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gkwelding | 4 years ago | on: The surreal experience of my first developer job

We'd been working there for about 2 years at that point, had always got paid, had been the same team since day 0 so we had no reason to doubt the "I'm just waiting for the next investment to clear in the company account then I'll pay you everything you're owed" message. Plus the arrogance and naivety of "it's a tech company, he needs us to do anything so he's got to pay us eventually".

gkwelding | 4 years ago | on: The surreal experience of my first developer job

This literally could have been written by any developer in the UK. I think most of us start out like this! I think the best one was a company I worked for in Leeds, it was building a secure learning platform for schools which ultimately fell flat on it's arse. The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people.

He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyone would know about it is when the door code would be changed and we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) for the new code.

His grand idea to save the failing online learning platform was "pivoting" to selling personalised dog food online........... (and I mean personalised in the sense of just slapping the dogs name and their face on some generic crap dog food, not actually nutritionally personalised to the dog)

Left that place being owed 3 months wages (which I never got).

Last I heard he was being investigated for fraud. (this was the scum bag in question: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)

gkwelding | 5 years ago | on: Move to EU to avoid Brexit costs, firms told

Wow, who could have possibly foreseen that saying a big "fuck you" to our largest trading partners could have possibly resulted in unfavourable trading conditions for the smaller party... Not me that's for sure... But at least we all get blue passports.

gkwelding | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

I used to use privateinternetaccess.com, but various issues with them led me to look for a new VPN provider. I eventually settled on ivpn.net as they have a good selection of exit points, their software is easy to use and I can use it across devices too. Their network speeds have been really good too.

gkwelding | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Are Online Courses Enough to Become a Full Stack Web Developer?

I would consider myself a full stack developer, hell I've even made a decent career out of it. I don't have a CS degree, what I do have is many many years experience. I know HTML, CSS, JavaScript (including whatever the latest fad is be in jQuery, Node, Ember et al...), PHP, Python, Java, SQL (MySQL and MSSQL), NoSQL (Mongo, Elasticsearch etc...), and I can set up, secure and maintain a web server running Ubuntu, Redhat or CentOS.

You can't reliably learn all of this from an online course, although it might be a good starting point, you become a good full stack developer after years of experience.

gkwelding | 10 years ago | on: PHP 7 Released

"My experience with hosting PHP apps has historicity been one of fending off security issues"

Unfortunately PHP seems to have this reputation. It's not so much the language that is the problem but the people using it. PHP typically had such a low bar to entry that literally anyone could pick it up and do anything and everything with it. And quite frankly there were (and still are) a lot of beginner tutorials out there encouraging people to do very stupid insecure stuff. It now seems to be an image that stuck.

If you take a look at the OWASP Top 10, and any big data breaches recently, they are all caused by human error. SQL injection being the major culprit.

gkwelding | 11 years ago | on: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

This is true, and if you read into it you'll find that it wasn't anything to do with Valve, but actually Bethesda who defined the 25%, they've already profited immensely from the game and I found it quite hard to swallow that they were not stiffing dedicated content creators.

gkwelding | 11 years ago | on: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best.

Only 25% going to the content creators? Really?

And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.

gkwelding | 12 years ago | on: All Packt ebooks are $5

Can I just ask, as somebody who is currently reviewing a book for Packt on the FuelPHP framework, I've found the actual technical content to be quite good. But the foreword and a bit of background info about FuelPHP at the front seemed like it had been written by another author entirely. Do Packt add in non-technical chapters such as this?

gkwelding | 13 years ago | on: Github blocked from China

Yeah, this is happening because I specify the A Name record for the in-the-attic.com domain, if I hit gkwelding.github.com which is the github page itself then it's also blocked. Looks like some DNS FUBAR'ness is occurring somewhere.
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