SO is great, but you definitely need to learn how to navigate schoolmarms and rule nazis who make up a large part of the mods and high-volume posters. Many of them are smart and helpful, but you have to toe the line for them, and be careful and specific when composing your questions. So, it's sort of annoying, but worth it.

Yea Im afraid that might be the case. I should just focus on programming otherwise I'll be trying to become a designer, which will never happen.

I'm in a similar spot. I've worked 100% remote on a ton of different projects since 2007. Although, I did spend the last couple of years working for a couple of small companies/start-ups in the gaming space (and if that's not a negative, it probably doesn't help much).

It's been much harder to find a remote job than I expected.

I started sending bad resumes (because I expected this to be easy) to all of the remote jobs listed on stackoverflow in Oct. I got nothing but rejection letters in Nov. No explanations.

I tried a little harder in Nov which led to 1 phone interview in Dec. I interviewed with the CEO who said they got about 100 resumes in 3 days. I didn't get that job or any of the others. No explanations.

I was pretty discouraged in Dec but in Jan I learned that the job I had (and hated) was ending at the end of the month. I tried harder in January.

I ended up getting a 3 month contract ("contract-to-hire".. we'll see) that started the day after my job ended. I also had a phone interview today with one of the Jan applications. Being in the middle of a 3 month contract didn't help but the interview went well.

Everybody makes it sound like it should be easy to land a job as long as you're even semi-competent. It's not (at least for remote jobs). Explanations would be extremely helpful.

If you're not, ever, once, visibly putting in the 8 hours a day, i.e. at an office, at least once a week, most employers won't consider that your employment is worth a full time pay in the US.

Yea that is the reality unless they personally know you or you are like best in class at something.

i'm curious to hear more. what types of jobs were you applying to and what kind of experience were you listing?

I was applying for senior front end web positions.

Early on I was only using my last two jobs + an internet marketing company where I was the technical co-founder. My most recent job was working for a company that makes javascript/html slot machine games. Before that, I spent a couple of years as lead dev with a poker related company where I wrote a few web apps/managed a few people.

In the last round, I listed everything that I could remember from 5+ years of freelance and contract work as well as open source contributions.

What do people here use for continuous integration/delivery/deployment? Not too thrilled with TFS or Jenkins. TeamCity sounds promising though hosted would probably be better. Since our needs are not complex, something that handles all the way to deployment would be preferable. Is Bamboo any good? Any .NET people here have experience with AppHarbor?

Let me know what you find out. We're not thrilled with Jenkins either.

I have Travis CI on my github repo and it's pretty sweet. Not sure if that has an enterprise version.

I use travis for public repos. All of my repos have travis tests, it makes accepting pull requests much easier knowing they pass my tests. Even code style tests can be ran automatically such as using rubocop or pyflakes.

Self hosting gitlab and gitlab-ci is definitely a reasonable solution for private stuff. Alternatively you can use travis pro.

Travis has paid plans for private repos and even an on-premise version, but apparently no real Windows support - Mono on Linux seems to be the best they can do.

Jenkins + Travis (for open source repos).

I've always liked them both.

I know I probably don't do things the best way especially as a 1 man team, but what use cases do services like that have? My build process is build > copy + paste onto server. I can't see anything really speeding that up at all. I know I'm missing something obvious!

It's a core company value. It's very clear that the company does not want anyone who uses proprietary software where there's sufficiently good free alternatives. The founder did tremendous work fighting software patents in Europe. I think it's perfectly reasonable. It's also made very clear in job postings. I'm pretty sure one litterally said "if your application was written in Word it will be rejected because ..."

[it's probably also illegal]

The philosophy also extends to customer acquisition. They tend to chose their customers strategically (one customer is usually enough to fund the entire company for half a year+ so they can be picky). They could have grown quite a lot quicker but declined to to keep things more controlled and manageable. 100% self funded/bootstrapped helps a ton for this. I think it has worked pretty well so far as have other things related to the (drastic) core values. "Full data freedom" is paying huge dividends now.

