Yeah I doubt I could have landed a remote job worth a damn, but after working in person somewhere for a year they were fine with me going remote full-time, and then connections I made at that job got me my next remote job.

Do you guys actually enjoy working full time remote? I feel like it would be too hard to collaborate with others. I understand there are tools, like teamviewer, skype and using the phone, but it's just not the same.

I can see if you do it a few times a week, but everyday seems a bit too much in my opinion.

It has pros and cons. I'd prefer something closer to a 2/3 split between the office and home but that isn't possible. I work with people I know quite well (and who I get along well with) and that helps a lot too.

I'm sure this has been asked hundreds of times in this forum so I didn't want to start a new thread, though I haven't found anything too relevant to my position in recent posts or the sticky.

No programming experience, wanting to learn for prospective career opportunities but I'm currently employed full-time (with little need for programming in the role) so it's also just for my personal interest. ie: I have no pressing need to learn any particular language or skill set.
I hope to pursue a career in finance so I think database skills would be useful, but I'm happy to start with Python as it seems to be the most recommended.

Where I need help is in finding good learning resources. Most of the recommendations I've seen in this forum are Coursera/EdX/Udacity and while they are probably the best way to learn I would prefer non-video resources as most of my study is going to take place during downtime in work. (I have a lot of downtime but I do work quite long hours and am studying for my CFA in the evenings.)

I found daveT's thread to be a great read and was interested in the book he mentioned in his OP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) which he completed after the first course. It sounds like it may be too advanced for someone completely raw like myself but if not I'll happily give it a go.


Again apologies for a question you guys probably get asked all the time.


I'd love to hear a bit more of how you went about this if you don't mind sharing?

It's not the same. There are definitely some guys that are hard to work with. Thankfully one of my manager's strongest suits is getting third parties to do what we need. Before I went remote I had a 90 minute commute, so I lost some camaraderie, but am now more productive and gained 3 hours back every day. Big life improvement.

Working most days in the office is better for the soul, but working remote is better for productivity for the work I do.

Will definitely second this. I'm a really easy going person and can work well with almost anybody in person without any real effort but there have been a few people that I've worked with remotely that I've really had to work hard at maintaining a good relationship with.

In one case I even started travelling to the office more frequently just to get to know a co-worker better in non-work/non-stress situations to improve things between us. It worked pretty well but obviously that doesn't scale to a larger company where you just have to work with lots of people.

Well I spent 6 months learning and doing projects/putting things on github and then I lied a little on a resume and got a contract job. I was a little lucky I guess in that half of what I do isn't programming in any real fashion (markup) and the vast majority of client side javascript is written by people who are really bad at it so I probably blended in back then.

The biggest thing I had going for me is that after exploring it a bit I "decided" on my particular career path, concentrated on it only, and didn't get distracted by other things or languages. Liking what you do or what you want to do is the most important thing, without it you have no real chance of getting to the end goal of a career in it. I still come home after a full day of work and program.

Yeah I suppose it depends on the person and the type of work. All meetings are virtual so the information flow is good. IM is used a lot too and we have virtual phone calls where we carry out voice communications with just our work stations involved. I also have the target platforms, if I didn't have them I couldn't telecommute. VPNs ftw. I pretty much like to work independently on a lot of things so that probably helps. For me the main advantages are that my hours are uber flexible and of course I don't waste time in a commute. I think the concept of 8 hour shifts for software development is a flawed model for software development anyway.

???

I almost responded to that too.

I think the removal of many of the office annoyances is good for the soul. But I also understand that the lack of many casual interactions sucks.

Dont knock it till you try it

While I agree with you here, I believe it primarily depends on your natural tendency and the project team make-up.

I've worked on projects at many large companies where almost always some active team members were not in the same location anyway. They're at their desk in another location.
So you've got the remote access set up one way or another as well as conference calls.
In those projects, and with my personal preferences (ie. max lunch time of 20 mins, 99% of my work done by me myself and I truly, me hating computer cubicle/farm setups which they all seem to use, and not being fond of constant distractions via telephone or walk-bys), I would vastly prefer to work from home.

those with lucene/elasticsearch experience,

i think i've mentioned before that just for fun i want to create an app that can search all seinfeld episodes. so you could, eg, type "i'm out!" into it and it would pull up the scene where kramer loses the bet in "the contest" (plus any other possible matches). it should handle things like mispelled words out of the box, and also find matches that are close together: eg, if i typed two words that appear near each other in a script, but aren't exactly next to each other, that should still be a match, though weighted slightly lower than when those words are exactly next to each other.

i understand elasticsearch should pretty much do all this for me? is that correct? should i be using elasticsearch or lucene/solr? or something else? basically, i'm just looking for a little high level guidance since i've never used any of these products....

i recently worked with the ES problem of using proximity for scoring when doing a standard query that's not an exact phrase. luckily, the manual covers this exact situation starting here ( http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/e...-matching.html ). keep going through the sections - i ended up basically copying the query from "improving performance". (this probably won't make sense if you haven't done the basic ES stuff first)

i have not done misspelling / "did you mean" in ES yet, so i can't speak to that. i see they have something called 'fuzzy queries' though. not sure how well that works in conjunction w/ proximity, so you'll have to try that and see how it goes.

ES uses lucene under the hood, so you'd be missing out by using lucene instead of it. ES adds on easy scaling (sharing, replicas, clustering) and a json interface.

i work full time remote (as well as everyone else at the company). it's nice to not have the distractions of an office, but it can certainly be distracting in its own way. i've had weeks where i had two hour+ long conference calls each day of the week (one in the morning, one in the afternoon). absolutely kills my productivity. i wonder if there's more pressure to have a conference call because we're all remote.

http://conferencecall.biz/

random, but, a long time ago (maybe a year?) there was a problem that was hosted by a website about hunting vs not hunting in a population that required a submission in python for an answer. the website also has like math and programming problems they give out for fun.

it was organized like by levels, you could take different levels of a subject and it gave you problems at that level and you could move up, e.g from simple derivatives to complex integrand within calculus. or from the area of a circle on the first level to like different theorems in geometry.

they had some for programming as well that were fun and playful little brain teasers.

anyway was hoping to get the name of the website for a friend. its been buggin me hardcore.

www.brilliant.org

https://brilliant.org/competitions/hunger-games/

thanks so much!

As was said both of elasticsearch and solr are lucene based.

I've become pretty familiar with Solr this year from a high-level capabilities standpoint.

There are a couple ways to do this. One of the ways is by weighting search criteria using the interfaces available to you in Solr (or with elastic search). The other way is to alter the scoring at the lucene level.

http://www.solrtutorial.com/solr-search-relevancy.html

http://lucene.apache.org/core/3_5_0/...imilarity.html

In terms of terms that are near each other but are not exactly next to each other, you could probably do that by adjusting the "coordination factor".

Be careful with how you adjust things in Lucene, if you do something like mess with "term frequency" too much you will end up with a ****ed up version of google from the early 00's when you could stuff keywords and make things come up first, which provides a pretty frustrating experience.

waffle and larry, thanks for the replies

Due to Clojure, I get phone calls from recruiters now and then.

What am I supposed to say to these guys and gals when they call? They generally ask about my experience and background, and I'm probably too honest.

Does anyone know if there's a way to automatically insert shipping information into something to preload USPS shipping labels? Specifically their Click-n-Ship labels? It would save me heaps of time.

https://www.usps.com/business/web-to...ing-labels.htm

No idea if the API page above would have anything to help with this.

If you aren't looking for work say "no thank you" and hang up. If you aren't feeling polite just hang up.

Dave,

Send them a link to your three years of programming thread. I am serious.