That's interesting. I assume Boston is pretty damn expensive just like NYC? I keep hearing the old "you can raise X% more if you are in SV" or "we don't fund anyone who isn't in SV" which I always thought was rather strange give we are talking about tech companies and software specifically.

I've worked in the (ERP) industry and pretty much all companies I have had contacts with were run pretty badly/had issues. There's quite a few small companies that basically can't scale up (or don't want to) and giants like SAP are run like utter crap imo.
The thing is we're taking pretty big chuncks of money/customer. It's fairly easy to get by and make decent money with a single clienet. The best thing you can do imo is just focus on some nich and become pretty good at it, try to get bigish contracts and not loads of smallish ones and strategically pick your customers. It's kind of the exact opposite of the sexy landgrab hypergrowth stuff

The downside of being a small company is that big companies will usually insist on having some name recognition and then you're stuck with a layer of big name tech consulting company that basically just wastes everyone's time for lot of money

Total fail from Amazon: CLRS is only available on their tiny Kindle Fires and PC or Mac Desktops. eBay has a cheap cloth-cover edition at ~$25 so I guess I'll add a brick to my bookshelf...

I finally finished that project for my old job. They took pretty good care of me $$, and thus, my programming break is officially over.

I'm not sure that this is correct. Promises are only used for async operations. I don't know which properties you're referring to or how they're being used, but unless each is a separate and distinct asyncronous operation, there shouldn't be a promise attached.

On the other hand, if each property is from a separate async operation, and there are many, you probably should reconsider your overall design and how you're sending and parsing data from the server.

Are you using jQuery? Also, is there a particular reason why you're using promises for handling async development instead of callbacks?

This is a good question, and I think it depends heavily on the particular situation. Despite being an OO language, many people treat JS exclusively as procedural. And that's fine in spots where you only need simple functionality. But, when you're writing plugins or need more advanced capabilities like inheritance, encapsulation, etc., it fails.

Personally, I like using the constructor pattern in Javascript. Here's a pretty good intro to that, as well as several other design patterns:

http://addyosmani.com/resources/esse...ernsjavascript

In AngularJS, all http requests are asynchronous operations that return promises. So unless I want to preload the entire database client side, just about every complex method that deals with data needs to return a promise. And once you go down that route, every method that depends on a promise from another method also needs to return a promise. Part of this is the rigidity of the OO approach. If the object doesn't need to know about related objects, then I don't need this.

Either way, I'm largely done with this part of the project and the design I've ended up with (promises everywhere!) seems to both appear reasonable and function correctly. There are some problems at the margin, but it has more to do with shortcuts I've taken for the prototype (in particular, using eval instead of a dedicated formula language for user-defined calculations) than using promises.

I'm using AngularJS, which uses promises for nearly all async operations. Promises are nicer than callbacks in every way except in interoperability with non-framework code. AnguarJS promises not working outside of angular context is rather annoying and potentially makes my design decision problematic, because I now have lots of domain logic code that's framework-dependent.

This is good stuff, thanks!

candybar,

That explanation makes much more sense. Perhaps I was misreading, but I wasn't clear on what you were using promises for or how exactly you were using them.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that promises are that far superior to callbacks, mostly because in a lot of situations, there's no advantage to be had by using one or the other. They can make code more manageable, but I suspect that's often an issue entirely unrelated to handling async operations. I'm sure you've come across code like that.

Oh, and they're excellent for handling multiple, concurrent async events that are related to one another. IMO, that's the most useful aspect.

Congrats on knocking that part of the project out, though. Sounds like it was something you thought a lot about.

Yeah, that interoperability exception is huge, though! But for the most part, you can use promises just as you would with callbacks, it provides additional features at some cost. In many cases, you'd use them the same way.


Thanks! Yeah I had some extra time at work due to holiday slowdowns so I was able to invest a bit in a side project. Now the whole thing pretty much works and I have a poor man's web-based Access or Force.com. The bigger task is how to sell this (internally) so that I can devote more resources.

