Agreed, but I don't think they need to adopt the process.

I just meant that Dave should adopt the relevant parts for how he deals with and communicates issues. The only change on the vendor side is that the AM needs to check in with whatever tool Dave wants to use and give feedback on the top X items in the queue.

If they're not willing to do that, then this problem is effectively unsolvable due to them not wanting to put in any work at all.

That Trello looks like the right price, and probably easy enough that management can understand when they see it, and easy enough for all of our departments to use.

We do have an excel sheet with all of the issues. I'm sort of using it as a guide of items that need to be done. Even if the software company doesn't want to use Trello, it will definitely help improve issues and communication on my end of the phone line.

Trello is great, I use the free version for my personal long term time management and to file away ideas, books I want to get etc.
(oldschool pen+paper for regular time management)

It's almost two years since I've started doing web development. I've done a fair number of heavy JS apps on my own, but mostly relatively vanilla rails apps for my work. At least with rails, I finally feel like I have a certain mastery that I didn't have even 3-4 months ago. I can develop super quickly, and very rarely make errors. Same goes for javascript to some extent. If I do run into an error page, I know how to fix it super quickly. I'm confident in my ability to build a production grade app that runs well, and is secure, and do it fast.

It's satisfying. I know I'm not an expert in everything, and there's a ton of more stuff to learn... but it's nice to have some mastery over my craft.

That being said, has anyone ever experienced a rails server not updating after model changes? Usually it'll autoreload changes to model level stuff, but for some reason it's dying after changes to routes, form objects, and models, required a reboot. Driving me f'ing crazy. Only ever happened in this app I'm working on right now. Rails 3.2.13, both on webrick and thin.

I never experienced that Nchabazam. I did experience some lameness with modules and reloading though, even if they are in the included path (app/models).

I would make sure that auto class reloading is enabled in your development config file and I would also make sure the ENV is actually development. If you're launching it from some script then maybe it sets a diff ENV. Since this only happens on that project either of those things are possible.

jj, thanks for the Trello suggestion. perfect for what I need.

I'm quite impressed at how intuitive their UI is. It is a good lesson in representing somewhat complex tasks with no hover text or explanations needed.

I haven't used trello yet but I recently started something where I will be logging user stories.

I really like how features can be written for anything with the simple role, goal, benefit pattern. You can apply that to not just programming tasks but anything.

Ya, I probably should have taken a look in development.rb. Someone set it up to cache models for some reason. Waste of time.

I saw blueprint linked in the comments for the Vagrant article on HN. Has anyone tried it? The idea seems pretty useful but probably unlikely to produce great results (it generates Chef, Puppet whathaveyou scripts from an existing install)

http://devstructure.com/blueprint/

Nchabazam,

I turn on action caching occasionally when I'm working with fragment caching. Being able to test that stuff live in development mode is really useful.

Also did you take a look at https://github.com/peek/peek? I wonder how well it compares to rack-mini-profiler.

i thought it was all about docker these days....

(i haven't used any of them)

Thanks for the link, looks cool.

I like trello but I actually don't use it a ton. I've never found one piece of software that was good enough to be my one productivity / organizational tool. It's probably more related to my personality /laziness / whatever but if such a tool existed that worked for me I would pay a ****load of money.

I was thinking it'd be pretty neat to set up a site that allows you to do typing tests with code. Suppose you pick a language and then the site picks up a chunk of code from github. Seems like it may be possible to do with the github api, but I haven't really looked into it.

I guess a related question would be how much the language affects things. If we're talking just transcribing character-by-character I suspect Python along with Lisp variants would be fastest (although if every language could allow the DrRacket shortcut of `]` = close the most recent delimiter shortcut that would probably balance things quite a bit).

Obviously, there would be no shortcuts.

In theory, it shouldn't matter if it is Java or Python. It is simply wpm in code. I think a long ways goes towards whatever you are used to using. If you are used to using ';' at the end of all your lines, it may be a bit hard to break that mental habit when you are rushing.

Well, for me the SHIFT key is a drag. Python is actually pretty good at not making me hit it, what with whitespace instead of braces, boolean conditions being words instead of number-row symbols, if/while/for statements not requiring parens, single-quote strings, etc. I joked in that tutorial I wrote for the Data Science that my style was informed by a hatred of the SHIFT key but I was only half joking.

I can't live w/o my Shift keys...

Just come across this on HN.... its a HU poker site where you can see you opponent via webcam. The implementation is pretty neat https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6835449

I've been browsing cs job postings on the web, and there's a certain vibe many top-notch tech companies looking to hire developers give off.

I'd summarize their message by saying "We're good. And we know we're good. We're looking for top talent to join us in a challenging, fast-paced environment. The work will be interesting, the workplace fun, and the coworkers friendly. The salary is competitive, the gear state of the art, and the perks numerous. If you love to build things and want to join a team that shares your passion: apply today."

These jobs are always characterized by catered lunches, the latest Mac gear, and indoor rock-climbing walls in the office.

Substantive examples include:

http://www.shopify.com/careers
http://www.khanacademy.org/careers
http://www.palantir.com/careers/
https://www.drchrono.com/jobs/

Obviously I only see these sorts of job postings from the outside. How characteristic are these jobs of the tech industry as a whole? Could a motivated cs grad reasonably expect to land in that sort of company? What is your guys' response to those sort of job postings?

Isn't it amazing that every single company has the top 5% of programmers working for them?

Joel Spolsky brings everyone down to earth:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...vaSchools.html

I also noticed this strange argument for the first time:

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

Is fixed point harder than pointers?

And everyone that thinks functional programming is strange really should read this line:

They'll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

I would guess that most of those small-ish companies with really good compensation, perks, and interesting work have the majority of their developers in the top 10-20%.

There are a lot of crappy developers/development jobs out there.

Hey guys, sorry to bug you, I have a quick question because I'm registering for classes right now.

I'm taking advanced java (I'm told the instructor likes to work with windows applications specifically) and I have an option to take an online elective course right now. It's just for fun, but i'm debating the following:

javascript 1 (2 units) - this seems pointless because there are loads of javascript resources out there and i'm reasonably confident I could teach myself a lot. However, it could be a fun distraction from my coursework this next semester.

Windows Desktop Administration - this I'm not really sure of. I doubt it would be very fun, but I could learn a lot. I'm not exactly sure what it would entail, either. This seems like the most common sense thing to take for myself because I'm not super familiar with windows' capabilities and I could learn a bit more about my preferred OS.


Then there's some network sys admin classes that I'm also not too sure of what they would entail or how much I could learn from them. I'm clueless with that stuff and it would be good to take something other than programming. My other choice is info/storage management which I may have to take anyway but sounds really boring.

These are all online fwiw.

What do you think top 10-20% of devs entails? Unnaturally gifted or just generally solid?

I haven't given a lot of thought. Generally speaking I guess it could be either. Some people are insanely good in very narrow situations which is great if those situations are useful to you. But a strong generalist is also extremely valuable.

When I think of top developers I think of skills like:

* Ability to learn new technologies/languages
* Ability to learn/apply common design patterns / best practices
** Includes code architecture, testing, commenting
* Productive social skills
** Works to resolve problems
** Able to communicate easily with non-technical people
* ...

and I'd say that the top 10-20% have a decent amount of all of these skills and are particularly good in at least a few of them.