Doing websites is all in who you know. That's true in a lot of fields, but it's especially true in this one. People go with the guy they know, which is why there are so many bad websites out there.

This. And get involved in open source projects. If you can go to a company and say 'check out this project that I worked on that is used by thousands' it can be quite a game changer. (Pretty sure this is what convinced my employer)

icwudt

Ditch the JAVA, do something buzzier and find a startup to work for imo. They always like saving money and usually provide environments where learning happens automagically.

Might even try to just write to some and make an offer a la "let me work a month for free, it'll cost you time from one of your developers to train me...we reevaluate after the month" (assuming you have the fund to live for a month). You can also pitch your business skills along the lines of "will do sales and similar stuff for free for tech training"

If you're not stuck on being a developer, you could put your business skills to use as a BA or project manager

Yea I don't wanna be a developer, but I feel like from what I see (and I see 100's of different IT type jobs all the time, and take a lot of requirements directly from managers, etc.) it is hugely beneficial to have some hands on development experience, most of the time it is 100% required.

whoooooooooooooooooooo just accepted a new job! moving back to the bay area in a couple weeks!

Good grief.

ffs, don't have 2 copies of the same code, that is an admission of defeat + incompetence.

Take the common code and put it in a static library project. Then you don't have to distribute a dll. The basic gotcha is having different code generation settings for things like c runtime lib -- make those all the same (and default without a good reason to change).

Use project dependencies so the static lib gets rebuilt at the right time.

I suggest keeping project specific headers in the project directory and expose the project's api in a header in a common directory. Then include the common directory in all of your project include paths (method will vary by vs version).

Most important languages for Web dev right now outside of html/css/js/php/mySQL are? I guess interpert most important as most in demand for getting an above average out of college first job. Will working on a legit project with a team of people look a whole lot better than standard websites as a freelancer during college?

Grats! What kind of company/role?

There's lots of demand for Rails developers. Like everything else job related it probably depends on where you're looking for a job.

Would add Java and .NET as well.

thanks!

i don't want to talk about the company in public (feel free to pm if you're super curious) but they, y'know, do things on the internet. my title is sr. site reliability engineer -- basically devops.

Alright, so I am a bit confused by the whole cloud hosting thing. If someone could clarify a few questions for me, that would be great.

I am working on a side project. I am using Java for the server language, MySQL as the db, and django for the front end stuff.

I guess my question is do I need to go ahead now and decide on my cloud hosting provider? I see that each option has an API/SDK to work with. Is that pretty much a plug and play type deal around your code?

What about the db? I see that some options have data store back-ends that I am assuming are not compatible with MySQL.

tim,

why java on the backend? if you're already using django, why not python?

my understanding is that in today's ecosystem, you'll need to target a specific cloud provider. there are some projects aiming to provide a universal API but i think they're in the early phases -- not surprising since the whole cloud universe is pretty new and changing rapidly.

you can probably mitigate this risk with good software design: encapsulation, low coupling, using your own internal "api" to deal with machine resources, etc.

it sorta depends what you're doing with the db. if you're doing simple key/value store stuff, you might not have any hand-written sql and might be able to let JDBC (or whatever) deal with turning your request for data into the appropriate query on the underlying persistence layer. otoh, if you're doing complex queries using mysql-specific sql or data types, this plan obviously won't work.

Depending on what you need Whirr (http://whirr.apache.org/) could be a good fit. It's been useful to us but its not perfect.

while watching "survivor"[1] on teevee tonight, i was shown a commercial -- presumably paid for by microsoft -- for IE9 -- a web browser which microsoft gives away for free to anyone who will take it.

mind of 1996 me officially blown.

[1] a popular-ish american reality show televised at prime time on a major us network

There's IE commercials on TV here as well. Friend and I looked at eachother and kind of went WTF when we first saw it.
Microsoft running around like a headless chicken because they can't be Google, Google running around like a headless chicken because they can't be Facebook theory confirmed ldo

I've seen a fair few adverts on TV for Google, not seen an IE9 one yet

Tivo means never having to watch those things again...

I am a Java developer, so that is why my initial thought was to go with Java. The server will periodically run batch jobs (at night), so speed will not be an issue with that. However, once every week or so, the server will need to run a calculation where two teams submit orders. I think Java would be faster at returning that, but I could be wrong, especially considering that most cloud hosting providers don't allow you to do threading. But Python would still need to be interpreted (or maybe just once?), so I think it would be slower.

The db is going to be pretty complex, so I will need a full MySql solution.

What I am trying to avoid is getting locked into one provider and if said provider jacks up the price, I would be forced to pay it.

I also looked into BizSpark and Azure as an option, but not sure about that. If the game did take off, I am sure Microsoft would charge quite a bit for licensing, hosting, etc. But maybe I am wrong about that. It looks like the best MSDN subscription costs about $11k.

Azure is unlikely to jack up the prices anytime soon (I'd guess ever). They're always going to be competing with AWS and at a significant handicap (EWWW Windows).

The cloud provider space is getting (really already is) super competitive. Nobody is going to be able to jack up prices significantly.

My personal favourites are the ones advertising the 'private browsing feature'

"So your wife doesnt know you bought her a gift"

fyp

i strongly doubt that for the kind of stuff you're doing -- particularly in overnight batch jobs! -- you would even notice a difference in performance between java and python. hence, use the right tool for the job, whichever it is.

i can't imagine why/how a provider would disable threading. you're paying for the cpu time; why should it matter how many things the cpu is doing with that time?

i think you mean full SQL solution (of which mysql is just one of many options).

aws is the 800 pound gorilla today. if you want to get the most out of your (currently inevitable) vendor lock-in, i'd just use them. note that i know nothing about how much they charge .