monroepe's comments

I started the Wheel of Time series and am currently through book 3 and I am loving it.

Wow. Deleting account now.

While I agree they do get lost quickly, there is an "ask" link in the header. I check there every so often, but maybe I am in the minority.

If you want a bunch of recruiters to contact you. Put your resume on job boards like monster.com, indeed, careerbuilder, etc. It might not be the best way to get a job (as others have mentioned), but I guarantee recruiters will contact you.

I don't like the look quite as much in Sublime 3 and the ColdFusion plugin doesn't seem to work (obviously not going to be a problem for most people). Otherwise I haven't seen any issues. But I also haven't noticed much of a reason to switch if you aren't having any problems with Sublime Text 2. I installed Sublime 3 after Sublime 2 started failing to search properly and had issues opening some of my projects.

One thing you can do is contact the organizations and ask for some documents about what they are doing with the money and other data. All organizations waste money or use it ways you might not like. But I think you have to do some research. Ask for the data from the given organization and make an informed decision from there. Any non-profit should have this data available in some form for you.

You can't really control how they use it. But you can see what they accomplished in the past. Look at what they are planning for the next few years. And then evaluate at the end of the year and see if you feel like they did what they said they would.

I believe the saying is, "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors."

But seriously I do still have problems naming things. And when working with other developers we can never seem to agree on a good name. The name he or she chooses is usually way different that what I would choose.

Yeah I find it hard to believe that Amazon isn't #1.

It's never too early if you really hate it. You just don't want to get in the habit of leaving companies after working there less than a year. A lot of companies get turned off by that. The advice I got from multiple people was to stick with your first company at least a year. I am not suggesting staying a year, but you should plan to be at your next company 2-4 years at least.

The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

I entered not knowing what I wanted to do at all and ended up with a history major, which hasn't really been all that useful to me. I discovered too late that I loved programming for me to switch majors to cs.

Now I am not saying that waiting a year or two would have helped me pick a better major, because I still might not have found my passion for programming. But I do know that I would have studied harder and learned more during those years. My grades were fine, but I really did just enough to get good grades. I didn't take advantage of the learning opportunity because I was immature. I would love to go back now and really learn.

>But many people are vastly overpaying for this benefit.

Exactly. I don't have any issues with getting a degree. I think it is very beneficial both financially in the long term and emotionally. But you shouldn't overpay for it. There is nothing wrong with community college. There is nothing wrong with putting off college for a year or two to save money. Obviously every situation is different, but I think we should be educating high school students about their options and their prospects.

I see what you are saying and there are definitely certain fields where it makes sense to take on more debt than the $10k-$20k I suggested. I think another factor to take into account is financial maturity. Some people are better situated to handle larger debt than others. I am fairly frugal at this point in my life, but I am not sure I could handle the pressure and the need to budget with an extra $744 payment towards loans every month like mentioned in the article.

A Bachelor's degree doesn't really do that much for you these days. It's become like a high school diploma was 30 years ago (which almost no one paid for). I keep trying to advocate that people not go so far in debt for a college degree. For med school or law school (although I would argue that this is not a great investment with the current glut of law school grads) it makes sense to go into debt of that size. But I don't think you can or should justify student loans of over $10k for undergrad. Maybe you could stretch that to $20k, but I wouldn't (and didn't). If you can't afford a college don't go there.

I left college with ~$3k in student loan debt. I went to a liberal arts college that costs ~$60k a year with room and board. My family definitely could not have afforded to send me there, but I got a lot of scholarships and financial aid. I ended up with a job that had nothing to do with my education there. I value the experience I had there, but it was not worth $60k a year by any means.

There is a lot of benefit to college education, but not everyone needs to go to their dream school. Not everyone drives their dream car or lives in their dream home.

In Chisinau (the capital), where I spent roughly a year, I would say that you hear Russian even a little more than Romanian (although there are definitely more Romanian speakers and people really like it when you try to speak Romanian). I would say the actual ratio in Chisinau is 65/35 in favor of Romanian speakers, but you tend to hear Russian a little more because the Romanian speakers learn Russian, but the Russian speakers don't learn Romanian nearly as often. The other city I lived in, Balti, has a much larger percentage of Russian speakers.

I didn't know Romanian beforehand though, so going with Russian was easy enough. I did work with some other Americans who learned Romanian and didn't have the easiest time in Moldova just speaking Romanian. They would often run into people who only spoke Russian and they had no way to communicate. As a Russian speaker in my two years this happened very rarely to me and then it was usually only people from villages and young kids (even then they were familiar with Russian and I picked up enough Romanian to communicate).

It's a very interesting dynamic in the country between the two languages. It's not as controversial a topic as some people would have you believe. People definitely like hearing Romanian more (for the Romanian speakers), but they are ok with Russian too. I got yelled at one time by a drunk guy on the bus for speaking Russian, but literally everyone else on the bus defended me and the guy I was talking too. They all knew we were Americans based on accent haha. Overall though, it's not that hard to immerse yourself in Russian in Moldova in the bigger cities, but if you already knew Romanian you would have to be disciplined because it is still widely spoken.

I think a better question is "How do you make something people will use?" People want a lot of things that they won't necessarily use. Look at all the apps on your phone that at some point you "wanted," but now are never used.

I became fluent in Russian after 2-3 months of living in Moldova. I had a crash course in Russian beforehand, but couldn't say a whole lot more than basic phrases before I got to Moldova and couldn't understand much either. Obviously you need to study (grab a good grammar book). But I ended up studying less than an hour a day when I was there. What I did do was speak Russian as much as possible. You have to force yourself to use the language. What set me apart from the people I was working with (in terms of using the language) was that I was not afraid to fail. I just continued on and tried my best. I gave myself no chance to fail. If you aren't living in country that speaks the desired foreign language it is a lot harder. I took French in school for over 10 years and another two years in university and I still can't speak it. My grammar is very good in French and I can read it fairly well, but can't speak much.

Makes me chuckle just thinking of the potential.

$15 million seems excessive. But that's the American dream.

A couple of Easter Eggs would be nice.