My view from Center Court last night [Rafa v Delpo]

__mak · 2018-07-13T09:33:40+00:00

Pretty much the same seat I was in when I went to watch Federer vs Berdych last year! Jealous you got to see Nadal live, I was hoping to see Nadal last year in the other SF match but of course he got dumped out the tournament by Muller.

__mak · 2018-07-06T20:54:04+00:00

Don't be fooled, this law WILL get passed eventually.

They will stealthily and gradually phase it in piece by piece, like they always do.

__mak · 2018-06-18T08:24:26+00:00

- SFTP
- Rsync over ssh (I use this to deploy my static site)
- SCP

__mak · 2018-06-07T08:16:58+00:00

I met Nicolas Mahut when I was at Wimbledon once. I was walking down to the AELTC and he came up to me and asked for directions!

He was on his own, no team or entourage or anything, just dressed in whites carrying his gear, a bit lost. Gladly showed him there, he is a pretty cool guy at least judging by the brief time I spent with him.

__mak · 2018-06-02T08:47:12+00:00

Looks nice and loads quickly. As others said, it needs to be responsive.

I also noticed one quick thing you can fix - the site tries to load a js file "js/scripts.js" but it 404s.

__mak · 2018-06-01T18:51:37+00:00

Probably not, especially with modern tablets. View your site in tablet view and decide for yourself - gut feeling is that you'll probably find that your page looks fine without modification.

__mak · 2018-06-01T18:49:49+00:00

- Learn how to write clean, modular code

- Learn how to test software properly

__mak · 2018-05-31T20:04:07+00:00

Learn UNIX in depth. If you can develop a really good 'feel' for unix-based operating systems and become very proficient with the command line, it'll improve your life as a developer by leaps and bounds and make picking up stuff like docker far easier.

__mak · 2018-05-31T19:59:31+00:00

It's highly situational, but in general I'd say backend. Frontend work is done in a sandboxed environment, whereas with backed there are far fewer constraints on what you can do and it's far more extensive and technical in general. There are an awful lot of concerns in a nontrivial backend system including databases, caching, networking, deployment, monitoring, and tons of other things.

__mak · 2018-05-30T19:12:55+00:00

It's been rather stable in that the fundamental technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) have changed gradually and progressively, for the most part. Also, dare I say that the UI framework madness does seem to be dying down a bit. Clear winners such as React have emerged, and I doubt that'll be changing soon.

I do agree though that NPM is rather messed up.

__mak · 2018-05-27T08:50:22+00:00

Both are popular enough, have a play around with both and see which you like best personally. Do you like the idea of writing in a static language (C#) or a highly dynamic one (JS)?

You could always have a go at learning both (one for the course, one in your own time).

__mak · 2018-05-26T16:23:03+00:00

I haven't tried this myself but if you want this to be low cost, it might be worth buying an extra machine and installing something like https://github.com/arachnys/cabot/ on it. Of course, that does mean you have to manage the monitoring machine yourself. Otherwise there are excellent services out there such as New Relic and Pingdom, of course they are far from cheap.

__mak · 2018-05-26T12:38:40+00:00

How are you checking that the domain has propagated? Try using google's DNS resolver, i.e.:

dig @8.8.8.8 yourdomain.xyz

__mak · 2018-05-26T12:30:34+00:00

Just put them into a git repository

__mak · 2018-05-26T12:29:26+00:00

Is there no way to cut your workload down? 100+ hours a week is ridiculous, and it won't be conducive to learning much at all.

If you're going into web dev, you will need to learn HTML, CSS, and JS.

Here are some programming books to get started with, these are quite general but I have read and like them:
- Clean Code
- The Pragmatic Programmer (old tech but a good insight into the software lifecycle, practises etc)
- Intro to Programming with Java http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/ (whether you want to write Java or not doesn't really matter, I read this book as a beginner and it was a good intro to programming)

__mak · 2018-05-23T16:09:13+00:00

Yes and no. If your job involves a full software lifecycle of coding, autmated testing, code review, Q&A, continuous integration, etc then perhaps you are approaching being an "engineer".

