OP here. Link is in the github repo! You'll find my motivations for making this in the readme. It's still quite rough but I'd love to get some early feedback on the idea.
#4 is interesting I've never heard that before. I recently graduated as well but from a heavily liberal-arts oriented uni. Most of my friends didn't even know a CS major even existed.
> There's the perception of being able to easily create a startup or to get a programming job at a tech company
Yeah a lot of people believe simply having a CS degree is a shoo-in for any job. However, if you're studying CS you probably want to work at a top-tier corporate or startup and neither is easy for most grads.
Yeah I think that's an important distinction. A lot of kids are picking up CS as a second major or as a minor because it's believed to make you more marketable for a non-tech field.
I posted a text description but just found out that you can't post both in a submission.
This is still in the very alpha stages but here are the main ideas of the project:
1) Simple, no-frill dashboard for managing posts (files). Once you're happy with a file you can publish it to your blog.
2) Key bindings (right now the only main ones are ctrl-c for code formatting and ctrl-l for linking). Eventually these will be completely user configurable.
3) Relational (not in the db sense): you can tag your files with labels and fast link text in your files to other files.
It's just a review tool designed for storing Question / Answer pairs to your long-term memory. Nothing else.
If that means using it to review and remember specific answers to WHY questions (Why is the sky blue?) for the rest of your life, all power to you. Keep reviewing. However, I think the moment you start asking these conceptual questions you're no longer just trying to remember - you're trying to understand. That's not what flash-cards are designed for.
Instead, you might actually want to look at the sky. Do experiments. Meet experts.
In the process, you will come up with new questions and new answers to old questions. More importantly, as a result of this adventure you will not only remember, but also learn. I wonder if Newton used flash-cards.
The best way to learn JS is very much the same as the best way to learn anything. If you don't know how to learn something effectively then no tool can help you.
What do I mean by knowing how to learn effectively?
* Understanding the basics (js is a dynamically typed scripting language)
* Understanding core concepts (in JavaScript, one core idea is prototypes. Another one is the keyword this which trips a lot of people up)
* Understanding all the connections (variables are actually object properties!)
It's a great tool for memorizing things that need to be rote-memorized. Chinese characters often fall into that category. Arcane Chemistry vocabulary probably do as well.
It's just a flash card system on steroids. If you know how to use a flash card system appropriately then this is a pretty powerful substitute.
> If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company
The difference between a founder that started a company this way versus a founder that started a company out of significant personal experience is astounding. The way they talk about their company is utterly different and I imagine that has a great deal of influence on hiring as well.
> This is a ridiculous game, and I think every wise person should refuse to participate in it in the first place and set their own priorities.
Regardless of whether or not that 19yo ties his happiness to doing something great doesn't change the fact that he's going to be part of this game either directly or indirectly. I desperately want to believe that we can all lead a happy life simply by setting our own priorities. However, as warm and fuzzy as that can make me feel inside I just don't think it's true. Resources are scarce. There's going to be competition. In some places in the world there's heavy competition even if your priority is something as basic as water.
> What I find surprising is that the recruiter still wants me to interview even after I explained who and what I am.
Did you tell him that you're a psychopath? My point is that if a recruiter reaches out to you, it probably means your online identity matches their criteria for potential candidate. Now this criteria can be as simple as oh neat he uses haskell to I'm impressed by his contributions to project X, Y, Z. So unless you tell him something that is completely contradictory to his superficial impression of you there's no reason he should tell you NOT to interview with the company.
Also, I feel like whatever reason the recruiter decided to contact you (Github / nice linkedin profile) has very little to do with the companies hiring bar. It's a terrible proxy for measuring how a company hires. It's at best an indication of the technologies you'll potentially be working with. For example, if you only have java listed chances are you prob. would have never gotten that phone call. You should try it as an experiment.
Want to know where the bar actually is? Go for an interview. Of course, what they mean by interview is usually 1-2 rounds of phone interviews. So in essence you're still pretty far from being seriously considered as a candidate.
> Don't think that the fact of recruiter getting in touch mean anything -- they are playing their own numbers game.
Exactly. In some conversations I've had with fellow dev's they seem to equate a message from a recruiter with a job offer. I never understood this. Sure, I get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn but it's prob. the same generic letter blasted to hundreds or even thousands of candidates. The quality of your online profiles (SEO?) as a programmer is directly related to the volume of messages you get from recruiters.
I like live coding too but I think how much of it is acceptable depends on what you're trying to demonstrate. If you're doing a programming tutorial video then yes by all means type every line so the viewer can follow along. However, if you're trying to show how various code changes get reflected in your browser do you really need to dedicate 20% of your video time to writing a sine function?