andyhnj's comments

andyhnj | 11 years ago | on: Drupal Core – Highly Critical Public Service announcement

We did a lot of Drupal work at my last job, and I sent my ex-boss a friendly warning about this when it was first announced, but I don't think he patched all of their Drupal sites. I could be wrong, but I just checked the CHANGELOG.txt on a couple of them, and they're still on 7.27.

andyhnj | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your working tunes?

I don't think it's available yet, but I'm curious about Carl Franklin's project "Music To Code By". He's specifically trying to craft an album that's "designed to induce a state of flow suitable for writing code."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/311638984/music-to-code...

andyhnj | 11 years ago | on: Losing 58.3 Lbs for Science

Nice write-up. My experience is quite similar to the author's. I've gone from 230 to 170 over the last year or so. (Oh, and I'm also from NJ!) I wasn't involved in any study or organized plan though; I just stumbled through it on my own. I tracked calories with an iPhone app. I stuck to a plan that, theoretically, would allow me to lose one pound per week. That actually worked out pretty well. I never bothered tracking anything other than calories. I just tried to be sensible about fat, carbs, and sugar, but I didn't explicitly track them or set goals related to them. And I'm curious about the National Weight Control Registry now. I'm going to have to follow up on that, after I've maintained the weight loss for a bit longer.

andyhnj | 11 years ago | on: Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find?

I got fed up with this fairly recently, and remapped it so I can use ctrl-F for find, using AutoHotKey:

  #IfWinActive, ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
  ^f::Send, {F4}

andyhnj | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What invoicing program are you using?

I've been using Harvest: http://www.getharvest.com/ Works fine for me, though I don't do a lot of freelance work, so I'm not a heavy user.

andyhnj | 12 years ago | on: Poll: How do you manage your passwords?

KeePass on my PC, KeePassX on my Mac, and iKeePass on my iPhone & iPad, with a shared database on DropBox. I'm pretty happy with that setup, except for iKeePass, which is a little clunky. I'd really like to have a better KeePass client on iOS.

andyhnj | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

I'm in my late 40s, and have been working as a developer since I was a teenager. Here's a simplified account of the last 20 years or so:

I spend 10+ years working for a mid-size company, progressing from developer to a sort of combination senior developer / IT manager. My salary grew at a reasonable pace. I was wearing a lot of different hats, and gained experience in a lot of different areas. That company went out of business a few years ago.

I then spent a couple of years at a small (12 person) web dev company. We had one in-house product and worked on various sites for various clients. Mostly ASP.NET, some Drupal. I took a bit of a salary hit there, making maybe 85% of my previous salary.

I left that company about a year ago, and am now at a fairly large company, primarily working on Dynamics AX custom programming, with some random ASP.NET/C# stuff in there too. I'm still not back at my old salary, from the company that went under, but I'm closer.

With a little more Dynamics AX work under my belt, I could probably jump ship for an AX consulting job that would get me back to that old salary. Or I could stay here and make a pretty reasonable salary, with modest gains, over the next several years. (There doesn't seem to be much room to move into management here, though if I stay long enough, that may change.)

Or I could try to go back to another web dev position, ASP.NET and/or Drupal, maybe. (That probably wouldn't get me much of a salary bump though.)

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing ten years from now. The company I'm at now is stable enough that I might be able to stay here until retirement, but I wouldn't count on it. I'll probably need to change jobs 2 or 3 more times before retirement. I try to keep my skills up to date, so I can stay employable, and, at some point, I'll probably start using the standard 50+ tricks on my resume: dropping my college graduation date, dropping the oldest jobs from the resume entirely, etc. And dyeing my hair maybe, if I get too grey.

This being HN, other people have of course talked about starting their own company. I'm not sure I want to do that, but it may become an attractive option at some point, especially if the health care situation in the US gets straightened out enough that I can afford to pay for my own health insurance.

andyhnj | 12 years ago | on: 37signals becomes Basecamp

Am I the last guy still paying $7/month for a solo Backpack account? I've looked for good alternatives a few times, and never found anything I like as much as Backpack for basic note-taking. As long as they'll keep taking my $7, I guess I'll keep using it.