doobiaus's comments

redis. Coming from years of old school "Web + DB + memcached" redis has blown me away with what it can do from searchable lists for typeaheads to pub/sub.

I used to work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment and found what worked best for me was to run Linux via Vagrant, and use MobaXterm (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/) for ssh, as it has an X server. That's how I used to use RubyMine and Geany.

EDIT: There's also interesting stuff coming soon with Ubuntu/Bash on Windows https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-o...

Short comment from my experience.

I would say the difference between a junior and a mid is experience breadth of knowledge. Knowing what tools, patterns or architecture to use and when.

The difference between a senior and a mid, is that a senior knows when NOT to use them.

In other words, juniors and mids tend to focus their attention on technology. Seniors tend to focus on delivery.

We've come full circle and have just pulled our stack back from a complex framework (Durandal, akin to Angular) to a simple architecture centred around knockout.js, and everyone is happier for it. The code is cleaner and debugging is a world apart.

Backend wise I've taken a liking to Express because it hides nothing. I prefer it over Rails or ASP.NET MVC, where there is so much magic. I would switch if I could but we have too much legacy code.

We're running production apps based mostly on Knockout.js and jQuery. We also use lodash and moment.

The problem with getting stuck into one particular framework is that then become an "X" programmer, not a web programmer. If you need a fully fledged bells and whistles one though, Angular is probably top dog at the moment.

If you're not in an environment where you have mentors, or if you find yourself easily distracted, sign up to a course at a school with proper in person training and testing or you're just going to keep procrastinating.

Take it as an opportunity to learn about linux and use it as a test bed to upskill yourself, if you're into that sort of thing.

Install a hyper-visor and start playing with VMs, containers etc.

There's "MacInCloud" http://www.macincloud.com/

You can rent time on a remote Mac, preinstalled with tools, on an hourly, weekly or Monthly basis.

I'm a programmer more than a gamer. I have a fondness for wireless & free scrolling mice. I'm currently using a Logitech m560 which is okay, but the balance is off.

I'm looking to upgrade too. My contenders are the new Logitech MX Master ( http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/mx-master?crid=7 ) and the Marathon m705.

i prefer smaller, so I'm leaning towards the m705.

If it's not a drop in replacement for underscore or lodash, please don't use "_".

I'm running a 2014 15" MBP as a Windows machine with bootcamp. It's not bad, but would not have been my first choice (Company issued) My personal beef is the keyboard layout sucks (for a Windows guy). Other than that it's a perfectly capable Windows machine.

Having said that, my first choice is the Dell XPS 15 (http://www.dell.com/au/p/xps-15-9530/pd)

Otherwise the Lenovo Carbon or Yoga Pro 2/3 are also great depending on what you're looking for.

We're a start up using using .NET/C# MVC4 SQL Server etc etc. (Sorry can't give names Just call us "Medical Software").

There are a lot more .NET start-ups than one is lead to believe, but you don't hear so much about them because they're too busy making money to give interviews to TechCrunch ;) Seriously though, they tend to be from developers branching out of existing enterprises & "non-cool" fields and have existing customers or bootstrap funding.

With Azure, AWS, Bizspark & MAPSDD cost implications of being on the .NET stack are negligible comparing to the long term savings in maintainability.

My short answer is, go with what you know, it's better to have a solid working product than a flakey pile of learner spaghetti.

I'm a .net dude at a startup though and to be fair long term costs should be factored in, but can be mitigated. For one BizSpark is an absolute must to get started, and once you graduate there are the Action Packed for a few hundred dollars a year.

I would however suggest you look rather at using oss where possible even from . Net. We have used MySQL, Mongodb and redis on Linux because it keeps scaling costs down, and to be frank they' re better supported on the platform.

We also leverage BitBucket and TeamCity rather than TFS for cost reasons.

Having said that both Azure and AWS have fairly scalable windows and SQL hosting services.

Programming is the 'easy' part. To be employable learn the rest of the process, which is typically language agnostic: Dev Processes & workflow (scrum), DVCS (git), TDD, CI/CD (Travis/Jenkins/TeamCity), devops (puppet). etc

They're the things, regardless of language or project you will need, but which are rarely taught properly.

Github was bootstrapped for 4 years before taking funding. Eventually everyone does when they need to grow rapidly.

I'd say almost always it's the soft stuff: Respect, stress, suitable challenges etc. I know very few Senior Devs who've left a great place to work just for more money.

doh. Sorry, got lost in the excitement ;)

What about a chromebox?

http://www.asus.com/au/ASUS_Chromebox/

I've been with C# since the beginning, 1.1, coming from ASP 'classic', I absolutely love C# as a language. But... I'm now working in a Ruby/Linux shop handling some of their legacy app integration and I've come to understand that a lot of the disinterest comes from a complete clash of culture more than anything else. By that I don't mean the old "Evil M$" rubbish - for 10 years Microsoft has not understood Open Source culture. Instead of collaborate it was compete compete compete. NHibernate vs Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC vs fubu/castle, Codeplex instead of GitHub, everything was done to keep people dependent on Microsoft.

ALT.NET came and went, but there was never a really strong open source community. That combined with the cross sell policy is a barrier to entry. Everything has been tightly coupled, IIS dependencies in ASP.NET makes Mono a second class citizen, MSSQL dependencies in EF made code first migrations break in MySQL. All designed to sell licenses, books and certification.

Talking about productions web apps, at the end of the day it has to be on Windows, even if you want to dev on Mono. If I'm going to start building a production app you start asking yourself questions about licensing costs too, Server, SQL, VS pro, CALs. Okay so you can get it going for free if you join BizSpark, but then there's the waiting etc etc and the niggling fact that eventually you will have to pay. Comparing that to my experience working on Linux is like chalk and cheese. vagrant up -> npm install -> {do work} -> git push heroku master. Frictionless, all for free, with no gatekeepers.

With OSS, people don't sit around waiting for the mothership to fix issues, because there isn't one, they band together and fix it themselves. Additionally, as I've come to realize (flamebait warning) Linux kills Windows on the server. Not by a nose, but like a Red Wedding in ease of use, footprint and resource utilization.

You also have to look at the "why C#" specifically. To do RAD web development it is much faster to use something like Rails. C# is more performant? Then use Java or node.js. C# just doesn't fill a particular gap.

Having said that, it's not all doom and goom, I think C# is the #1 choice for mobile development. I think the ASP.NET Titanic is starting to turn. Scott Guthrie seems to get it. The announcements recently with regards to ASP.NET vNext are all heading in the right direction and address a lot of the glaring issues. There is also some great non-MS .NET work being done at places like GitHub and StackExchange. Will it be enough to convince OSS types to start adopting it? I doubt it.