aavotins

I accepted early on that working for a startup will probably not make me rich. Quite the opposite, I may wake up one day and find out that I no longer have a job or my next salary isn't coming. I'm not the kind of person who believes in gambling. Working and living in Europe doesn't really help with the vision that I might join a European unicorn startup, whose stocks might not be worthless one day.

However I do see a lot of benefits that come with working for a startup. You can voice your opinion and be heard. Pushing code to production on your first day. Owning what you do and being able to make decisions. Creating your own environment in which you can learn and become a better developer.

And, most importantly, startups are more open to remote than BigCo Inc.

Monetary compensation might be less, but freedom has a price. If I'm able to work remotely, I can move to a place that is cheaper to live.

I'm an individual software contractor and I pay for a personal plan. GitHub UI and UX appeal to me more than competitors do. Also it seems that all the libraries I regularly use keep their code on GitHub, it feels like a community to me.

Lada 2101's aren't the same as Fiat 124. Russians bought the designs and rights to manufacture and changed them significantly enough.

* Fiat used either OHV or DOHC, Lada used SOHC * Fiat had rear disk brakes, Lada had drums * Lada suspension was raised and reinforced to better deal with bad roads * Lada suspension was also dumbed down. IIRC Lada did not use trailing upper arms

There are more than 800 differences between these two cars. I am not saying that Italians shouldn't be praised, but in reality the Lada is a completely different car.

Long story short - I was brave and stood up for myself, demanding the righteous thing.

I was 15 years old back then. I had just learned how to code and my hunger for programming was insatiable. I didn't think much, browsed through relevant classifieds and sent out a couple of honest e-mails stating that I really want to have a job, but I have no real life experience.

A company replied within a few days and they were interested. It was a very small company, consisting of a CTO and CEO. We agreed on 200$ for a portal type of website(it was a thing back then), with user sign-ups, public and private posts, comments and a few more things.

This company was hired by a rather large media company, to develop a dedicated website for them. I knew who was behind it and I was hoping that I would get recognized by the media company.

I dreamed about writing lines of code in my sleep, daydreamed through school and spent all time I could on coding the whole thing.

I think I was done in three months or so, and then came the day I asked to be paid. I had put daily changes on their FTP server, as we agreed, so I had literally no leverage. And they stopped responding. I tried reaching out to them in numerous ways, such as using my mom's cell to call the CEO, but he hung up immediately after realizing it was me who called.

As I realized that I had been scammed, since we did not have any form of written contract and had agreed that I would be paid in cash when the whole thing was done. Therefore I went on the media group's website, found the contact section and somehow managed to stumble upon the personal cellphone of the CEO of the media company. And I called him. I was an emotional teenager, but I spoke the truth. I did not have any demands other than to be heard. After a 10 minute long discussion where I explained that I was ripped off and worked for free for months, the CEO invited me over. I still remember the awe everyone was in, when they realized that a kid had just called them and walked through their front door in a few hours.

That phone call has been the best career decision I have ever made. The media company terminated their contract with the agency that had ripped me off because of terms violation - they were prohibited from outsourcing any development to any third parties, without a written permission given by the customer a.k.a media company.

And so I landed my first job! The people working for this media company were so genuine, mature and supportive, that I did not lose my love for what I did and had been in web development ever since.

It pays off to be brave and righteous in the end.

Would you mind sharing where you found leads on technology oriented Slack channels? I'm old school, used to hang out on IRC some 15 years ago, but went silent and passive after starting a family. However my boys have grown and I'm looking into getting back into general or topic oriented technology talks and banter, but have no idea where to start looking for like minded people.

I had such high hopes when I opened the arsenal. I anticipated it would an article of how to write code that's both JavaScript and Python syntactically correct.

Wow, this was a trip down memory lane. In fact it was Frontpage 98 that inspired me to try out my hand at building the web, back in 1999. I was just 10 years old back then. However it sparked my interest, because I could create something. Creating a webpage about my then most favorite game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, publishing it and receiving my first ever e-mail from someone in the UK about a spelling error resulted in an experience that struck me so deeply that I became a web developer. Almost 20 years later I still love what Microsoft FrontPage 98 allowed me to discover.