I don't think I agree with everything and it must seem pretty radical from what I write but it actually feels rather moderate in practice. I also tremendously respect a founder that has strong values and sticks to them (even if I don't fully agree with them).

I disagree with this. Writer is fine and works cross platform (Latex is excellent for stuff that needs nice layouts, I don't even know what non-free tools one uses for this stuff). Excel is probably a lot better than Calc but I use neither beyound entering simple data. It's used a ton so it has to be decent enough. As a programmer I also think people overuse Excel but that's another debate.

Proprietary software has much clearer wins in many different domains. Idiot statistical analysis (SPSS > PSPP but R etc. are better for non idiots), graphics, 3D modeling, sound, online poker :P
I mean I can't do my taxes without Windows (I guess Wine emulation could work, haven't checked) so they also have clear lock in wins.

Free software has at least one gigantic win though which might arguably be the biggest one


And of course programming languages etc. (welcome aboard .net)

I'm a one man team too. A CI setup lets you do stuff like this:

- Code code code
- Commit locally
- Git push to somewhere
[Everything past this point happens automatically]
- Webhook fires which kicks off something like Travis CI
- Travis CI reads a config file in your repo
- Travis spins up an isolated VM which runs whatever you told it to
- If pass, yay green... if fail, it crashes and lets you know what failed

So, your last step could be to push your code to production if everything passes. Now you have this setup where all you have to do is push code as a developer and if everything is good it ends up in production without having to do anything else.

ya, I understand, it's a dumb core value that you are saddled with. You are arbitrarily limiting your applicant pool and creating an echo chamber with regards to your software. It doesn't matter to me at all other than a check off thing to make sure we're not doing in our company.

Cool I'll probably come back to this
thx

Maybe look at how ionic styles their components to look natively? I'd guess there's some good ideas to borrow/css to copy.
http://ionicframework.com/docs/components/
http://code.ionicframework.com/1.0.0.../css/ionic.css

The business management side in me is actually very curious if it is a dumb core idea. My gut says this is dumb and limiting your canidate pool is not a great idea. I don't care what people do when they go home and I probably don't care what they do when they are working as long as they can show me it's better for them than the alternatives.

But ultimately it's just a gimmick. I guess the question is if using proprietary software if you are supposed to strongly value free software AND know that this is explicitly screened for correlates with you not being a cultural fit (or more importantly not being a +EV employee) in a FLOSS company. My guess is the answer is yes but mostly because of the second part of the and-ing not the first.

You're still artificially limiting your candidate pool. I just wouldn't apply to a company like that. Let me use the tools I want to use.

If you're a 1 man team with 1 server and 1 application, then it's probably not that worthwhile. Although I think Shoe lists a few benefits that would still be useful to you.

Once you start expanding in any of those three dimensions (or others that I haven't thought of) it because much nicer to automate everything or have one button releases.

Virtually no one actually cares about free software to this degree. Practically all web apps and nearly all hardware are proprietary.

Edit: proprietary desktop software is also more open than web apps or proprietary hardware, because you control the data and you can disassemble and modify the binary.

Also, I'm not aware of any for-profit software company that doesn't write closed-source software.

to add to shoe's answer, if you don't want to go whole hog yet, i'd say that just replacing the copy/paste with a "git push" (which can then be further shortcutted to "g p") is a pretty nice-to-have.

like many usability upgrades in your dev environment (indeed, in life), it's the kind of thing that, theoretically, seems small and unimportant, but whose benefit you really feel once you experience it. aside from the "ahhh, that's nice" factor, it also improves flow, an area where sub-second differences can matter.

that is surprising. if i were looking for a full time front end guy, that resume would definitely get me to investigate further, at the very least.

New job has a framework they say is "RESTish". At least they're more realistic than most places.