I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.
Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman).
I was surprised that the JSONView Chrome extension wasn't working when I opened a tab with JSON that didn't get reformatted. When I checked chrome://extensions/, there was a note: "This extension contains a serious security vulnerability." The extension had been automatically disabled in Chrome.
When I googled the extension, opening the extension's page in the Chrome store returned a 404. I haven't been able to get more information about what the vulnerability is.
1) Being in debt sucks. Become incredibly passionate about the idea of never being in debt again. If you don't have a giant student loan weighing around your neck, you are far more free to pursue work that interests you. So what to do? Come up with a plan in your favorite evolution of Visicalc, complete with how much debt you're going to pay off each month so that you can put a date on the calendar about when you're going to be debt free. Even if you're doing soul-draining work, knowing that that work is getting you one step closer to being free from debt should help.
2) Your current situation isn't as bad as it seems. I work with a ton of devs for whom working at a cool startup was their first real job. Awesome for them! Also totally not in line with most people's reality. Most people start in some version of "the bottom," whether that be in terms of low salary or poor culture, and then they maneuver their way through a couple of jobs until they find work they really enjoy. If you are smart and get things done, you'll do this too.
So your interviewer lied to you, exposing a toxic part of the company culture. They'll probably lose you over it and you'll eventually end up in a place you prefer to work.
Just come up with a plan to get out of debt. That can move your career a lot closer to freedom than you may think.
From what I gather watching the video, you only need the xlwing.bas module and the supporting VBA code if you plan to invoke python from within the Excel file. If you're only manipulating an Excel file with Python externally, which was covered in the beginning of the video, it doesn't appear you need the module and VBA code.
My favorite reference is the VBA Developer's Handbook by Getz & Gilbert from 2001.
You can probably learn everything you need from Googling for solutions to problems, but that book was great when I was committed to working with Excel and Access for a while. It covers a lot of things you're not going to think to search about.
While Fog Creek doesn't announce features and services prior to shipping, we do keep a fairly public account of what we're working on at http://trello.com/dev. Note the cards labeled "Trello Power-ups" in green.
After OWS forgives random debt, is it also going to help teach people how to avoid debt again? By avoiding keeping a balance on credit cards? By saving up an emergency fund for a rainy day? By saving for retirement?
A one-time forgiveness of debt is a generous gift to be received, but unless you have the habits to avoid debt again, it will just grow back again over time.
I really like how the LookBook is viewed as a way of "increasing customer happiness." You're essentially helping the customer validate how great they feel about themselves for doing business with you, which I would expect goes a long way to keep them around as a customer.
"Switching customers to annual billing radically decreases churn, one of the key risks to SaaS businesses long-term."
Where I can I read more about annual billing decreasing churn? I've read your blog post (or email?) about switching to annual billing to free up revenue to acquire new customers, but I don't remember reading about how it decreases churn as well.
When I was teaching myself how to program in VBA, I remember thinking "there's got to be some syntax to take a list of things and iterate over each of them." I was of course looking for a for loop (or for each). Without knowing to even google "for loop in VBA", it was a pretty big deal to finally discover, "Hey, programming languages have loops!"
Later, after coding for a couple of years and picking up .NET, I eventually learned LINQ syntax and really started to appreciate the expressiveness of chaining methods together to iterate over collections. It was a nice addition to my tool box, but it still took some practice more me to grok it. If that had been my first exposure to loops, it likely would have been a stumbling block to my learning.
Sorry if my comments were confusing. I intended no sarcasm nor arrogance.
I started off in VBA hacking recorded macros. I would then write hundreds of lines of code into a single function (usually named "DoSomething" or something equally vague) and then I would live and die by the VBA debugger, tweaking the function when it broke. Over time, I learned the value of encapsulation and how much easier it was to debug my code if used smaller, well-named, functions.
When I started a different job and ended up doing a lot of VB6 programming, I ended up reading a lot of others' code. I would stare at functions that were literally 1000+ lines of code an painfully difficult to debug. The purpose of the VB6 code was to print barcoded shipping labels in a specified format, but the ZPL print instructions were heavily mixed with business logic. It was a nasty mess. The single greatest thing that would have helped me would have been encapsulation. Even if the developer hadn't separated the business logic from the ZPL code (which would have been very nice), small, well-named functions would have made the program so much easier to follow.
The reason I mention encapsulation specifically is because of how much you gain as a developer. If you learn nothing more than basic encapsulation as a VBA/VB6 developer, you'll do wonders for the readability and maintainability of your code.
"Becoming a good Visual Basic 6 programmer took much less time than becoming a good C++ programmer."
I love this line because it implies that you can actually become a good VB6 programmer. Sure, you may not be able to sort a linked list, but you can still learn about encapsulation and ... actually, just start with encapsulation; that's going to make your code SO much easier to read :-)
I still have a soft spot for VBA, especially in Excel. I wrote a supply-chain management application in Excel+VBA that's still in production today. As comfortable as I am with VBA, I wouldn't mind in the least ditching it for Python, which makes writing routine methods trivial. Great work!
The site looks nice. Whether or not their methods are the best, I've worked for quite a few folks who would find their presentation very appealing. Because they've been burned by companies who wrote code for them that didn't meet their expectations, they're excited about a company that will actually listen to their expectations thoroughly before the process begins.
I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.