SEEKING WORK | Remote | Chicago, IL | Contract | Full or part time
I'm a Chicago-based, full stack developer, and my forte is developing web-based systems that enable organizations to achieve more. With 20+ years of experience, I have taken numerous systems all the way from requirements gathering, through development, and into production.
My Dad brought the 994A home while I was in elementary school. He later became the chair of the Chicago TI Users group for a while. I learned to program on Extended Basic, made a couple of extremely primitive games. I remember dictating game code from magazines while my Dad typed them in, and also reading and analyzing other people's code from shareware text adventures like Cake and Kidnapped. We had the expansion unit with memory and the floppy drive - the fan on that thing used to roar! Played hours of SPAD, Parsec, Scott Adams adventures, and bunches of Infocom games. This brings back lots of good memories for me.
Find an experienced business person to work with. The ideal person would be someone that is successful at what they do, and that also understands the potential for technology to transform their business. It certainly helps if they have seen a software development project traverse from start to finish. And they should be someone that you can trust. If you can't find this person, find a job in an industry that interests you. Ideally, you'll eventually meet people on the business side that have a vision, and are looking for someone that can deliver technology that fulfills their vision. They're out there -- like attracts like. And, be the kind of professional that people want to partner with and it will eventually happen.
Every time that I fly now into Vegas for business or competitions, it's a matter of routine for me to drive up to Charleston peak, and the Red Rock area - it's only an hour away. It's all too easy to snub one's nose at the strip for everything that it is... I can simply say it has almost no draw for me. I invariably rent a car and head out the desert.
Beat me to it. I can vouch for this book as being completely amazing. It teaches you the fundamentals of how to see design, which in turn contributes to learning how to produce your own designs. Or evaluate someone else's. If you read only design book, this one is worth the time.
Oh, good on you for posting this. This takes me back to childhood summers spent hacking away at TI Extended BASIC trying to write my own games - with admittedly humble results. Or the evenings spent reading dot matrix printouts of other games' code trying reverse engineer the text parser. Or memories of playing Scott Adam's text adventures, the flight-sim SPAD, Parsec, Infocom's Witness, etc. Or attending Chicago TI user group meetings with my Dad - who eventually became the president of such IIRC. Or my Dad dialing up 300 baud modems to a BBS. Those were definitely good times.
Remember when people used to clap or cheer at the movies??The don't make 'em like they used to. Even with its moments of campiness, there's a certain authenticity, even nobility to Raiders. To this day when I watch the ark-opening sequence I get chills, in no small part due to John William's masterful soundtrack.
I really like KnockoutJS, having used it on multiple projects, both personal and professional. Many will say that it can't really be apples-to-apples compared with Angular since it's technically MVVM, it lacks many of Angular's features, like dependency injection etc. etc. And that's all true. But, the end result for me is that I'm able to rapidly build sophisticated client apps. I'd have to dig up the links, but there are some pretty complex front-end apps i.e. website builders and the like, that were developed using KnockoutJS.
Open question: how do you look at the equity where one of the co-founders (Founder A) does not have to work for X number of years, since they've cashed out of another company. They have the capacity to work full time, whereas the other "co-founder" (Founder B) is only able to work part-time. Founder A has the means to not work for a lengthy period of time. While they're taking on an opportunity cost, is their risk viewed the same as some other guy that quits his job (kills his income) and maxes out his credit cards?
EDIT: According to Spolsky in his hypothetical situation, Founder B was not a co-founder because he kept his job. Founder A, OTOH was essentially unemployed and took on all the risk, and therefore was a "legitimate" founder.
There's no such thing as C# 2.5. You must be referring to 2.0. Anyhow this may be true of financial institutions, but to say that it's a norm... is not my experience at all. > 15 years of experience.
Rant excused. While some of your points are more or less correct, would you care to elucidate on a few of the others?
1. You mentioned Oren Eini, who is the author of Rhino Mocks and contributed heavily to Castle and NHibernate. Apart from the usual TDD zealotry, how exactly do any of these screw up architecture? Or cost anything? -- they're free. Are you referring to RavenDB? Also, can you seriously name a platform that doesn't have celebrity developers slinging trash ware to line their wallets? Is this strictly a Windows/Dot Net phenomena?
5. & 6. While I agree that there are tons of clueless/mediocre Dot Net devs, I've met many that are exceptionally sharp and just as capable as any hardcore, passionate Java/Python/whatever developer. Passion outside of the Microsoft ecosphere? Are you at all familiar with the entire Alt.Net "movement"? Is your sampling based on the type of "talent" your company attracts? Or maybe the UK?
Your point about having his girlfriend's labor as a huge contribution to his venture is pretty correct. I don't think it down plays his success at all... but it's certainly a significant contributor. If my wife would embrace my madcap ideas and work on them full-force, it would be quite awesome.
As a KnockoutJS fan, this is completely awesome to hear. It's nice to see my technology of choice pushed to the limit. You guys have really delivered some phenomenal work.
Constructive criticism: it looks like something I could actually use i.e. automation, server-side rendering, useful for SEO. But, I left the landing page and couldn't tell you exactly what the product will do for me. I have a vague idea that it might be useful for SEO or automation. I'm too busy to read the long copy. I'm not too busy to write this post, though :-)
I'd like to see different headlines (or landing pages) that speak to my pain points. "Having trouble getting your Knockout.JS website ranked?" "Frustrated by trying to automate testing of your JavaScript-heavy site?" etc.
Again, kudos. Something tells me this service is going to do fine... patience, right? ;-)
Indeed - or WatiN, the .NET port of WatiR. I've done some pretty heavy duty scraping and automation with WatiN, which included building a OO framework that trivialized writing scripts. Good stuff.
Fricking impressive, dude. I tried it and can immediately see the value.
Some constructive criticism: the scroll bar for the toolbox is too narrow for my personal taste. Gmail does this and it drives me crazy trying to actually grab it. Why not make it a nudge or three wider?
Indirectly. He's referring to developers, like you and me. But, Apple, being one of the smartest businesses on the planet, is playing the exact same game. If you actually strike gold with your app/unicorn, they win. If you don't, they're still getting paid. This is just smart business.