I have been enrolled in classes at The Pennsylvania State University's (PSU) World Campus[1] since the spring semester of 2014. This is PSU's fully online offering. I first earned an AS in Information Systems Technology (IST) en route to continuing for my BS in IST. I will graduate this fall.
I took my sweet time because, alongside my studies, I've maintained full time employment in industry (first as an SE and recently moving into cloud architecture). I share this to highlight that, although I've been in it for the long haul, the quality of the education (e. g., course design, instructor engagement, CMS quality, etc.) has kept me thoroughly rapt along the journey.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week and am extremely comfortable with a 2019 MacBook Pro (15 in) and two Dell P2415Q monitors (24 in / 4K). I wish I had gone with the 27 in model but had limited space in my office.
My personal laptop is a mid-2015 MacBook Pro. For connectivity, I use both DisplayPort (DP) and mini-DisplayPort (mDP). DP goes to the 2019 MBP and mDP goes to the mid-2015 MBP.
I run everything from the latest MacOS to Windows 7 and 10 to multiple flavors of Linux via an unRAID box that pulls double duty as a media server. I've had very limited issues with driver support.
I just asked myself this question quite literally yesterday. In my search for an answer, I stumbled upon CodeTriage. You pick a language with which you're comfortable and a project (or two) that utilizes that language and CodeTriage delivers GitHub issues to your inbox. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of knowing how to jump in.
I experienced a similar situation just a few months ago. I'm now being asked to step in and take over the project from the very person who got the promotion because said individual never truly had the leadership skills to begin with, rather, they only had the leverage of walking out the door.
It's a very difficult pill to swallow when my manager turns this situation around on me, stating (I'm paraphrasing), "If you truly want to be a senior, you have to know when to swallow your pride and do right by the team."
Awesome reply! This is why I love HN. I'll be sure to investigate all of the options you've provided, including your own company. It takes a lot of integrity to list your own product last and include a disclaimer to boot. Kudos!
I suppose you've hit the nail on the head with your final sentence. I do agree with you, though, that my VP is making the appropriate decision given that we're a large enterprise.
At the end of the day, whether I'm a cog in the wheel of a huge machine or a decisive voice at a small startup, the engineer in me just wants to see the best solution realized. I guess that's why I still care, when in reality, I should probably be considering a move elsewhere.
Would you care to comment on runtime performance of the finished product? I've played around with Flutter a bit and get the impression that it's still a little too heavily skewed toward Android in terms of optimization. I guess I can't fault a Google-built framework for that, but I could never sell Flutter to upper management if I have to say, "well... it's a little janky on iOS."
This acquisition has piqued my interest moreso than your average bear because I work for a major retailer that just so happens to be heavily invested in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We are using AEM strictly as a CMS and are otherwise heavily invested in Oracle Endeca to drive commerce from a search/nav perspective. And then there's the whole payment and order management issue which we handle with custom, in-house solutions.
I'm a little scared to hear all the horrible experiences with Magento because I'm a developer on our search team and working with Endeca (or any Oracle product for that matter) is an absolute nightmare. I flat out hate Endeca. We'll be due for a replatform in another few years (once the business gets sick of us trying to bolt on big data features to Endeca, which just wasn't built for such). I can imagine us going the Magento route since we already have hefty contracts in place with Adobe.
I've tried to pitch a custom solution based on Elasticsearch (or Solr directly) but my director and VP don't want to hear about anything that involves building various business user UIs from scratch. Endeca provides a (sigh... Flash based) UI that gets the job done, and on top of that we have several legacy apps with (can't believe I'm saying this in 2018) UIs written in classic ASP.
Other than Shopify or Workarea, are there any platforms you, the ever-full-of-knowledge gurus of HN would recommend? I really like both of the aforementioned products because they give you a lot of useful UIs out the box (in addition to the capabilities of the platforms themselves), but they also give you a lot of content management and we don't need that.
I've been writing so much boring backend Java for so long... Some Python would be a sorely needed breath of fresh air. Thanks for pointing me in this direction. I might just play around with it on my homelab for the fun of it!
Thank you for the article link! It was an interesting read, indeed. I hadn't thought of this seemingly obvious approach, and it's one that won't be too difficult to pitch to management.
I took my sweet time because, alongside my studies, I've maintained full time employment in industry (first as an SE and recently moving into cloud architecture). I share this to highlight that, although I've been in it for the long haul, the quality of the education (e. g., course design, instructor engagement, CMS quality, etc.) has kept me thoroughly rapt along the journey.
[1] https://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/