>> I've got several prototypes, one being evaluated by a publisher currently, and I've been going to conventions and networking with other people in the industry. If one of my designs ends up being a hit, I should have enough money to make the transition.
Care to share more on this ? If I want to, where do I start making board game prototypes ? An email would do good, I don't see your contact info on your profile. All the best.
Neah !! Jobs are not about the degree only, still having a degree always adds up. Try half a dozen other companies. This response is typical of small size startup who instead of inviting you for a drink invite you to an interview with their two person team. I was rejected by three companies (2+ engineers) before the present company (15+ engineers) made me an offer. It wasn't even a coding interview at all, the Sr. Engineer wanted to have a conversation for a couple of minutes.
If I'm not mistaken parent is talking about 'working for a startup' that IMHO isn't as risky as 'co-founding' the startup, which of-course has its whistle bells. Why would a 10th employee join a startup for the risk and not for the money ?
If I were in your situation I'd use that time off the actual work to learn new things. Work on open source project or start my own projects etc.
Whoever you work with at the end when it comes to learning it falls back to how far you are willing to dedicate time to learning. The best way to learn is by yourself. As far as getting influenced by A level people is concerned you can get influenced by them fairly anywhere in the internet.
Bottom line – to get your ideas to spread you have to connect with people in a way that is meaningful and useful to them. If you can’t do this, it’s your fault, not theirs.
Let me tell you one thing, I haven't committed any code to "popular" opensource projects yet. But, I've been closely watching one opensource project from its beginning. Dev team pushes new changes, there I am learning a bit more from it. That way it took me two years to build up confidence that now any code I submit to them would meet the code guidelines, standards and will improve existing system. I've been releasing small features on my own repo and contributing to community forum too. Now i think it's time to go ahead and surprise them with a new feature push.
You named >> mongrel2, Rails, Sinatra
I never understood this. Are there shortage of opensource projects in the internet ? I wonder why every one wants to commit to the already "established" and big projects. They have enough genius community backup to them. Why not give a shot to small projects just starting out in language of your choice ? I think, the end result will be more satisfactory.
>> Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office.
If any app being social means being popular among general web users than yes Google Docs / Office document is not make-or-break feature for social. But when you use Google docs within an organization for team collaboration there is no better tool than this I've found so far. I doubt whether they are working on Google Docs desktop or not but I think that will be a one on one competition to MS Office.
>> (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave)
Etherpad was simple tool. Yes, we can't run it on etherpad.com, does it means they killed it ? I don't think Google killed it, they opensourced it. There are plenty of other hosted options available and are linked at the same domain http://etherpad.com. Why don't use them, they run Etherpad as well.