amy_seqmedia
When I look at a piece of technology I want to know what problem is it solving. And for me it will solve the biggest one: I want to work on the couch while next to my partner. My current solution involves bringing an extra monitor down and putting it on the coffee table.
Beyond that, the massive increase in screen real estate will be great for working on highly visual projects like Final Cut or Ableton.
When plugged into my large monitor, I have hotkeys set up to put a window on the left 1/3, the middle 1/3, and the right 1/3. It is so unbelievably useful.
Also when doing multiple monitors, if you do a Divvy hotkey it will move the current window to the monitor your mouse is in. This makes moving windows so fast.
In fact, you're probably far from being alone. There will be many people around you in the same boat. Because of that: everyone is likely to be in the same situation where none of the old processes may now work the same way. (Even if the long-timers don't admit it!)
And chances are (since you're posting on HN) that a lot of your colleagues are remote. So this might be harder too since you may miss physical cues and casual things that make it easy to build friendships and become a known quantity: you can't find your tribe by sight nor will they be able to find you.
1) Meet everyone regardless of title. Learn who they are, not just what they do. Take field notes!
2) Meet everyone related the people you talk to. Repeat until numPeopleMet >= 100.
3) Join all the tribes/channels, even if you don't think you have a strong affiliation with the group. Observe how language flows, not just where the code goes. Make visual maps of how products and teams interrelate.
4) Be joyful of the skills that you bring, and find fellow fans.
Have fun on your new adventure!
A more awesome 3D CSS digital clock
On the point of luck, yes there is a whole lot of lucky circumstance which you have no control over that puts in you in a lucky position. But I believe you pass a point in your life where it goes from being purely lucky to being just plain prepared. If Scalzi didn't work at his craft or his networking, the opportunities that availed themselves to him probably would not have happened.
I think a lot about where I am and where I'm going. There's lots of things I do now that don't have immediate payoff. Rather, I think of everything as just training for something else down the road. So I try to get good (or at least passably decent) at a breadth of things and specialize in a few. Hopefully then when luck swings my way I'm prepared to go after that small window of opportunity with full force.
I'm also a big fan of paying it forward, like Scalzi. Not everything is money---often it's just time. Giving someone honest feedback, lending them a hand, or supporting their efforts is all good karma. When you help others in a way you help yourself: growing your community of interest, raising the overall standard of living, moving groups of people forward.
My experience with developer-type leaders and sales-type leaders really breaks down to this: the developer builds a solid foundation and finds the product-market fit for it, the sales-oriented person projects the future they want others to believe in. One is slightly more logic-based, the other emotional. Some people can do both. That's rare.
Font Awesome icon search tool
Squelching double-clicks with Underscore.js's debounce()
I think the article wasn't so much about the glory of piracy and how you can make a profit out of it. Rather, it is a perspective on desire and finding a way to feed it. I think that this is the one of the best things about living in our current state of the internet: if you can get the initial tool (the computer or the smartphone) you open up access to so much opportunity.