Definitely agree. If you're thinking that you're missing out on life then make the change, go down a tangential path. Do not go through life bitching & whining that you didn't make the most of an opportunity.
Take the sabbatical and go to Europe for 6 months. If it turns out to not be what you expected, so what, you've learned something and grown.
There will always be someone who does something better than you, regardless of whether it is related to programming or not. Some people have more of an aptitude for a particular skill than you but that doesn't mean you're a failure, nor is it something to get depressed about. Rather than dwell on the knowledge that someone is better than you at something you enjoy, use it inspire & motivate yourself to improving your own ability.
Interesting article, but annoyed that it doesn't feature Norway in the country comparison. The Norwegian start-up market may be small, but it is growing.
When I was 7 my parents gave me a Commodore VIC-20 and after tiring of playing games, I wanted to make my own. Started out with copying game listings out of magazines in basic, then moved on to assembly, pascal, and then C.
Fast forward 30-ish years and I've been a developer for over 20 years coding games to enterprise applications and everything in-between.
To me its more a calling rather than a concious choice to be a programmer, like joining the seminary. now I spend my time mentoring younger developers and tinkering with new languages and things.
The university of Liverpool has a number of decent online programmes in cooperation with laureate international.
I'm currently on the MSc Web sciences & Big Data programme.
There's no mention of using Google authentication anywhere other than after clicking the login or sign-up buttons and you get the oAuth permissions/Google login page.
Also, if you cancel the oAuth request, you get an internal server error:
Background; I'm currently running a system which at peak runs with about 15 million messages per hour using ActiveMQ, with several producers and consumers on the same topic.
Another vote for RabbitMQ. We're currently using a small RabbitMQ cluster that is averaging 5000+ msgs/sec and its not straining the sytem. At times, we've experienced bursts approaching 10,000 msgs/sec without any issues.
We have around 30 producers and 45 consumers spread out over a wide range of queues & exchanges.
Whilst ZMQ is generally faster, it does require more effort to be useful. Whereas RabbitMQ, I believe, provides the best of both worlds. Blazing fast messaging combined with ease of use and setup.
I signed up before the change to being a paid service, so am not paying unless I go over the 10 account limit.
Now its $5 per account. An account being in Googles own words:
"We consider a user to be the same as the number of distinct email inboxes you need. One user can have multiple email addresses, and a domain can have multiple aliases – these are included in the price for each user."