I wish projects like this caught on and became an art trend, as in digital artists would create pieces like this and put them for sale. I love the idea of smart "paintings" that illustrate the technical detail and inner workings of a CPU, running a simple program, source code of which is printed out and put inside the frame. Perfect addition to a geek nest, as I detest the name "man cave".

edit: elaborated on art trend

Some suspicions can be clarified. Especially ones with clear photos available.

As per online presence - we do not hire people that we have never seen. We're a remote and distributed team, thus rarely any hires get to have a walk-in interview, but we do always see the person being interviewed. I wouldn't waste hours looking at posts of a person I can clearly see is not my potential colleague. Having no online presence is fine, most of us don't at my current job. However, if it's there, it is going to be examined. It's way harder to get to know to understand someone as a person if you've never had had a face-to-face interaction, therefore having a video call is a must.

No offence, but googling your name yields some very questionable search results about events in Woodstock, IL. If it's true, then perhaps the true cause of cultural discrepancy comes from assumptions based on a Google search?

Perhaps I am the odd one out, but whenever a potential new hire is presented to the team, I do a quick Google search and investigation about whom that person might be and whether I'd like working with that person, regardless of his/her skills and knowledge. Every day interactions make up for a very large portion of work agenda.

If that happens, I feel it's one of the good things, speaking from general perspective on how humans interact with devices. I'm a power user, who discovered f.lux around 3 years ago, and I've been hooked ever since. Around a year after, I converted my family to use whatever blue light restricting settings they had on their devices, and can say with confidence that it does help. I wouldn't say it's encouragement per se, more of a guideline that should be there in the first place. Most users don't care about colors being off at odd hours, as they're not power users, whilst power users will have the knowledge to turn this feature off. Raising awareness is not a good term, but I feel it fits in this case.

An article about unhealthy desire for prestige has surfaced on HN, a subsidiary of a very prestigious VC firm, a site with clever upvotes and, most importantly, karma system. It strikes me as ironic.

I also think that John was a metaphorical figure. I can name a few startups that got financed early and are now attending conferences, hiring and spending a lot of money, without actually doing anything for their business.

Not US, but my wake-up call was my sister purchasing a small apartment for just 8000$ in 2002, in an industrial part of the city, surrounded by beat-up apartment houses and humungous acetone storage units. Whole place reeked of chemicals and the low price was justifiable, as "nobody wants to live there". She sold that very same flat for 80 000$ in 2006. Bought by a young couple, who's combined income was enough for 110% financing with no down payment and some extra cash left to spend. Suddenly a lot of people wanted to live there, because it was the only thing they could afford, or it was one of the last areas in the city with somewhat lower prices, thus giving way better profits when speculating. Then came 2008 and the rest is history. Taught me another lesson - never rely on savings too much, they dwindle way too fast

So it's the same issue as with many failed startups - solving a problem, that does not look like a problem for the end user. At all.

Software engineers are an interesting bunch... Reading all the bashing comments about Paw not being free, I can't help but feel a vibe, that some people expect to be paid thousands of dollars and not pay a single cent themselves. Where does this entitlement come from?

Good job guys! You made a fantastic product. I will always favor native apps over Electron hacks. I can't count how many times I've CMD+Tabbed to Chrome and hit CMD+W to close a tab, only to see Postman disappear. It disrupts my flow.

One thing though. I'm a developer, I know what I'm doing. Please make JSON Text the default option. Formatted JSON doesn't hurt or threaten me :) I expect to see my responses exactly as they are.

Edit: Unfortunately I have to edit this comment to give additional feedback about Paw. I'm using the 30 day trial, i.e. I am evaluating the product. Paw is running in the background, I'm not interacting with it in any way, but it jumps to foreground, just to show me a pop-up window informing me, that I have 29 days left of trial and should upgrade. No, thank you, I installed the app just an hour ago. I'm aware of the 30 day trial. No need to nag about it every 20 minutes, that will not prompt me to upgrade any sooner. If anything, it does quite the opposite.