-programmer). Every role is specifically defined and the main way of moving up is for a position above you to open up and you go through an application process* - often against external applicants as well.

So I was just curious how prevalent the first approach is in other tech companies.



* This leads to a frequent rant of mine because an internal candidates 1-3 hour interview is treated as a major input to whether they get a position or not. Which seems mind boggling to me when you have so much more information to go on from ACTUALLY WORKING WITH THE PERSON!

Dates have sucked in nearly every programming language I've ever used. And that's before you even lard on **** like time zones and the occasional second adjustments. I don't know why it's so hard. But I also don't know how I'd fix it.

But they do suck harder in JS than most places I've seen.

This gives a pretty good overview of timezone troubles in programming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

JJ,

I feel like it's most common for people to be having behind the scenes convos with their boss about promotion opportunities and then one comes so they become a team lead, or senior engineer, etc.

My fiancee had to apply to get a promotion and ended up against very serious competition, but still got the job because they (correctly imo) valued her first hand experience actually working with the team she was applying for and her existing body of work for the organization. But she had been there for 3 years (first job out of school) and someone with 15+ years experience applied against her and got to the final round.

I see some value in both approaches, but ultimately I would only seek to bring in external candidates if i didn't feel completely confident with the internal person. Being forced to apply in 100% of circumstances seems very wrong, and not having promotion paths without competition for high achievers also seems wrong.

DatesTimes do seem to suck, but if I'm in control what works for me is to just convert everything into UnixEpoch(UTC) time as input comes in. Then convert it for display whenever you have to pull it out.

Also use JodaTime for Java stuff if you can.

One problem with Java date times is that there used to be a Date and then that got deprecated in favor of Calendar, but lots of people still use Date objects.

still use it and highly recommend it. what makes you think it's a joke?

I noticed some code like this in Facebook's React tutorial - is this a common/recommended way of dealing with having to do this.x.bind(this) everywhere, to do it just once in the constructor?

I know why time zones are hard, I wrote the tz engine for a mail server many years ago. That isn't really what I mean though. The programming interfaces to datetimes in most languages are really atrocious. The actual DT handling itself is usually ok although occasionally buggy.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Apologies if this is the wrong thread to pose such a question, but has anyone taken the course "Intro to iOS App Development with Swift" on Udacity?

I'm a programming newb with my only experience having been taking the EDX MIT Intro to Comp. Sci Using Python course a few months ago. I've been thinking about trying to do this one next as I have an idea for an app that I would like to pursue. Mainly curious whether my lack of experience will be a major obstacle towards understanding what's going on in this course. Also curious about its quality generally.

This is best practices yeah an unfortunately dumb thing we need to do to make the context work.

Yeah, true. I think generally decision-making people have known who is interested in moving up and also made it clear to some people that they're being given opportunities to grow and to be in line for promotions in the future.

But its still sort of a matter of a position comes available and the decision is made (sometimes its an obvious decision, sometimes its not) w/o any sort of process the applicants go through.


Yeah, I'm totally with you. I was curious what other people did mainly because I was talking about how much better tech companies are at this - but then realized I wasn't actually sure how representative my experience was.

The java.util.time stuff from Java 8 looks fine, the problem is that I have to work with old code that's all using Date etc. The two systems don't play particularly nice together, plus then the driver for SQL Server doesn't play well with java.util.time, etc. Then there's the problem that if you google for answers to stuff you don't know how out of date the answers are.

I wonder how much it changes with the size of the organization? I've been doing a lot of looking at career pages and pretty much avoiding those with jobs that have job codes next to them. At EDS and Accenture it seemed career path had little to do with the accounts you were on.

Without knowing much about the course, I would guess it will be a little challenging; they'll be teaching you a new language that's very much unlike Python (hopefully it's geared towards people that don't already know Swift or even Objective-C) and there will probably be a lot of new concepts you haven't seen before. So, it might be time consuming and tough to grasp a lot of the stuff, but if you're dedicated and did well in your previous programming class then you can probably do it.