White Whale Web Services | Junior Support Engineer | REMOTE (US) | Full Time | $55-65k
White Whale is a small higher-ed web, strategy, and technology company. We make, maintain, and support a CMS and Calendar product used by 100+ colleges and universities (livewhale.com and livewhalecalendar.com). We've been a small company in this space for 20 years; we're currently eight, looking to hire our ninth teammate. (Speaking personally, I enjoy working for a founder-owned company that's grown organically from contract revenue over the years, rather than the big leaps you see the startup/investor space.)
Our company and this junior role are likely a bit "low-octane" compared with your average Hacker News job posting, but if any of y'all know any recent grads or early-career folk comfortable with HTML/CSS/JS and looking for a job that prioritizes work-life-balance, feel free to point them our way! This is a position grounded on our support team, but with opportunities to learn and grow into development and devops tasks.
Like many others, QBasic plus some library books comprised my start to programming and totally changed my life. A few of my most vivid childhood memories were sitting in a closet with a humming MS-DOS computer, smelling hot plastic and finessing how to use SCREEN 7 so I could place my game's background on one page and sprites on another. A huge "aha" moment was when I learned what arrays were, as they allowed me to use the same "enemy sprite" logic to place multiple enemies on the screen at once without requiring separate code. Another was when I devised and designed my own Zelda-like tile system so I could draw various map elements once and then encode each game screen as a simple string of letters. Nothing but love for those days and how they got me comfortable messing with code.
Many good points made here; the one thing I think everyone missed is how exhilarating and SCARY MineCraft can be. If you have been spelunking in a labyrinthine cave system for (in-game) days and racked up a huge bag of loot, every monster around the corner (or over your shoulder) is alarming in a very real way. Getting killed doesn't just mean a manufactured in-game penalty ("go back to last save point") it means the possibility of literally losing everything you've just been working for and discovering.
Funny, this exact same thing happened to music. You used to be able to listen to a band's demo CD and immediately tell if they were any good by listening to the drummer, because a good drummer wouldn't play with a crappy group. Now with drum loops and better recording technology, even a crummy group could (on the surface) make a good-sounding demo. The underlying talent may or may not be good, but as the article says, it just takes more time to figure that out.
I only clicked around the game for a few minutes, but I have two general ideas: (partially borrowed from the Zynga Handbook of Doom, but you did ask for addictive...)
* Don't have players start with zero coins; give us enough to start off and do something fun or cool (i.e. book one flight, get to a new city), and then lead players into the game's job mechanic.
* It's a terribly silly (and transparent) game mechanic, but I love games with Achivements / Medals / Awards. Either make them all available from the start or (a la many iPhone games) only "assign" three achivements at a time, each with a certain "star" value; get enough stars and you "level up", which comes with a hefty coin bonus. This way, once players have figured out the game's mechanics, they'll continue playing for achivements (and you can use achivements to encourage experimentation with other game features).
I think, of course, the problem he 'cracked' that will make the interface easier is that instead of a conventional remote, you use your iPhone/iPod Touch or something similar that would come with the TV. Touch screen, context-sensitive menus, voice commands... that would simplify a lot, no?
(I also wonder if he was imagining removing the layer of "channels" and just have something like the iTunes Store where you search for shows?) Just pondering...
Along these same lines, I'd like to quote another fan of Cinkle's from Metafilter:
"The thing about this that fascinates me is there is no pose here, no ego and none of those horrendous qualities that you see in a lot of the young people who seek out attention on the Internet. She was never supposed to be famous. Cinkle was just a friend of Black's who was invited to be in the video, and given practically no direction. When all of this unearned and decidedly negative attention crashed down on her, she turned it into something entirely positive -- most of her FB and Tumblr followers are people who started out making fun of her (myself included). How many people could manage to do that at any age?
I was won over when someone asked her 'Why are you so awkward??' and she responded:'Um, because I'm 13 (:'"
I can remember this feeling after playing Katamari Damacy... I'd drive down the highway and imagine how great it'd be to pull off the road and roll over that string of highway markers.
White Whale is a small higher-ed web, strategy, and technology company. We make, maintain, and support a CMS and Calendar product used by 100+ colleges and universities (livewhale.com and livewhalecalendar.com). We've been a small company in this space for 20 years; we're currently eight, looking to hire our ninth teammate. (Speaking personally, I enjoy working for a founder-owned company that's grown organically from contract revenue over the years, rather than the big leaps you see the startup/investor space.)
Our company and this junior role are likely a bit "low-octane" compared with your average Hacker News job posting, but if any of y'all know any recent grads or early-career folk comfortable with HTML/CSS/JS and looking for a job that prioritizes work-life-balance, feel free to point them our way! This is a position grounded on our support team, but with opportunities to learn and grow into development and devops tasks.
Info and how to apply: https://www.whitewhale.net/job-postings/