I've only been a consultant for 2 months, and the reason I say every waking hour is because we are only just now getting caught up with bills, but we're still pretty far from being stable, and this weighs heavily on my concentration, so while I may work 12 hours in a day, I only get maybe 6-8 hours out of this work that I can actually justify billing for, because the rest of it was just spent staring at a screen and not really knowing what to do. And besides that, I have several children who need at least some of my help and attention throughout the day, and my wife who needs my help with them. So there goes another 2-4 hours. So even though I'm trying to get to a computer and type stuff in to count for billable hours throughout the day, this or that kid comes in needing something, or it's suddenly lunch or dinner time, or like basically everything breaks up the day and ruins any productive flow I could get into.
I'm not in a position for any of that. We're living literally week to week, and every single hour that I'm awake I need to work. Our bills are past due and we're overdrawn $50 in the bank right now. I'm making $25/hour with this one client, and it's barely enough for the life we have. I would downsize our lifestyle if I knew how but we can't even afford to move to a cheaper city. As it is right now, the only choice I have right now is to just work on this client project every hour that I'm awake, and sleep no more than 7-8 hours per night.
For beginners? Whatever’s most popular on the job market. Ideally something with C syntax. Most languages are similar enough and their quirks can be avoided. Lisps are definitely a bad idea for this since the syntax is less intuitive to most people. ML languages like Haskell are not for everyone either, they require mathematically inclined minds. So maybe Java or JavaScript?
Speaking as someone whose first dynamic language was python, it’s full of weird inconsistencies and I have no idea why anyone voluntarily chooses it when teaching programming. Granted all languages have warts, but people say python is easier to learn programming concepts in than other languages and I just don’t see it. I think they just mean the indentation syntax discourages confusingly indented code?
The last time I tried to post on /r/forhire, some very vigilant commenters made a point of it to alert everyone else about my past, so they would know not to hire me. The moderators said too bad, it's their right, and really I agree with that judgment. But it means I have no way of getting new clients.
Removed that part. Not sure how naming other real names hurts them at all. Everyone else mentioned in this blog post did only good. The only thing they could be faulted for is giving me a chance, and they couldn't have known better at the time, so I really don't see what would be the benefit in changing any real names.
So I was actually just about to write a cross-platform app using https://material-ui.com/ purely because it is the most comprehensively fully developed and React-first toolkit for React out there. Plus it has 11k (edit: oh it's 37k, wow) stars on Github, more than twice as much as the next most starred React toolkit.
Semantic and Bootstrap have been "ported" to React and are missing features or do things non-idiomatically, whereas MUI was built with React in mind (twice if you count the rewrite). There are other React-first toolkits but none are nearly as comprehensive and "healthy".
But I've been on the fence because it feels really weird to write a cross-platform app (mobile and desktop) using components that are clearly designed to look like just one platform (Android). Technically I could make a custom theme for it, but that looks extremely complex, and OP's linked theme is practically the only free one I could find.
I'd love to just abandon toolkits like this and write my own React components specific to my app, but honestly I don't know how to make half the stuff that's in these toolkits. My JS/CSS is just not that strong.
I tried to rewrite my node backend in C++ but I got stuck at the package management part. When I learned Node I was able to install NPM and run “npm i -P uws” and was up and running quickly. Reading through about 5 WebSocket C++ lib installation instructions and still not making any progress was enough to make me wonder if my time would be better spent paying for a faster and/or bigger server cluster and just keeping node.
Regardless of whether he has the right to veto the consensus vote to remove the joke, by ignoring the general attitude that it’s not in good taste, he’s alienating everyone. That’s not a good position to put himself in, and I wonder if he’ll soon find himself the head of a dead project while a forked one lives in in his spirit but without his name.
I think that's more because Flask is a micro web framework whereas Rails is a macro web framework. Sinatra, Express, and Compojure are micro frameworks in the same vein as Flask, and they encourage simplicity of mental model over batteries-included comprehensiveness of features that you find in Rails, Sails, and Django. In general I prefer some kind of a middle ground but I don't think there's middle-ground frameworks actually out there, I think you have to kind of build on top of Flask/Sinatra/Express by throwing some-batteries-included libraries on top of them to get there. But yeah I also find it easier to reason about than having a whole lot of convention-over-configuration rules memorized.
I've used a few registrars over the years in different ways.
About 10 years ago I used pair.com because they also had PHP hosting and that's all I knew at the time. I did little with them.
I think for a very brief period I actually used godaddy for one or two domains.
A few years later I used gandi.net because they were "no BS" domain name registration, which I think was a direct reaction to having a hard time using godaddy. I mostly used it to point to custom slicehost servers. Later I also configured the DNS to point to github pages. Since they're in France, there's an extra step and extra few minutes before you get your domain names approved.
A few years after that I started using namecheap instead, and still use them. They give me the same amount of control as gandi.net but with a simpler (less confusing) interface, and they're in USA so they don't have the same delay that gandi.net has. I've pointed them to EC2 instances but mostly to github pages.
Recently I experimented with buying a few from Route 53 on AWS, mainly so I could see if it was all that big of an improvement to have everything on AWS. For some reason I'm getting charged like $2 every month for some (or all?) of these domain names, and it's a charge that's slightly annoying to me, mostly because I don't really understand what the charge is for (I think they said some sort of DNS routing fee or something?). I did like the integration with other services that Route 53 gave, but the flexibility and customization needed to get that integration working seemed like overkill and was definitely harder to figure out than the other services. Again I've used them successfully with both github pages and EC2.
Personally I would go with namecheap if I had to buy another domain name.
I've always had better luck restricting FP to using things like map, reduce, filter, (etc) inside methods as an implementation detail, but having the structure of the app use OOP.
Not just a basic one either, it had syntax highlighting! I always thought that was a pretty involved and complex feature, but it's simplified and demystified here.
Thanks, I appreciate it. And my thinking lines up with yours, that nobody will realistically pay for this app, which is why my plan is to add a buy-me-a-beer (donate) button into the app, and keep it open sourced, and submit it here next Tuesday, since I hear that's the best day for a Show HN.
That's what I've always tried to do: make something I use. The most successful example of this is when I made an app that I use on a daily basis (https://github.com/sdegutis/AppGrid) and have for several years straight. But it's so niche and small that nobody was willing to spend money on it, so I open sourced it. But I still think of it as a success because of how dependent I've become on this tool whenever I use a computer.
I've been really wanting to get into the artisanal business world as an entrepreneur for a while now, it always seems so full of potential, and I've had good experience on the other side as well (having purchased a hand-made Atreus keyboard from @technomancy). And it fits inline with my philosophy of quality craftsmanship being very important, especially in this age of disposable low-quality goods and services. The hard part is finding something that is pretty low-risk to jump right into. That's part of what drew me to software, because there's almost no costs except what you'd already have at home (electricity bill, computer, rent). So it's just a matter of finding a software niche that's low-risk enough to bootstrap without VC if possible, and in a very small time limit. That's probably why I started making Mac apps 10 years ago and have kept doing so since. Mac apps used to be known for their fine craftsmanship and attention to detail as well as niche market.
I don't mind learning, definitely. I got into this field because I'm passionate about software and I enjoy programming a lot. But while I have a full time job and a large-ish family to support, it's hard to fit "3 years of professional React.js experience" into my spare time to put on my resume, so that when nobody's hiring iOS developers anymore, I can still get a job. That's what I'm talking about. A lot of the skills are very transferrable, but I've already been turned down for a few jobs simply because I just don't have the in-production experience with the exact technology they're hiring for, even though I could pick it up pretty quickly.