As mentioned here, it depends what your motivations and career aspirations are. Working at startups (worked at one mature startup, then consulted for a bunch of small ones) gave me experience dealing with customers directly and delivering high impact in a short timeframe. Working in a big company is teaching me to think really big (reach big customers, scalability/performance, high ROI, etc) and giving me the opportunity to learn from many, many brilliant people.
This brought back a lot of (good) memories for me. I was new to Javascript and picked up MooTools to help me with my first big project at work. Really glad to find out that a lot of the MooTools devs work on React now!
I splurged and got myself a used Happy Hacking Pro 2 keyboard, just to see what the hype was all about. It's quiet, blank, and very fun to type on.
I also have a Leopold Otaku with Cherry MX brown keys. It's not as quiet as the HHK but I like the tactile feedback. I like the tenkeyless form factor better than the HHK because I use arrow keys sometimes.
And before those 2 expensive ones, I had a MS Natural ergonomic 4000 which was a good, inexpensive and comfortable keyboard. I had the one with the very stiff space-bar but I think the newer versions' keys were less stiff.
Good luck on your search. My dream keyboard would be one with the MS 4000 ergonomic layout and the keys of the HHK. But I've spent enough on keyboards for awhile. :)
It looks like it. There is the Ergodox (https://ergodox-ez.com) and the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/), which were/are both crowdfunded and have an ergo layout. I've also seen in a forum where someone hacked their Ms4000 to have Cherry MX keys.
Algorithms/data structures classes are a good start.
I hear that the Coursera algorithms classes by Prof Sedgwick (Princeton) and Prof Roughgarden (Stanford) are very good. I think the Princeton ones might not be available after the Coursera switchover so would recommend downloading the course content if you can. There were some threads on HN in the last week about it.
Also MIT OpenCourseware has Intro to Algorithms which I hear is good too.
I viewed classes from all three mentioned above and found Prof Sedwick's classes to be very structured and to my style/liking. Prof. Roughgarden is "free flowing" and may require fast thinking to follow him. Prof Demaine's classes gets very mathematical and I found myself sometimes lost in Greek symbols. But Prof. Demaine is very thorough in building the theory.
I've done a little bit of python and nodejs and quite a bit of java in Windows. It's pretty much all doable unless you rely on libraries that are linux only. Java was a little less painful than python and nodejs. Also, when I discovered ConEmu and started using that with msys git bash, development in Windows wasn't too terrible for nodejs. For python in Windows, I used the anaconda ecosystem, but I much rather prefer developing python on a linux machine.
I've used OpenShift and it's pretty straightforward to use. I don't feel like it's as easy to use as Heroku, but it got the job done. If I left my app idle (I think for 24 hrs or more), I noticed that it took awhile for it to awake when I tried to access it again.
However you can work around it by hitting your server with an http request every 24 hours, or upgrade to the Bronze Plan which apparently has $0 base price anyway so I'm not sure what the downside is.
Openshift user here: there is no downside. Bronze truly is $0/mo. It's just that you have to given them a CC number (while you do not need to do that for the "free" plan). Why the CC number? Bronze lets you pay for more features if you want them—but there's no obligation.
Are there any ways to be hit by surprise charges on Bronze? I'm assuming setting up a ping via the New Relic trick people used on Heroku is sufficient.
Also, for a relative novice, how easy is it to get a Rails or Sinatra app up and running?
My concern longer-term is that Openshift would go the same route as Heroku. Is there anything about their business model that might indicate that's not a major risk?
Do you know how powerfull the free gears are that one gets with each price plan? I have a fantasy basketball league that a few of my coworkers and I play and a free service would be ideal for that. Can the free gear (as a scaled app) manage a postgres database with around 600 MB, or would that be too much?
People have mentioned some great blogs! Another one that came to my mind is Jennifer Dewalt, who built 180 websites in 180 days to teach herself coding: http://jenniferdewalt.com/
I eat ramen a few times every month, and I usually add eggs (poached, sunny-side up, etc.) and green onions. My mom always made ramen like this. :)
If I am craving niurou mian but don't have the time to make it, I add some soy sauce, sometimes a bean paste, cinnamon, star anise, ginger, and sugar and let the broth simmer a little longer.
Yes, programming courses get better and more interesting. The interesting ones aren't usually called "programming classes" -- they are usually some kind of theory or design classes that make you solve problems and build stuff. Maybe you can find something on Coursera or these other online courses where there is programming involved, but it's not the emphasis of the class. I am pretty sure when you take a class that challenges you, it will really whet your appetite for more.
I know UC Berkeley has a lot of their CS class pages online. You can check it out and see what kind of stuff they teach.
