I'll do a proper testimonial later that's ready for the site, but I was a member of Sumeet's WDI (San Francisco) class and I can say that he's not only a talented instructor, but he's also hard-working and compassionate one as well. When you're spending that much time with someone, for 12 weeks, you find out a lot about them. The more I learn about Sumeet, the more I admire him.
This one is generally highly recommended. Didn't work for my laptop, but I think it was stolen by professionals that wiped it without ever powering it on.
You can't find developers because everyone in the Greater SF Bay Area is looking for the perfectly seasoned developer that has deep experience in their given stack.
It reminds me of a grownup having Play-Doh time with toddlers. The grownup takes the time to make some recognizable object (a dog, a human figure, an ice cream cone) and then the toddler starts grabbing for it. This is how many young companies act with talent. They don't want to invest in people, they don't want to bring on interns or junior folks. They want high-output plug-and-play rockstar senior devs. And they want them on their terms.
Some of you might see things differently, but that's the impression I'm getting from all of the listings I'm seeing in my job search (for a junior dev role.) There are some companies that are making the long-term investment in finding the less refined talent and developing it, but they are hard to find.
I hope other people see this trend and that I'm not just entirely saturated in the pungent juice of sour grapes.
If properly picked and hired, junior-level inexperienced engineers can be a gold mine. Employers need to retune their hiring process to value intellect and potential over straight-up experience and know-it-all-ness. This is a tricky proposition, since many hiring managers are terribly inexperienced with hiring and don't know how to do much more than coding challenges, "explain to me how DNS works" questions, etc. These hiring managers are trying to compare their own skills against this new hires and they will reject the hire if it doesn't match up. Huge fail. The gold miner hiring manager, however, asks more open-ended questions to probe the intellect of the hire. The gold miner doesn't expect a "full-stack hacker" and is tolerant of "I don't know" responses. The more important question: what problems has this person solved and how did they solve them?
If you want to see how to hire and structure your team, a good example to follow is the military. Consider the typical platoon of Infantry soldiers: you have one senior leader/manager, one senior subject matter expert and all-round ass-kicker, four SME-and-ass-kickers-in-training, and about 36 junior guys who are there to learn. The junior guys make a fraction of what the senior SME makes and their skill level is also fractional. No worries. They are there to learn, develop, and do their best. Treat them well, not like slaves, , respect them, and develop them. Most of them will leave after a few years for a new job elsewhere. That's okay. You got something from them (work) and they got something from you (experience). You, the leader, will identify a few promising individuals amongst them and groom them to be SMEs in training, giving them the added responsibility and pay increases that they deserve. Like an Infantry platoon, your team will eventually hire experienced SMEs from outside the company to bring in fresh skills and ideas. If this team building is done right, you can build a loyal, organic organization that grows and trains it's own and you can do it for about the same cost as going out and hiring three or four absolute badasses that will probably leave as soon as the next shiny, well-paying thing comes along.
> perfectly seasoned developer that has deep experience in their given stack.
This one really pisses me off. "Oh, you've been using JavaScript for 7 years? Sorry, we need someone who is an expert at jQuery."
A decent developer can get up to speed on your stack, provided they've used something similar, in a few days, or a week if you can't spare any of your current team to guide them through the process. And if you can't spare anyone on your current team to mentor the new guy for a few days, you have already lost to the Mythical Man Month.
This is part of the "unicorn hunting" that we see at Hired.com. We've even seen hiring managers rejecting candidates because they didn't use a particular JavaScript framework, or they haven't shipped code relating to a particular industry/vertical.
So, I did something similar, and I found that one of my least favorite things was going into the browser to create and link the github repo. Using the octokit gem, I automated that part. Feel free to swipe some code from my gist:
That's great, thanks! I hate creating the github repo as well (sometimes I skip that part and just use Heroku). If you don't mind I'll copy some of your code and make creating a github repo another optional prompt.
I noticed that suspenders(thoughtbot) also had that option. They used hub, which I think is a bit more intrusive than just installing the octokit gem. I'm interested to see what you come up with! :)
If I could do one thing for you, I would make it possible for you to parent your first like your third.
But it's impossible.
I wish you could cowboy-code your way through infanthood, like a parent of two can:
"Chill out, baby! Your diaper isn't that wet." or
"You can't crawl yet, so just stay in the middle of the room while I run out to the car"
Please believe that we've gotten this far as a species because we're fairly fault-tolerant. We're built to survive. I know that preventable tragedies happen all the time, but don't let fear run your life.
If you help out your wife with as many things as you possibly can, you'll all survive with your sanity intact.
Gear: Boppy, mirror that enables you to see the baby in your rear view mirror, good low-light camera, good photo library/storage solution (Picasa, Flickr, whatever), cheap lightweight stroller for quick trips, Ergobaby
With this second installment, I'm pretty sure this is fiction. Kudos on the concept, though.
The posts are both very well written and have dramatic twists right on schedule. But s/he's using web marketing writing, with bolded thematic sentences alternating with short paragraphs.
We've seen posts from foundering founders on HN before, and it's usually more like a wall of text. This time, note how this author leaves us on a cliffhanger. Someone in their position should be trying to show they're still in control. So they'd explain more about their plan.
So I think we're dealing with someone who knows startups, who also is an experienced writer, and wants to subvert the business blogging form.
Does anyone else find this app sort of overwhelming? Not necessarily in a bad way either.
I remember when my boss showed me a flurry of vines from her trip to Washington DC, I found myself feeling a bit disoriented as I tried to catch up with the rapidly switching contexts of each video.
The same things happens to me when I'm scrolling through a feed. It's strange to me that it doesn't happen with pictures, but I can only describe it as being teleported through the globe in rapid-fire mode.
No I feel the same way at age 21. It's quite hard to follow the quick-cutting nature of most videos. The ones I tend to like the most are comedy videos that have really quick setups and punchlines.
