i could not think of a worse idea for a beginner programmer than taking a year long C++ certification course.

Ya, I don't of getting certifications as being something you do to get a job, more like what you do to keep one.

I'm pretty skeptical about this for a lot of situations. Not to mention finding someone to do your sysadmin work isn't exactly cheap and easy.

Heroku is great for what it is. We use it regularly to get stuff up and running. If we then need to ramp it up we move it to EC2 and manage everything ourselves.

There doesn't seem to be any middle ground for hosting other than your own low cost VPS.

ec2 is really expensive if you just want to use it for your own non-profit projects or maybe you want to use it for a few clients.

Even the most basic micro instance is at minimum $14.50 a month and according to multiple articles it has serious performance issues (1000ms+ latency is common).

it think there is a big opportunity for a reasonably priced, more transparent and simpler version of heroku.

It probably exists, just so much competition in the hosting space with marketing/advertising. Its very hard for the lesser known ones to get their name above the big ones.

I'm sure that if a heroku alternative existed, work would spread very fast via hacker news and reddit.

Yeah, I wanted to tell him this, but I didn't want to pee on his parade, though I did tell him that the idea of a C++ cert struck me as silly for various reasons.

A better way to spend a year trying to improve your odds of getting a job is to pick some app/site idea and make it, regardless of the platform/languages you use. I guess the only downside is that you aren't being held accountable by an instructor or whatnot, so it might be harder to keep yourself to it.

edit: "Here's my fantasy football insult generator" > "Here's my C++ certificate"

Compare it to a host like digital ocean and you are paying (at least) 7x ($35 on heroku for 1 dyno vs $5 on DO for 1 CPU and 512MB ram). I also find the performance on heroku to be very sluggish for NodeJS.

If you are using heroku to quickly spin up apps, why not host your own PAAS for $5 a month... Dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) is a super easy to install mini PAAS for NodeJS (im sure equivalents exist for other platforms).

Have you ever setup dokku so that it supports multiple domains/databases/etc. off 1 DO instance? I know a lot of small projects I make could easily run off a single low cost VPS but they each need their own database and some type of isolation because I wouldn't want 1 app crashing the others if something goes wrong.

You could just host a single app on each dokku instance.... would still work out at $5 / month. Another alternative would be to setup a DO instance exactly how you want it, then snapshot it. You can then just clone the snapshot when you want to host a new app.

Heroku has its advantages, but do those advantages really make it worth paying 7x more?

Yeah that's true. Docker containers are crazy small too right? Read a little bit about docker.io when it was first talked about on HN but didn't look too much into it since then.

I would never use heroku unless it was for something that would run on the free tier. I'd probably move to ec2 once managing a bunch of DO instances got to be too much to handle but I've never reached that point.

You can host up to 10 separate sites/apps for free, depending on the resources consumed by each one of course.

Uh, that's pretty much exactly what AppEngine is.

From the book of
- Dude write tests, WTF
- Lol I cannot believe this bug
I present...

Was testing my holdem engine today and noticed a great bug. A while ago I implemented a predicate that checks to make sure raises are at least minraises (right before rushing out the office to catch my train LDO)...alas I typo-switched a < and a > so it checked if IntendedBetSize > MinRaise and then if
Villain bets 5, Hero raises 3 -> Arrrrrrrrin

Docker is awesome. Been playing around with it lately and the possibilities (especially with regards to testing) are amazing. Its still in beta tho, and there are some noticeable nuances.

i've never really looked into, i should. but they don't support ruby yet do they?

No. Java, Python, Go, and PHP.

https://developers.google.com/appengine/

hmm... actually looks like you can do it with jruby, which i'd be using anyway:

https://code.google.com/p/appengine-...i/RunningRails

i'll need to research this some...

Anything that would be show stopping for deploying code that someone else paid you to write, AKA. do you trust it? dokku is built on docker it seems.

Hey my old laptop has a working version of microsoft office. It came installed on the computer. How do i get the key used for that microsoft office so I can use it on my new laptop?

I did look into GAE a while back. I'm very uncomfortable with open-ended pricing.

Besides, it can't hurt to learn a bit about what is happening under the hood.

I'm curious what you don't like about open-ended pricing. It seems good to me to only pay for what you actually use. And you can set a daily/weekly max spend, so there's no risk of getting hit with a $$$ bill unexpectedly.

And yes, it actually *can* hurt to worry about what's happening under the hood, unless you place zero value on both your time and your sanity. But you seem to make a lot of suboptimal decisions just to do things the hard way, so keep on keeping on I guess.

Sadly, OEM licenses can't be transferred away from the original PC. MS Licensing FAQ.

Some are sub-optimail and some are not, but I consider most of my choices to be pretty darn good and the payoff has generally passed my expectations.

I am not comfortable with open-end pricing because the figures mean virtually nothing. There's a post I was reading today where someone who was getting 300 visits per day was getting charged $20/day on GAE. I don't know what kind of traffic you get, but I can do 100x that if I am promoting my work and that experience scares the living daylights out of me. To be fair, he was running an app that is more intense than I run, but the point is still the same.

The free tiers are free as in free Coors Light. At some point, you want to try something better but if you hang your hat in the finest restaurant in town, don't cry when they hand you a bill for Dom Perignon.

I also enjoy working on certain kinds of projects and prefer to use certain tools, and it makes no sense to me to pay over $20/month or risk paying several hundred a month and then be forced to work with tools I'm not interested in using (PHP, Java, Python, no PostgreSQL?). I spend far more time thinking and developing than I do mucking around on the server. I think I'm maximizing my sanity not fighting my language, tools and my server.