> To what extent are companies using whiteboards to test who is serious about getting the job? And who is willing to put in extra time and occasionally do unpleasant extra work?
But it doesn't say anything about who's serious about getting that specific job, if every tech company does the same kind of whiteboard interviews.
> Whilst this comment might sound facetious, it isn't intended to be.
Yep, it's dizzying how fast the JS ecosystem is changing; hell, even just the React ecosystem on its own. I went back to a React-based side project I had been working on at the beginning of this year to try to get it up to date with current best practices and tooling, and SO much has changed (Babel/ES6, Webpack, the maturation of the Flux pattern, the React/React DOM split, etc) that I've decided to rewrite it more or less from scratch.
I don't even need a lot of the stuff this particular boilerplate kit has, as my app is designed to run as a static site on Github pages, but having one place to go just to find out what libraries and practices are currently considered the state of the art (or flavor of the month, depending on your level of cynicism) would be wonderful.
> calibrated to the phonetic system of its language
The funny thing about that, though, is that English "huh" has a phonetic feature that's almost nonexistent in the language otherwise: a nasal vowel not followed by a nasal consonant.
To be fair, the dosages most of these doctors are administering are well under a usual recreational dose, as the article mentions. IIRC you also build tolerance to ketamine pretty quickly, so I'd imagine the amount of K those people are doing that's causing bladder damage is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any of these patients.
This is a pretty neat approach to building a static site, and it reminds me that a couple months ago I was experimenting with building a static site generator in Clojure. Which makes me think – is there any reason something like this couldn't be done with Clojurescript and Reagent? I've been itching to try out both of those but haven't come up with a good project for it.
The hard part might be routing, since there doesn't seem to be a robust solution for doing that in Reagent yet. I found https://github.com/ghedamat/reagent-react-router but it hasn't been updated in months and the author calls it "very very alpha."
Personal anecdote time: About a year ago a band I like (which also happens to be a side project of members of my favorite band) was playing in my city and I was trying to find friends to come with me, but none could or wanted to. I spent a few hours beforehand agonizing over whether or not to go alone but I finally decided "screw it, I'm going." Got to the club, band came on, played a kick-ass show, and after I went to buy a record at the merch table I spotted the singer (also one of the core members of said favorite band) hanging out by the bar just talking to people. So I went over and said hi, shook his hand, told him how awesome the show was and was generally a starstruck idiot the whole damn time.
None of that would have happened had I decided not to go alone, and it seemed silly in retrospect that I spent so long agonizing over the decision, but I was definitely grappling with a degree of social anxiety. But now it's something I do all the time. The key was convincing myself that no one actually cares if you're at a concert by yourself.
I think that's true of a lot of other social situations, but sometimes it's a hard mentality to internalize. Kind of weird how much we care about strangers' perceptions of us.
`isNaN` as it currently exists isn't terribly useful, because anything that can be type-coerced to NaN will return true. If you want to check if something actually is NaN in JS, the common idiom is to test x !== x, since NaN is the only value in JS that is defined as not being equal to itself (don't blame Eich, blame the IEEE floating-point standard). NaN, despite the name, is a "number" that's a result of floating-point calculations with undefined behavior. Sometimes that's a useful thing to test for.
Adding a new, proper isNaN function under a new namespace (Number) lets them do that without breaking the old functionality.
$14k? Not unless they changed it since I enrolled. I did have to pay a deposit but it was "only" $5k. I admit I was annoyed because they had just bumped that number from $3750 IIRC. So you do have to front some cash but nothing approaching the full eventual cost of the program. (Again, unless they changed it, which would make me a bit sad if they did. I like that lowered-risk, alignment-of-incentives model and it would be a shame if they had to abandon it.)
> 2013 Hack Reactor grad here. I had actually heard this about Dev Bootcamp before applying to HR, so I asked the HR founders during my interviews if they did this and they emphatically said no.
Huh, interesting. I knew DBC does that too but they seemed much more upfront about it in their ad copy (and in fact it was touted as a selling point). FWIW, a/A sounds similar to HR by how you describe it; they want everyone to succeed and will give you plenty of support but if you still aren't pulling your weight you'll get booted. There was a guy in our cohort who dropped right before final projects and they let him come back at the same point in the next cycle but they made an exception for him because he had personal reasons for dropping.
But yeah, besides that, great learning environment, everyone wants everyone else to do well, build cool shit and get good jobs. I'd recommend a/A in a heartbeat to anyone, with the caveat that you've done enough programming to know it's something you enjoy doing. (But the amount of Ruby you have to learn to get through the admission process successfully is a pretty decent litmus test.)
While it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, good bootcamps have an emphasis on (ahem) marketable skills that a lot of CS programs don't. You'd be right that you don't learn a ton of theory like you would in CS, but App Academy at least (and I'd assume Hack Reactor as well) makes sure you have enough grounding in programming fundamentals that learning new languages/frameworks/stacks isn't hard.
That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating. Whether that's out of genuine concern for students or it's just to inflate their job placement numbers (or both), I couldn't tell you.
I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.)
Having talked with my friends who are working now, there are definitely things a/A doesn't teach you much about (e.g. deployment/devops, advanced Git) but on the whole we all feel like we learned more than enough to prepare ourselves for working in software development. I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well, though they expect you to come in with some coding experience already.
So yes, there are good/great ones out there, but I'd agree that your bullshit detector should be set very high if you're looking into bootcamps.
Yeah, if there were an Android app I'd try this out in a heartbeat. I use Lastpass currently but I haven't been liking the direction it's recently taken. This seems like a much more elegant solution, but it's a no-go if I can't use it on my phone.
Looks interesting, but from what I understand it's a really really bad idea to run ZFS without ECC RAM. So is this geared purely toward Mac Pro/Hackintosh users, since no other Mac models use ECC RAM? Or does this somehow do things differently?
Oh, and it looks like it still doesn't play nice with Spotlight. That's a dealbreaker for me until they fix that.
Eh, I'm not holding my breath on that (though of course I hope I'm wrong). In all the Pono marketing material I've read I've seen almost no reference to (re)mastering; it's all been about chasing the hi-res dragon. Meh.