In that case, you can definitely find work on the freelance sites. You should pick one that looks like a good source to you and run with it. You want to focus on one site, because you really want to build up a 4-5 star reputation over a number of jobs. You're going to try to command a premium over international devs, so you really need a solid history. Of course this means you're going to have to take a huge pay cut at first to get someone to take a chance on your non-existent rep. Just explain that you want to build a rep and are willing to work cheap to do it. Try to take on a bunch of smaller jobs to get that going. Then once you have a decent developer profile on the site you can move your rate up. You're still going to have to try to sell yourself over cheaper international alternatives, so make it clear that you are a native English speaker with strong communication skills and are located in an American timezone, able to deal with their change requests in real time so no work is wasted.

Also check the gigs section in craigslist in your city, since these folks are often looking local.

Thanks, maxtower.
I'm in Australia, not the US, but all points should apply. So I am on the right track then. Getting those first small projects will be crucial - obviously doing it for peanuts. Just trying to price it low enough without looking desperate/shifty at first glance.

Hadn't thought of craigslist. Coming from Europe, cl isn't really a factor so totally forgot about that.

I am also considering building up a topcoder profile. Not sure if that is going to be any help but the challenges are both fun and actually help in keeping knowledge fresh.

Btw, did the learning swift challenge yesterday. First time touching swift, too. Language feels a bit awkward at times but has some really nice features (looking at you closures and computed properties!)

ArchLinux and Ubuntu are the same in the same way that tomatoes and apples are similar because they are both red fruits.

At the very least, one doesn't have adware baked in.

But how stable is this distro?

Learned something interesting:

in his Sorting and Searching,* Donald Knuth points out that even though
the first binary search was published in 1946, it took 12 more years for the first binary
search without bugs to be published.

Then there is this link: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2...it-nearly.html

Fast forward to 2006. I was shocked to learn that the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug. Once I tell you what it is, you will understand why it escaped detection for two decades.


The second link is deeply humbling.

****ing computers jfc

I hear ya but at least from the standpoint of package management strategy, minor differences aside, it's basically the same. Btw, I use Xubuntu and have never seen any adware - I think it may be specific to the main Ubuntu distribution.

I don't know but it's created with production server deployment needs in mind, whereas Ubuntu and ArchLinux are much more geared towards desktop/workstation needs. If you're going to manage lots of servers, you pretty much need the approach taken by NixOS, whether the functionality is provided by a package manager or a third-party automation tool.

Is the best practice for automatic deployment basically to build a new VM from scratch (or copy a pristine VM maintained for this purpose) for every application release? If you make a Nix package out of your production build - I don't know how easy it is - theoretically you can have complete assurance that the machine will be set up exactly the way you need for each build. And even roll back and get the previous version of your application without rebuilding the machine even if the two versions of the application require completely different sets of dependencies that would normally be mutually exclusive. Now there are other issues (the world is not pure) but this seems quite attractive.

Any purpose in learning vim especially since most of today's work is being done in an IDE. Like what's the point? I understand it's important for command -line environments that sys admins have to use. But for programmers?

Servers don't have IDEs

I still use it for some programming - python mostly. Also handy when you need to look at stuff on remote machines. Developers still have to do that at times.

Not sure it's worth the effort though.

learn how to hit the insert key and escape colon w q and that's probably enough.

/ to search forward
? to search back
n shift-g to move to line n

see: "whats your favorite text editor?" thread

"most of today's work is being in an IDE" -- perhaps statistically true, but misleading. i would counter that most good programmers i know are fluent in either vim or emacs.

that said, and being a long time vim user, i don't think it makes you that much more "productive." the thing it does do, but only after a nice size time investment, is make putting characters to the screen a lot more fun. there is tremendous power to it -- nothing makes the gap between the speed of thought and expression in the physical world smaller. i'd say a good analogy for the expressive power you gain is the leap from hunt and pecking to touch typing. if that sounds appealing to you, and if unlimited customization sounds appealing, it's worth looking into.

as others have mentioned, there's the practical benefit you get when ssh-ing into servers. but if you're happy with your IDE and all of the above sounds like more trouble than it's worth, not knowing it won't hurt you.

well said g_m

Use the arrow keys.

If you make a mistake in editing, press ESC then Ctl-Z.

Try again.

I know this is an asking out loud piece, but I don't know the answer to this one. I've talked to a few people about this stuff and it makes my head spin once they start talking about automatically replicating and rolling back VMs. I do know that they generally write out their own scripts, often in Python, to automate the processes. I've heard various opinions of tools, but haven't heard much about NixOS. I'll ask when I get a chance to.

I'm starting to really dig karma and protractor. I don't know if my company has the stomach to stick with automated testing when the project goes into panic mode, but I'm trying to learn everything I can in the mean time.

Depends on how good you are at pecking

I hear there are some really good peckers out there

I think the whole "there's no IDEs on a server" thing is a bit flawed. You will probably end up using some type of automation software to setup your servers at some point. All of your configs that you might edit will be managed by the automation software so editing them by hand would be pointless since they would get overwritten.

I did switch to a vim/tmux setup about 2 months ago tho and I really like it. Like GM said, it's actually fun. You also don't need to learn a ton up front to be somewhat productive. A couple commands and a little cheatsheet will get you going.

Btw, I'm not actually going to use this for production or anything. We don't even use Linux at work - it's Windows all the way down. This is for hobby projects and mostly for me to be inspired by the approach so I can apply the design to broader concerns. For example, I was partially inspired by the directive design in AngularJS and mimicked it to build a data-binding tool in a completely unrelated area. Interesting and useful software designs can be reused in unrelated contexts.

Also, I'm just beginning to take a look at this - I've mostly stayed out of web dev at my company - but our approach to deployment and configuration is completely horrifying. But that can probably fixed with a more standard approach. But we're building out more of a meta-system that can turn declarative configuration into a client-customized app and the design approach in NixOS is certainly relevant to what we're trying to do.

The correct answer is that for many tasks vim is simply better than any IDE out there. There are amazing IDEs for some languages but vim is pretty good for everything. Most IDEs I know choke to death once you have to work with really big files for some reason.

I do everything Java in Eclipse. It's kind of slow, I hear other Java-IDEs are better etc...but I mean learn one thing and use it until you run into severe limitations > learn a bunch of stuff.

At some point the productivity bottleneck is you brain/thinking no matter what tools you use. I'm a fairly slow programmer, I stand up, walk around, scribble with pen&paper etc.
I'm not a huge fan of "flow" since it's often for flow's sake...so basically I kind of feel like I don't even need any productivity enhancement as of now.
Once my brain works faster or something...maybe

Eclipse CDT seems a little slow too in resolving references. Pretty good tool though. As far as the IDEs go, yeah I pretty much agree that in actual coding, the editor that gives you what you want is the most critical issue. In my view, an Integrated Development Environment is about convenience in building executables. For instance if you are adept at creating packages from command line tools and interfaces then if you never knew a thing about IDEs you probably aren't missing much. I can say though that MSFT and INTC pretty much build their released software from command line scripts.

Meh, eclipse cdt has massive issues with the indexer at times. Not a big fan at all.
At least the toolchain editor has pretty solid options once you figure out how to work it.

I'm using eclipse for my C++ class right now and that was an absolute nightmare to configure. Still having issues but i am so used to eclipse i didn't want to use anything else. I really suck at command line stuff.

We are using Embarcadero C++ Builder for my course this semester. Seems pretty nice. Thankfully the school provides a license or else I could never afford it as a student.