I've been going back and forth with the webmaster on this site about whether or not his site is confusing and possibly driving away business. If you found your way to this class description, but wanted to take the class say in late Jan, would you think there's anything available? http://www.nobledesktop.com/mobile-r...ve-web-design/

(try to assume you're just browsing and aren't armed with the information that something is amiss)

Haha, I was actually about to post that he obviously isn't offering any classes in January other than the 2nd-4th. But, I couldn't make myself forget that something's up so I eventually figured it out.

Dear God, make him fix this.

pretty sure you can save your $975 and just get a wordpress theme that will adapt to mobile browsers

His website isn't responsive or mobile-friendly.

Is the nearly 1k for the easy class?

$1k is actually cheap for this kind of stuff. Going rate for any kind of 3-5 day corporate training is ~$3-5k. http://www.develop.com/training-cour...-6-programming

I'm actually much less enthusiastic about the class because of this. Anyone know of anything better? I'm the JS guy on our site. But I'll be making the front-end architecture decisions in our conversion to responsive design. So I need to know a lot more about the capabilities of CSS in general and CSS3 as they relate to responsive design. My CSS is probably a 3/10 right now.

I work on the mobile and full site for a major media company - Wordpress probably isn't gong to cut it.

Yeah in his email he said he's waiting for one other person to say it's confusing. If you don't instantly know it's confusing you have ****ty UI instincts and should never be making those kinds of decisions imo.

Is that date box just a teaser with a random sampling of upcoming classes? Or maybe the next day class and the next night class?

Yeah they want to make it obvious they have a night class. I told him it might be better to make a more obvious day and night class section - then put a link to the full schedule under each. Have the links say "See our full schedule for more day/night classes."

Also he said the link is supposed to scroll to the correct class in the full schedule - but some whiz-bang plugin the have is broken. Again not the best sign that they'd let that go any amt of time w/o fixing it.

Another vote for "showing an April class on the 'upcoming' list when there are that many classes between then and now is absurd"

EDIT: Also, the part about "wait for someone else to complain" is kind of amusing because I bet most people confused by it just leave the site and never think about it again

Exactly. Or they figure it out eventually, but aren't neurotic enough to email the webmaster about it like me.

I'm kind of curious how you land the job of "front end architect" for a major media company when you rate yourself a 3/10 with CSS knowledge.

My title is "front end lead". We have another guy who is the actual architect - who decides stuff like what framework to use, and even to try to go with responsive design. But he's not going to be involved in the detailed design decisions of how to handle particular tasks on the responsive design site.

I'm not sure how it is at most places but where we are the CSS guys and JS guys are separate roles. We each know some of the other's stuff obviously, but they don't know JS frameworks inside and out, and I don't know what a 3D transform is. Until now it hasn't been that big of an issue, although more and more I'm getting tired of not knowing how to do things in CSS. And with responsive design it's a lot more crucial that I learn.

I'm pretty surprised at the class line up. From what I've seen of job ads, many places require that you NOT know DreamWeaver, but this place is all up on it.

I probably wouldn't take this class, but I don't know enough to judge it. I'm pretty sure you need more than 18 hours to learn PHP or MySQL (they teach both in 18 hours). Or more than 18 hours to learn HTML5 and CSS3, but then again, I really don't know. Something seems wrong here. Six hours to learn WordPress? Not sure.

Of course need more than 18 hours to learn something. The classes are more about how to approach the problem, what's important to learn, establish the fundamentals, etc.

With my old company I took a Weblogic class, and some kind of object oriented J2EE class – that were both pretty helpful. Both were 5 day classes.

Oh. When I think front end, I think: html/css/js as being together.

So does my boss. I constantly have to remind him that the CSS guys can't do what I do, and I can't do what they do. So if he can't keep it straight, I'm pretty sure no one else in the company realizes that we have them split out as separate roles.

jukofyork,

Dang it dude, why did you close that? Hahah I seriously thought that was gonna be a lot of fun for all of us. No chance anyone was actually going to help him, and I'm 99% sure he was being serious. Oh well. Hahah