windust

sure. It used to be that major releases were tied with major features. InvokeDynamic on 7, Lambdas on 8, Jigsaw on 9. So since these were the features that were expected, the release only shipped when they were fully baked. Now is on a train-release model. You get whatever is ready to ship (big features can't delay a release anymore).

Installing the JDK has no ask toolbar (vs the JRE which is just the client libs)

Can't stress this enough. If you have Employee Incentive Options is way better to exercise them as soon as they are vested than to wait (if thinking of exercising at all). When you exercise them you pay AMT on what they are worth when exercised (of course the "fair price" is a hidden secret left for the CFO). As time passes, the "fair price" is probably going to keep increasing, but with no liquidity and inability to sell your options you are stuck with the AMT with the fair price at the moment of exercise

or we can skip a generation and go to JRuby ;)

Can you attach the JDK sources and put a breakpoint in the HttpRequest constructor? Then you should be able to find the culprit right?

I disagree, I think the hard skills for being a successful software developer are picked up by honing your craft daily working on the same project. Hackathons are too contrived since the goal is to have a finished product in 24 ~ 48 hours. Every time I have done one I throw away all the "Danger, Bad practice" signals from my sub conscience and work towards finishing the product/idea. Things that are important like maintainability (even if your hack is successful, and get investor funding you want to re-write it properly), coupling, testing, documentation, API, Memory profiling, Logging, performance optimizations, design patterns are thrown out the window to get that idyllic prototype out. Even working as a team, there is very little you gain from spending 48 hours with (mostly unknown) individuals than it is for your peers in a job where you actually have a favor economy.

And I don't mean that there isn't any value on hack-a-thons. I think you're right on dealing with deadline pressures and the ability of working yourself out of a problem in a pinch are valuable skills. I just don't think that's where the "hard" skills needed to become a successful software developer are learned.

I would biased-ly recommend javapubhouse.com (I host it). Is a tech dive on a Java topic that you can listen while on the radio/threadmill (you can close your eyes and follow the code) :)

Neat, will check it out. Yeah, Kanji might be a tall order right now (still working with Hiragana/Katakana first), but found the forums. Kinda nice to find a community of Japanese learners

Spanish native speaker here. I'm still waiting for my ah-ha moment (I'm learning Japanese for the past 4 months at a rate of 4 hours per week), I do hope it arrives. It took me probably 5 years to be fluent in English, and probably 4 more to actually be good enough as to read/write government proposals, abstracts/CFP, and finally co-authoring a published book "Java 7 Recipes"; my accent still lingers (javapubhouse.com if you want to hear it), the Ys, Js all come out with the same sound for me. I did learn French for 5 years, but lost most of it due to not practicing it. Learning French coming from Spanish felt a little weird because there are gender swaps (for the inanimate objects) that do trip you up. Did try to learn German for 5 months just after finishing French, so I ended up sounding like a French speaking German, which my teacher hated (and whom scared me away from the language!)

I noticed that I'm not really going anywhere fast with my Japanese and I think I might be doing it wrong (listen to one hour podcast while running / biking). Some stuff sticks but in general it does seem that my progress is nowhere near what I had when learning the other languages in a more structured format.