aliukani

> As for the 'large' company, I think his definition is valid. Where I am now we're approaching 200 employees, and it's well beyond the point where everyone knows each other (there is a term for this limit). Even for 400 people, the traditional 'meet at the watercooler' methods break down, and you need to inject some innovation to meet everyone.

Personally, I like to use Dunbar's number as a the divide between small and large companies.

I spent the downtime trying to figure out how to use Jade without the documentation available -- the docs are in the readme.md on the Github repo. It was only later that I realized that the docs were also available through npm (https://npmjs.org/package/jade), but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

At the moment:

1. Large Monitor -- I wish I had seen this article before I bought the one I have: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/the-ips-lcd-revolut...

2. Grado sr80i headphones

3. Laptop

4. Kitchen chair

5. IKEA desk

I'm probably going to add a better chair and mechanical keyboard to the mix.

The icebreaker sounds like a nice new feature for Highlight

My school (Northeastern University CCIS) has a list of suggested salaries: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/co-op/employers/index.html#salaries

  Average CCIS Co-op Salaries
  Student Level               Average  Midpoint  Average top 25%
  Undergraduate First Co-op   $20.00   $19.00    $28.00
  Undergraduate Second Co-op  $22.00   $22.00    $29.00
  Undergraduate Third Co-op   $23.50   $23.00    $30.00
  Graduate Co-op              $28.00   $28.50    $34.00

I've set up Gitlab at Northeastern University to explore it as an option for replacing our cgit install(s). I like the UI, but my only problem with it is that it doesn't support putting repos under a user namespace like Github does (with Gitlab, rails/rails and ali/rails can't exist on the same system). AFAIK there's no plan for Gitlab to support this, but it looks like Gitorious already does.

I set this up at my university to see if it would be a good solution for school-related project hosting. Haven't rolled out (yet), but as you said it's very promising.

Am I supposed to eschew powerful tools because there wasn't a UX guy involved in the project?

If I cared that much about ease of configuration, I'd use Textmate instead of Vim, and Colloquy instead of irssi.

Accepted! Flying in from Boston.

That's a really clever solution! A side benefit is you also get to leave the reporting method and report hosting to Instagram

As far as I can tell, there's not much of an advantage to Node over Rails, but Node has realtime built-in so I'll use it instead of Rails&EventMachine.

That said, they're both really fun to work with.

Not a company guy, just a student at Northeastern University's CS school. We have an IRC channel, but it's tough to explain to freshmen how to ssh into a university box and use screen+irssi, and then get them to keep doing it. If they use Windows you also have to show them how to set up PuTTY. I'm not against teaching people how to do this, but teaching this doesn't scale. That's why our IRC channel is mostly upperclassmen and alumni.

Now whenever we need to coordinate for student groups (like ACM) we use Facebook groups and Facebook chat (which is XMPP, so I plug my account into Adium).

I'm working on a guide to screen+irssi to get more people on our IRC server, but still I'd trade our IRC&Facebook setup for something like Grove.io or Hipchat.

> How about future plans? Some interviews with groups that did and didn't "make it"?

Agreed. I'd really like to hear more from companies that didn't make it or companies that aren't YC Allstars (Dropbox, Reddit, Posterous).

> They can just choose to be less profitable and no one cares.

The shareholders might.

> because Lion is a bit of a disaster

How so?

I use it for grading assignments (reading a .lisp file and writing a grade.txt file), as well as taking class notes. I also use it for editing config files (like for nginx) and dotfiles.

What? Just use whatever you're comfortable with. All the OS dogma is BS.

I'd like to hear more about your setup. Why do you consider these essential?

This is the textbook for one of my classes at Northeastern. The prerequisite class used HtDP (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/) and Racket (http://racket-lang.org/), and the focus was on design principles and writing good code more than it was on the actual language we were using. I'm expecting the same from this class, but I'm not against becoming more experienced with Java either.

CCIS student here. I've only taken Fundies 1, but I really enjoy working in Racket so I'm kind of stoked for this.

Don't need it.

e: I can code all night if I have to, and caffeine can totally help with that. I just don't need it to sleep deprive myself.

I totally want to, but it all comes down to cost.

I'm a college freshman without a job, using my 2009 Macbook Pro's stock 320GB HDD (275GB used so far). A 256GB SSD is too expensive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...) for me to dip into my savings when my HDD still works (and has more space).

Sure I'd like a faster boot time and for apps to snap open, but I don't know if that's worth $500.

Thanks for this!

One of my favorites. The quote "Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?" has stuck with me since middle school.

TryRuby.org (http://tryruby.org) was what I started with.

When you're more comfortable with Ruby and want to get started with Rails, get a Heroku (http://heroku.com) account to play around with and check out Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org/).

I think you'll enjoy Ruby (and RoR). Ruby's a fun language to code in and I found it very beginner-friendly.

I've always questioned wether inline CSS is the best way to go, given Tumblr's downtime issues.

If prospects are already sold on it, would they really mind reading through the text (which is nicely styled and not that much of a read)?

Usually I would agree with you on keeping the contact info and address separate somewhere up at the top, but in this case I think this approach works. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I've been using Sparrow for at least a couple of months now ("new"? Really?), and I'm very glad I switched from Mailplane. The minimally-obtrusive Tweetie 2 style interface really sold me on it.

I didn't know there was a paid version -- I'm using the free version with ads disabled. I'll glady pay up.

I'm a lot like the OP [Xtac]. I was born in Oklahoma and raised to speak English. I picked up Hindi off my parents, who are from India.

It's not difficult for me to speak Hindi, but it's not easy either. My limits are very basic Hindi, or phrasing answers that are very based on the question asked.