spiralhead

This is a very complicated thing to answer concisely, but I'll take a stab at it from a product development perspective.

You know you're a good programmer if the things you build "just work." It should be near impossible to find flaws in your solutions. This is actually rare. Most developers I've worked with will declare something "done" well before all of the flaws have been worked out.

Jedi, Rock Star

Great article. I've struggled with this for my entire career. I get bored after finishing a major project and am left with miscellaneous tasks. But I've found consulting gigs to be elusive and companies seem reluctant to hire contractors. Even startups. So I risk being labeled a job hopper...

Unless you're working for yourself on your own product it's hard to find something you're 100% passionate about. But the funny thing about that is working for yourself is one of the hardest things you can ever strive to do. It is even harder when you get married and have kids because your free time evaporates to zero. Now is the time to go for independence if you can do it

If you want to break into the tech industry, the best thing you can do right now is just start building stuff. Think of a mobile app or a web app that has a simple purpose that you think would be useful, then use the internet to teach yourself how to build it. If you can pull that off then you have a very good shot at a career as a developer. If you can't then you probably either don't have the drive or the aptitude, in which case you'll be spending a few more years figuring out what you want to do.

The new podcast app makes certain workflows impossible--like downloading a single podcast before taking a walk. Now it just says "preparing to download" indefinitely. By the time it shows up on my device, that window of free time to listen to a podcast is gone. Complete and utter crap.

I think they left out a zero

"...while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app."

The title is misleading...

Working on a web crawler that tracks the associations between websites online. Currently working on the front-end which will, at first, simply list websites ordered by how many other websites link to them which is not incredibly interesting in and of itself but my rough plan is to implement some sort of crowd-sourced categorization system to demarcate the data in such a way that people will find useful.

I usually go with programmer/web developer. It doesn't roll off the tongue as easy as hacker but the latter term has negative connotations among the majority of humans.

I like the minimal UI and the tree view is interesting. I would be interested in learning more about the background of this project but there's no "about" link anywhere.