I'm a senior dev, but still relatively early in my career (~8 years). I've been thinking about your exact situation a lot lately as I have interviewed several candidates from various backgrounds. I see a lot of people with lots of experience, but they didn't make the cut after taking our coding tests and technical interviews that younger less experienced devs breezed through. I wonder if I will be in the same boat in 5-10 years myself because I haven't kept up with the newest technology. Like you, I have no desire to become a manager and I'm quite happy being an individual contributor.
Also being a relatively new Dad (toddler and a newborn on the way) only makes it that much harder to keep up!
"it would be tricky to get all the rules of chess into a JS file"
Check out chess.js, https://github.com/jhlywa/chess.js, it does a pretty excellent job. The combination of chessboard.js and chess.js would result in a pretty sweet browser-based chess game.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
I wouldn't test 50+ onclick functions. I'd used event delegation to assign the click handler to the appropriate parent element. I'm not experienced with Angular, but the last time I checked it didn't support event delegation :(
I agree that animating the icons just for the sake of animation isn't useful. However, the precipitation rate of the rain and snow animations could change in response to the forecast.
"Fourth, good intentions; best practices; professionalism; engineering – the seductions of process. You are chasing the same gold stars you got when you were eight years old. But how is the master craftsman judged? By results, only."
It's true that we love to talk coding standards and development processes because it feels productive. At the end of the day, delivering a working product is true productivity.
Coincidentally, I watched "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" this evening, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see it on the front page of HN. I was absolutely fascinated by Jiro, and I couldn't stop thinking about how his advice is applicable to honing you software development skills. Jiro never stops trying to improve in all facets of his craft, including the seemingly minor details.
I agree with the Roger Ebert quote that it's clear he sacrificed much of his family life to obtain this mastery. Jiro even admits that he wasn't a good father. However, if you love what you do, as he does, then I can't fault him for it. We'd be so fortunate to have that kind of passion.
The creator of this remake gave a talk on it at the houston.js meetup this week. I was thoroughly impressed with how much effort and thought he's put into this project. He said that the Pac-Man dossier was his inspiration and seems to genuinely love the game.
For those of you who have criticisms about the game's accuracy, I suggest that you submit a new issue to his github repo: https://github.com/shaunew/Pac-Man/issues. That's what open source is all about, right?
(Disclaimer: I just accepted a position with PROS, but I haven't started yet)
PROS is looking for UI developers for our new, innovative cloud products. As a member of the PROS Product Development team, you will be working with Software Engineering teams that place a great importance developing modern, clean, and awesome code. We currently use JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, HTML, CSS, JavaScript templating, Backbone.js, Node.js build tools, and RESTful backend endpoints powered by Java and Groovy.
Ditto. I feel the same way about HN. I love the submissions and find it all fascinating, but sometimes I just need to take a break from HN otherwise I get too down on myself.
You have to remind yourself that people are showing off their accomplishments here. It seems like everyone is an all-star and they stamp out genius products everyday, but really you're not seeing all the hard work (weeks, months, years even) poured into those projects.