I used to play video games a ton growing up (most of the ones mentioned in the article). I have tried picking up modern games as an adult, but don't get quite the same thrill/zone as I did as a kid. I haven't felt immersed. I get that feeling now from rock climbing, cycling and skiing. I think it's because after spending all day working on programming, staring at a screen and working through challenges seems too much like work.
I agree with this. Mobile first doesn't necessarily mean native first. From both design and engineering perspectives, it is much easier to build a website that looks good on both mobile and desktop and then add components to the desktop site than it is to start with a desktop site and pare it down to work well on mobile.
Beautiful service - I've wanted this for a while. My bookmarks all show up, but when I search for anything I get no results. Looks like you guys still have a few kinks to work out...
Any "CSS Best Practices" guide should start with "1. Use a preprocessor."
Also, don't use IDs? Really? The article referenced as a source for this claim ends with "Don’t stop using IDs, just be aware of where they can cause you headaches and know where to sensibly circumvent them. Anyone telling you not to use them at all is not wrong, but they’re definitely not right…"
That's good advice. Understanding how specificity works will make you realize, when designing your Twitter widget, relying on a selector ".tweet a" is unreliable, and use "a.tweet-link" instead.
I just spent my entire day tracking down a missing "var" that caused a bug only in Internet Explorer. I haven't written any assembly code since college, and I hope to reach a day when I never have to write or maintain native Javascript again.
Can anyone explain why 'United States' could possibly be an autocomplete result for 'CA'? I am staring at United States and just can't see a 'C' anywhere... have I totally lost it?
I think the random string is clever. My first instinct would be that you should be able to reach it at http://resume.io/dangrossman, but then if someone is familiar with the service they could circumvent the tracking URLs.
On the other hand, having a human friendly URL might be nice in the long run for easily finding people. Definitely a tradeoff.
Do yourself a favor and use CoffeeScript! You will never have to worry about this or any number of other trivial JS mistakes, plus your code will be more readable and more fun to write. Win/win.
It is terrible that your friends' privacy was violated, and I apologize for this comment being off topic, but I feel compelled to address the specific personal circumstances that Alex has uncovered.
Alex: as a gay man who came out as an adult, I urge you to reach out to your closeted friend. Let him know that Facebook violated his privacy and you accidentally and unexpectedly came across his secret. Reassure him that you care about him as a friend and that his sexuality makes no difference to you.
Unless he is in physical or serious financial risk from coming out, his life will be unimaginably better if he comes out. If he's going to lose his job or be disowned by his parents, at least having one friend to share his secret with may make a world of difference.
If he has a girlfriend or wife, for her sake, you need to reach out to him. It's an incredibly awkward situation, but think about what an enormous positive difference you can make in one or two people's lives.
SASS @extend solves most of the code bloat - if you have lots of elements styled with border-radius: 5px, using @extend, the vendor prefixed code will only appear once in the compiled CSS.
Before commenting about Android, read the article twice, look around the page, and if you still want to talk about Android, read one of the related posts.
This isn't an apples to apples comparison, but according to the Prince, 41.5% of the graduating seniors my year (2008) "who had accepted full-time employment offers by graduation" were employed in the "financial sector" (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/03/08/25465/).
Not an apples to apples comparison with the Yale article, but my reaction is still surprised that the number is that small at Yale.
I'm from a different generation than Neal Stephenson. I grew up inspired by my parents' old IBM XT. The Apple II at school. My TI-83 programmable graphing calculator. Not space flight. I continue to be inspired every year by the innovations in tech startups, and that's just the field I happen to live and work in - the biomedical field in the last 10 years has made orders of magnitude of progress understanding the human genome in ways that I can barely understand (despite having a college degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology).
Without Facebook I wouldn't have seen or spoken to lots of old friends until our 25th high school or college reunion.
Without Twitter I wouldn't have learned from and made connections with influential people in the tech world.
Without Google or Wikipedia or StackOverflow I would have to go to a library to learn anything new.
Without GitHub I would have to write my own software from scratch and spend a lot of time managing collaboration workflows.
Without AWS, Heroku, Ruby, Rails et al. I wouldn't have been able to launch my own startup without outside funding.
Without Zappos I wouldn't be able to buy size 15 shoes in whatever style or fit I want. I ordered shoes last week at 7pm and they arrived at 9:30am the next day. Seriously.
Without Kindle and my iPad I wouldn't be able to get any book in the world in 5 seconds for $10.
AirBNB, ZipCar, Apple, Dropbox, the list goes on, and this is in my (our) industry alone.
Neal Stephenson might not be able to fly to Mars in his lifetime, but I'm pretty excited about the innovations that will happen in the next 10 years; if they're half as good as the last 10, us geeks will be pretty satisfied.