sebhack

Agreed. Integrating non-browser parts into a browser reminds me of the SeaMonkey days, where the browser wasn't just a browser but a whole "internet suite" with integrated email, IRC client, HTML editor... Glad these days are over.

In my experience, most employers are very reluctant to write reference letters at all. A common practice is to write the reference letter yourself when you leave the job and just get a signature for it by your ex-boss.

Getting a JavaScript error with latest Chrome when I click "Buy"...

Good article. Suggestion: When you post an article like this to hacker news it would help to include the programming language in the title, like "Getting rid of NULL (in PHP)". I wasn't aware that this is a PHP-related post until I've read the first bunch of paragraphs until you actually mention "PHP".

I totally agree with the author. I've had similar experiences with Elance/UpWork. I'm a Senior Software Developer from Europe and I can't really compete with developers who offer their services for $20/h. But still, it's not impossible to get a job. I worked on a few projects that were mostly already started projects from cheap software firms that couldn't complete the job for whatever reasons. The clients I met were usually frustrated, burnt a lot of money, didn't have any experience about software development and/or management and were hoping to save the project by hiring a more experienced developer to fix the project. The codebases I've seen were awful. For example, no git repository, just a plain ZIP file, unstructured PHP code with 300 warnings, duplicate code... I'm sure there are all different kinds of projects on UpWork, also good ones. But these are hard to find and I doubt UpWork is the right place for experienced Software Developers with higher rates.

> Now with Swift quickly winning over my ever affectionate engineer heart, I still find myself enjoying my time in Objective-C.

I feel similar when it comes to Objective-C programming. Although the language is quite ugly and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone (of course nowadays you should use Swift instead!), I still enjoy programming in Objective-C because I'm fluent with it and I'm familiar with the gotchas.

Surprisingly this is also the case with JavaScript and PHP. Both popular languages (actually industry standard for webdevs) I know by heart and enjoy using, but at the same time ugly and infamous for their design flaws.

Swift seems to be a well designed language and I'm really curious if and how it will be adopted outside the Apple ecosystem now that it has been announced open source. Maybe in a few years, I'll be using Swift not only for Apple development but also for web development and shell scripting. Although I guess Swift programming would feel quite different in other environments because you may have to use other frameworks. But why use several languages if you have one that works for everything.

I use vim for over 10 years now, I think. Every time I read an article like this about vim, I discover new stuff I didn't already know. Like commands or plugins that make my life easier. It's amazing.

That's great, thanks!

Nice app! Although it suffers from the same problem that iTunes has, when playing a radio stream: I have a very unstable DSL internet connection, the connection drops every 2-3h for a few seconds or more. It's like unplugging the network cable for 5 seconds and re-plugging it in. So when the internet connection drops, it says "buffering" forever, so I have to manually click stop and play to resume the stream. Would be very nice, if the app would automatically try to reconnect (i.e. restart the TCP connection) after short timeout, or something like that.

As a workaround to the missing media keys support because Apple won't allow it: You could provide a little AppleScript interface, so that everyone could configure own global shortcuts with FastScripts. If that makes sense. Don't know if that's possible to implement.