christensen_emc

For me, learning Haskell was a supremely educational experience. There is no better way to learn functional programming techniques and you will not regret learning it. That said I can count the number of times I've used Haskell in a non trivial application on one hand.

Elixir lets me use a lot of the stuff I learned with Haskell, and I've already used it building a real time component for an app I'm working on.

Take from that what you will.

Elixir!

On one hand it has a simple ruby-ish syntax and a solid MVC framework (Phoenix).

On the other hand it has immutability, concurrency through processes and message passing (which is awesome!) and a bunch of other functional goodies.

I'm not sure how widely applicable it is now, as it's still in its infancy, but it's the first "hipster" language I've used in a while that felt like it had legs.

Congrats!

SEEKING WORK - REMOTE OR TAMPA FLORIDA

My name is Erik Christensen

email me at [email protected]

I can do Rails or Javascript (Angular and Backbone) or Node or Python

Recently graduated college, taking a few months off to decompress and save up some money.

If you have a small project (maximum 6 months) that needs to be done and want someone to flatten it for a very reasonable rate, I'm your guy.

I went through a period of depression two years back. My family and friends were the last people to notice it. I put on a strong face for them and went out of my way not to worry them. The people who did notice were professors and classmates, people who I didn't make much of an effort to "impress". When those close to me started to realize they all began to rationalize it as being the result of drugs or sleep loss or a recent break up. You just aren't the type of person to be depressed they said, it's not like you. Sad as it may be, they knew even less about how I was than random strangers on the bus. I suspect a lot of it had to do with how they viewed depression and the stigma surrounding it.

There are many problems with the current crop of MOOCs, I'll be the first to admit that. In their current state they are not an alternative.

That said, the argument advanced against them in this article and numerous times on this and other boards is elitist and out of touch. "These lectures do not compare to the ones I sat in at UC Berkeley/Stanford/MIT! people watching them are not getting a REAL education!" Not only is it a classic "no true Scotsman", it also neglects to note that increasingly all large courses at large state universities are adopting a model not unlike the MOOC model. Lectures are increasingly posted online, and coursework is now almost always a blackboard quiz. Projects are submitted online, no paper copies are ever even created. Office hours are available, true, but often they are with a TA who is only slightly more than a glorified Tutor. All of these are transparent time and money saving moves on the part of the departments and professors.

Students rarely object as online classes give them more flexibility to work (something rarely mentioned in these kind of articles). Everyone wins on one level and loses on another. The quality of education drops as a consequence, but we're talking second and third tier schools here so it doesn't exactly make the news. All things considered, I might as well be taking MOOC at this point. I personally prefer Coursera to blackboard. More variety and no nagging advisors telling me I don't have the prereq. The tools and ui are better too! And its free!

Now this is awesome. No room for ads though, so I doubt anything like it will ever happen.

Seconding Mindfulness in Plain English. I am a much healthier person today because of that book.

Check out recipes with backbone. I was in a similar place(past to do apps, but not ready for anything substantial) and I found it to be a great help. Truth be told, there is not a lot of good literature on intermediate backbone development and I think that's really hampering its adoption.

If I may add to this, I found it really helpful to comment out every line as I went. Even today, when I want to learn new languages or frameworks I pick a repo on github and copy the whole thing line for line, commenting as I go. I found that this helps a lot.

I'm the same way. I use a txt file that I keep on my desktop. It does the job.

What they are doing is legal, yeah, but it is pretty much textbook "vulture fund" behavior.

It seemed like a pretty obvious reference to 2666 to me. The first part of the book has a number of dream sequences where its characters will just list off philosophers and put them into groups and connect them with lines. Definitely took me a few days to get through that book.