TheBrockEllis

We're all human and changing environments can be tough. My first task as a manager is to always make them feel welcome and comfortable on their first day. Everyone can understand the feeling of being lost and unsure of what the next steps are.

I always detail the stupid things in an email before the new hire shows up. Where to park, what entrance to use, what to wear, etc. Always make it a point to greet them at the door on their first day. It can make a huge difference to see a smiling face first thing when you walk in as opposed to having to talk to a receptionist to page someone.

I used Cloud9 (pre-Amazon acquisition) for teaching high schoolers the basics of programming. It was super easy to set up and use. It really let me, as the teacher, focus on teaching syntax and principals and less on 'toolchain config', which is helpful for newbies right out of the box.

I haven't used this new Amazon Cloud9 offering, but from the initial impression from the blog post, they've traded in the easy of use that Cloud9 once had for a deeper integration into the AWS ecosystem. The screenshots I saw were not something I'd want a greenhorn to have to walkthrough.

I'm not sure what future I expected when Amazon purchased Cloud9, but I mourn the potential loss of an awesome cloud based IDE that beginners could easily pickup (my mind can be swayed once I give it a try though).

You could also use something like Firebase as a datastore that could persist across multiple clients but also be implemented in javascript.

And you'd keep most of the code in javascript so new comers wouldn't get "culture shock" by having to learn completely new syntax. +1

As a new comer to Ember, I am quite confused as to the necessity of the Rails portion of the tutorial. I read through the intro and the first chapter and all I could gather was that it was for the "back end". I really wish there was a great, up-to-date tutorial that was back-end agnostic so that newbies don't have to possibly learn two new frameworks at once.