I had a fair amount of forewarning that this vacation would happen. At first, I thought it would be something like two weeks, but some things did pop up that extended this possibility to a month. Nothing bad, and in fact, good stuff for the company and the coworkers.

I think them telling me upfront is honorable. I did dig a little bit about the renewal, and the answer doesn't seem to be "absolutely not," but it isn't "absolutely" either.

As for pay, I've interviewed for plain ETL that pays more than what I'm earning, but the work I'm doing is far more interesting and involved than ETL, so at least short-term, I feel like it is worth it, at least to say I have something to talk about IRT to working on a team, optimizing to a database and server I can't config myself, working on legacy code, etc.

I was thinking about this as well. I was originally going to try to get some short-term work and perhaps just kill myself on the evenings and weekends until this contract ends so I have something secured when that time comes, but now I'm switching my mindset to free agent, and thus would not be available if I manage to find something.

Interesting thoughts. thanks.

Gamasutra article on toxic programming culture (in games specifically, but probably generalizable)

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/RichGeldr...ust_Change.php

yeah I need to remember to do that macro but hey at least it cost me 3 less hours than you...

I've read several different articles pointing out similar problems with tech work culture. I just don't get why tech has been singled out here. In my experience, the tech field is one of the easiest work environments. Compared with the work environments I've had in retail, fast food, and construction, tech is by far the most accommodating. Tech is mostly filled with timid engineers. In contrast, I had a job at a warehouse once where daily insults were basically part of the culture. An employee definitely needed a thick skin to work there.

My guess is that because tech jobs pay a lot better than these other actual bad work environments, people really do want these jobs. Perhaps because of this we get articles pointing out exclusionary practices in tech instead of the construction industry.

The problem is larger than tech.

You're not wrong, but anyone who wants to talk about the issue at large tends to get substantially more death threats. So, baby steps.

The problem is larger than just the tech sector, but it is also part of the tech sector. So, nothing wrong with starting somewhere.

Games dev is night and day from non-games dev supposedly.

I've worked in blue collar settings and in game dev. Game dev was way worse in my experience.

It could have just been the company that I worked for but it felt like everybody hated each other and they would do things like sending company wide "shaming" emails for small mistakes.

I didn't stick around for long and it's not something that I would do again.

I don't buy the 'but it's not as bad as X' argument anyway.

Our whole lives are built around the whole fact that we improve things that aren't actually the most meaningful problems. And it probably needs to be this way - but most of us complain about stuff and fix stuff and waste money on things that are nowhere near as important as people starving and living in absolutely horrendous conditions.

Exactly this.

In restaurants, sexism is the de rigour of the culture, but the woman were more than willing to dish it out, so it was pretty balanced.

I worked at one company that had a policy of hiring women only, and I was the token guy working there. I once brought in a guy for an interview and I got reamed pretty hard for that one.

I think part of it is that, well, you can eat **** at a construction site, and you are sort of expected to be "manly," which is apparently vulgar, insulting, sexist, and racist. I guess you are considered disposable material, so they are more than willing to push you to the ropes. I know none of this was serious and mostly an act.

Sexism is real and it definitely goes both ways, but that doesn't mean you have to be silent on your convictions. I think so much is said about tech because, well, we are more computer literate, more prone to using blogs, and let's be honest, this is the only industry you can work and be considered "productive" even though you spend 2 hours a day on facebook, twitter, reddit, hn, etc, so the echo chamber has more constant voices. (I hope I'm wrong on this one. I haven't opened any of these things up at work, but apparently this isn't a huge problem considering the busy days for many of these sites are working hours).

I suck at Java, but just spent an hour trying to figure out I couldn't sort an array of ints (they had to be Integers). Hyachhachacac

Does this not work? Looks like an array of ints to me:

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/u...s_sort_int.htm

Should have clarified I was using a custom Comparator (working on Coursera Algorithms Course Part 2) which requires the object version.

What was the hang up? Don't have to cast for compare the way you do for overwriting equals, right?

Never seen any of these happen in my programming career (most of it in video games), and places where this kind of **** flies are probably not companies you want to work at.

I have no idea sorry.

With this description, too much uncertainty to be tolerated, free agent mode is your play.

Angular 2 or React. React has React native for both iOS and Android these days. Dunno how good it is (apart from hello world works, yay) or if Angular 2 has something similar.

What about Knockout.js? Is that no good?

but why?

Probably has to do with Google support. It's a lot safer to choose a framework with big company backing. The framework probably is richer because of more resources too.

C'mon, to the question, "is X good?", an argument by popularity is a copout, especially in the programming world. by that reasoning, in 2000, java and php are better than ruby and haskell.

If he's asking what will be in demand, or make me marketable, the graph is relevant. but that wasn't the question.

Wolfram, if you're interested in framework that tame the complexity of UI, this is the place to start reading: http://jlongster.com/Removing-User-I...act-is-Awesome

React, or other react-like frameworks, are the right way to think about updating UI. knockout (unless it's changed recently) used a different model, which is not as good for the reasons explained in that article. I'm not sure if Angular 2 has switched to the React philosophy or not.

I've been doing some web dev for the first time ever, and I'm now at the point where I'd like to start testing in an environment that isn't my dev box's localhost. I imagine it'll come as no surprise to most people in here that I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.

To give a basic idea of what I'm working with, I wrote a simple backend in Go that serves up mostly dynamic content via templates, in addition to some websocket IO for the real-time part of it. Using MongoDB to store data currently, but I'd likely migrate to an SQL solution if/when I actually moved it into production.

With that in mind, any recommendations for hosting that could accommodate my testing needs? Don't need a lot of uptime or resources, just an environment that's pretty easy to restart with some test data. Unfortunately my vocabulary in this space is pretty limited, so I don't even know what the hell I should be searching for. Although I'm pretty sure that if I just go out and google 'web hosting', I'm not going to end up enjoying much of the journey.

The thing is if you pick some unpopular framework, you may have a hard time getting answers on stack overflow, may have a hard time hiring anyone with experience in it, any 3rd party ecosystem will be much less, etc. There are definitely good reasons to pick a popular framework that looks like it has staying power.

Heroku was pretty straight forward to set up. I think they support your stack.

Digital Ocean looks good as well, but I have no personal experience with it.