If you are in the US, take a look at Dice and Indeed to get a sense of where the market is and what is the rate per hour. As others have said, networking helps but I started my contracting journey through Dice and Indeed. Good luck.
Yes it is absolutely, but it was by design, in order to generate growth for NPM the company at the expense of the Node.js community. I'm not saying this, Node.js creator said that.
"Should take the money when a beta user offered to pay"
Not sure about this point. Why would we take money if we knew the product is not in a working condition. And what if, the product doesn't get to a stage where we feel the fee justifies.
I get your feelings here, and I think they say good things about you. But until you take money, you aren't running a business. What with business cards, a nice website, and an office, it might look like a business, but it's just an expensive fantasy.
Money is proof that your customers find you valuable. If you are really worried that the money is more an expression of faith and that you might not earn it, then don't recognize the revenue. Keep the money separate so you can give it back if things don't work out. But take the money. And then ask other people for money.
Avoiding taking money is basically avoiding finding out whether or not you've got something good. Your answer to that question is almost irrelevant. It's your potential customers that you should be listening to. One of the truest answers they will give you is their first check. (Still truer ones are regular checks and referrals to friends.) So take the money.
The nice thing about paying customers (besides the money) is that they will tell you what's wrong with the product, so you can fix it. Nonpaying users are much more likely to just walk away.
I am sure every good developer should have crossed bad developer phase at some point in his life as a developer. Here is a different take on some of the points (sorry if you find offensive) -
Bad developer considers himself as a programmer, responsible for generating lines of code
Generating lines of code that still works is not bad and it’s not uncommon. As long as the developer knows the language and makes something work, it’s not a bad thing.
Bad developer understands only the technical problem at hand.
Bad developer is focused on building classes and methods and configuration files, but does not get the big picture.
Bad developer knows only the components he’s written.
It’s fairly common to have a workplace where the developer doesn’t get to know all the details because of restriction but as long as he codes the problem to spec and gets everything correct, he is not a bad developer.
Bad developer only sticks to what he knows.
Bad developer does not have time to learn.
Developers cannot be tagged bad just because they don’t learn technologies apart from what they are using. Some stick to one technology and they are pro in that.
Good developer pushes himself to create bug-free code; bad developer leaves it to QA to find bugs to fix.
Even developers termed good tend to let QA find bugs.
Bad developer completes tasks.
What more is required other than getting the task complete.
Bad developer will wait until the finest details are available.
Without proper specs defined, even a good developer will have a hard time finishing a task. The more you think and question upfront, the better it is to code.
Bad developer thinks only about the elegance of his code and leave the job of delivering value to others.
True, he did his part and now it’s up to other teams from the chain to carry forward.
A developer who can solve a complex problem in a code that is easier for any developer to read and understand is a good developer. A developer termed good who writes code that is harder to read and understand by any other programmer is bad.
Java is a good language for web development. It's mature and most of the big companies use java. Java in terms of popularity might have slowed down but JVM as a platform will stay for a longer time. I use java for my day job, but I did learn php, python and ruby on the side just to build some small apps as part of learning. It's fun to learn additional languages and to know where each language shine.
I haven't worked on Play that much so I'll let others who have used talk about it. Spring framework is another really good one you can give a try.
The reasons why startups prefer anything other than java might be rapid prototyping, bleeding edge and probably hosting costs.
This is a good start, but I would like to see more real world experience on 1) How will this benefit w.r.t replacing or using alongside Sessions (HttpSession in java for example) 2) Size limits - 5mb and 1mb for IE7, storages different per scheme/domains 3) Data Security
The size limits are more complicated, because strings get stored as utf16, so that 5 mb is a lot less in practice. Also, on ie7, you have to fall back to userData whose capacity depends on the security zone your app runs in, and can get as low as 64 kb.
I use it to replace cookies for storing settings that don't need to get sent to the server on every request. The collapsed state of a sidebar for example.
As long as they don't become more like conventional CEO's and forget they were once writing code having lot of fun building applications and solving issues on day to day basis. Now that they are CEO's asking questions which makes you think..were they engineers before? I hope he doesn't turn to conventional.
Around 10 hours during week days and 3 - 4 hours during weekends.
Curious to know why this question? do you plan on doing any kind of research based on the data or is it just a random question. I would be rather interested how productive people are in those hours that we spend...
