Something other than writing code. Discrimination is Reality with a capital R. I expect it will happen to me and that's why I'm trying to advance my career to the point where I'm not being told what to do by some asshole younger than me when I'm 35.
The BART kiosk interface is terrible. Not only do you have to look up the fare and transfer on a fucking spreadsheet posted on the wall, it doesn't actually tell you when to put the money in.
Simply putting giant text that says INSERT MONEY OR CREDIT/DEBIT CARD FIRST on the home screen would be a HUGE improvement.
PHP sucks, that much is clear to anyone who's ever used Python or Ruby or whatever. But...
1. It's on every server.
2. It works consistently.
3. There's a lot of it already written.
4. It's easy to find people who know it.
5. Who will work for reasonable pay.
#4 and #5 are usually overlooked by people for various reasons which I won't get into here.
You really have to go back to the days of Perl SSI, cgi-bin scripts, and stdout shell scripts to really understand why PHP became popular in the first place. The whole inline code paradigm grew directly out of Apache SSI and how much it sucked.
I would rather click zero times and just read the damn thing.
If you don't like ads, block them. I like well formatted text that doesn't require user intervention every time I go to a new page. That's sort of the entire fucking POINT of web design.
Chances are during that time your income went up too, and you were no longer someone who really gave a shit about a $20 difference on a piece of gear and were willing instead to pay that $20 or whatever it was to an outfit like newegg to make sure their excellent service continued.
This is one thing that I have never liked about my fellow programmers/developers.
They sit around and speculate and arrogantly pontificate to no end when all that's really needed is a direct question to a person who can provide a direct answer.
Just ask the fucking doctor if he really believes in homeopathy, and if he does, switch providers.
My honest advice to you is go to college and do drugs and drink booze and have sex, 3 things you've probably never done before in your life. College is an excellent place to do all those things for the first time. The corner of Geary and Polk is not.
Get that shit (into and) out of your system before you move to SF or you'll never make it out alive. Trust me on this one.
SF is a fucking dangerous place if you go there without your adventure meter properly calibrated.
That's not necessarily the catch of TI, the Marina also suffers from that unfortunate side effect during earthquakes. The real catch is that nobody knows how toxic the soil is.
It's distinctly different than American BS.