Would you recommend attending any of these "hacker house" places I've seen on sites like Airbnb? Is that a good way to meet people who'd be offering jobs or would you end up around other people competing for them?
Thanks for the advice. Since first posting I've come to a mutual agreement with the company whereby I have left in order for me to find a role that allows me to further my software engineering skills.
Right now I'm in between jobs and looking for another position in the startup scene. I love the culture and I have a passion for learning. If anybody is able to point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated.
I graduated a year and a half ago and have been with my current company since then. I used to work part time as a developer during university so I've probably got closer to two years worth of software engineering in a business environment.
Whilst I would say that a lot of my day to day stuff is what most would consider bog-standard standard web development, we do get to dabble in dealing with big data, being our own sysadmins and bringing our software to other platforms i.e. there is a lot of emphasis put on learning where I currently am and researching and incorporating new technologies is always encouraged.
So if this is just an issue of certain add-ons being disabled because they're incompatible with X version of Firefox (something that's always been the case), then we're merely in a transitional phase where the good developers with popular add-ons will have to adjust their development cycle to fit with this new trend.
The web evolves at a rapid pace. Now that browser vendors are implementing new features at a faster rate, developers can deliver better experiences to end users with a greater degree of certainty that each will have the same experience the developer intended.
That's a shame for now, but the fact that related artists are presented very clearly (and you're able to quickly see their most popular songs) doesn't make discovery as bad as the article is claiming. I find myself listening to a lot more different music with Spotify than other discovery services such as Last.fm.
Unless the US version of Spotify is drastically different from the European version, discovery on Spotify is excellent in my opinion. The Radio feature does exist (although it's not one of Spotify's strongest features) and when you're on an artist page there is a tab to view related artists. There is even an radio tab on the artist's page which will play music from related artists.
Promotion of your apps on the App Store is up to you, not Apple. That being said, if your app is of a particularly good quality then you might be lucky enough to see it featured. You're paying 30% to Apple for reasons other than marketing.
When Chrome updates it keeps the version you upgraded from in Google Chrome.app > Contents > Versions. I've been removing them whenever I've upgraded and found no problems with doing so.