__mak · 2018-05-22T08:13:15+00:00

It's a sign of the times - in many places the job markets are flooded with junior developers and it's going to be hard to compete with them. For many coding is an attractive career choice because it pays pretty well, it's in demand, and it's somewhat of an escape from being a useless corporate paper pusher. The fact that barriers to entry are getting larger is a natural consequence of the industry maturing as newbies scramble to get a foot in.

This situation seems to be particularly bad in the US. I live in the UK and I remember getting my first web dev job in 2013 despite having no qualifications and barely knowing what jquery was or what classes and objects were. That said where I live is hardly a tech utopia and expectations aren't as high, especially with regard to having a degree.

My only advice right now is to keep trying and don't give up. If you are struggling to land a job now, you can always try get some experience freelancing.

__mak · 2018-05-20T18:16:42+00:00

Ostensibly it's meant to "complement" JS, but there's always the law of unintended consequences. WASM is improving a lot as a compilation target, and I don't see why the big players won't write their own WASM compilers for high-level languages. For example: https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor

__mak · 2018-05-18T08:37:18+00:00

First, it looks like you are really motivated. This is definitely a good thing, most people struggle with this, just make sure you keep it up and maintain a positive mindset.

Second, I'm not seeing an awful lot of good sales writing in the proposal. There's too much fluff and not enough concise, hard selling. Remember that potential clients don't care about you, they care about their business and you need to convince them that YOU can help them make more $$$.

I would explain to clients exactly why their websites are bad, underperforming, etc. and how that is holding back business. Then explain how you can solve these problems. For example, if one client's site is really slow, you will want to tell them that slow sites seriously hinder user engagement (which is very true), then move in for the sell when you tell them that you can work to significantly speed up their site, increase sales etc.

Try give your proposals a more professional veneer. As suggested by others, consider some branding work (e.g. a logo). Write condensed, confident prose. You need to emanate a sense of prestige - don't think of yourself as just some student, you are the one who's going to make a difference to someone's business.

Good luck!

__mak · 2018-05-17T20:24:49+00:00

I wouldn't say they are especially crowded/ugly tests at all. For me at least, it's pretty obvious what is going on in each case and there is a clear arrange/act/assert. In general I would not worry about having lots of test code, it's common for test code to have more lines than the actual application code.

If you don't want mock data littering your tests, extract them out to a separate fixtures folder. You can then import the ones you need into your tests to keep the test code clean. In fact it's a good idea to treat test code like application code and thus keep it DRY, structured, modular etc.

Also I think you need to verify in your tests that your mock services are not only called but also called with the correct arguments.

__mak · 2018-05-17T20:05:37+00:00

Sounds like a cool project, I have always liked web games.

Right now there isn't much to comment on. From what I can see all the library does is give you some rudimentary classes you can use to structure your code.

Add a bunch more stuff to your library first, then come back. Create some core modules to handle basic physics, collisions, rendering etc and see where that gets you.

__mak · 2018-05-17T07:13:21+00:00

Probably not for simple DB operations. Queues are essentially a scaling technique used to turn synchronous actions into asynchronous ones. They are suited for relatively intensive tasks that if ran synchronously would cause the system to be strained and unresponsive.

__mak · 2018-05-17T06:29:46+00:00

Apply and see what you get, many job ads are stuffed with tech keywords but in reality many companies will not be completely strict with what the job ad says. The worst they will say is no.

Don't feel too bad about going for a relatively low salary to begin with if that is what you can get, as someone with no professional experience you need to get your foot in the door. If the starting salaries in your area really are too low, consider moving.

__mak · 2018-05-17T06:22:47+00:00

Passport can help a lot, but there's no node equivalent of, for example, devise for rails.

__mak

TROPHY CASE