Obviously, this isn't something to do for every place you apply to. However, for those at the top of your list, as is mentioned in the piece, riffing their design or code when you're practicing or wanting to expand your skillset anyway is a great idea. Two birds, one stone and all that.
B. Bring it up when asked about previous experience tangential to it
C. Bring it up when asked about your outside work activities or what sort of continuing professional development you've been doing lately
D. Mention it when asked about the "coolest/most fun" thing you've hacked on lately
E. Whip it out when asked the usual "what do you think we do here and what can you bring to the table"
Or, when you start asking your questions about the company/culture/ect. (DEFINITELY ask those types of questions), weave it in with a question about what kind of side-project or 20% type program they offer/support.
You could also throw it up on a design site or your blog and drop it in whichever social media channel they may have.
Cultivating a curious attitude (or sincerely making an effort to fake it) will help calm your nerves a bit as well.
Tradeoffs (and I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir). Generally, for non-trivial mobile apps, you want to try and build native versions for Android/iOS first. Frameworks that are cross-platform just aren't up to par in many aspects (again, for non trivial apps). While you may be able to get performance close enough to native performance with a cross-platform framework, you're still going to be spending a significant amount of time on the UI/UX side customizing to ensure your app's look, feel and general flow line up with the standards and best practices for that platform. This is not a trivial concern. Facebook found that out the hard way on Android as one example. Users learn and form muscle memory on the platform they choose to invest in and respond very poorly if your app doesn't deliver a UI/UX that adheres nicely to the platform standards. Another concern, which is being addressed, but is going to be an ongoing concern for still some time, is API feature access on each platform. Cross-platform frameworks are continually playing catch-up to try implement access to the most important new API additions on each platform. The gap has certainly been shortened, especially in the location services area but ultimately, there won't be API access parity across platforms for quite some time and it will still lag behind the native implementations.
Again, this is all in general, applies the most to bigger apps and/or apps that rely heavily on fast performance or access to specific native APIs and based on one mobile devs experience.
It is exciting to see that for most things that are somewhere between a blog and a small to non-trivial application, just focusing on making sure your site/small app works well on most mobile browsers is sufficient. You can also usually wrap things up in each platforms' version of a WebView if you want to get your app/site listed on each store for that extra exposure. Again though, you have to be very careful doing that for the same UI/UX concerns mentioned earlier.
Getting away from the more technical aspects, just looking at WP market share vs Android/iOS means that even if a business wants to hit every platform, they're still going to start with iOS/Android and making sure they have a good mobile site experience before looking at WP. Add in the cost of finding a dev to work on your WP build (or assigning one from another team to it) and you end up with only the largest entities having the man-power and expertise to be able to justify a priority list that includes executing nice implementations across all platforms, including WP.
Not at all. While the author does end with a curve ball on the arts (which he then admits in the commments), the point is valid. Spending on infrastructure, education, reasearch, healthcare, exploration and the like contribute much more than the sum total of their costs. NASA is a well known example of this. DARPA as well.
What you're describing contributes to a vicious cycle. Lowering prices means less revenue which translates to lay-offs, scaling back and cutting corners. That means worse quality and less demand, which means lower prices again - so on and so forth. Unfortunately, a simple supply and demand curve doesn't come close to describing a functioning modern economy.
Unfortunately, your assumption that less money to consumers translates to wiser financial decisions is incorrect. It's well studied that quite the opposite behavior occurs and for good reason; more stress and less access to time saving goods and services. On top of the huge disadvantage that levies on a person, the things that person DOES need start costing more. In the vast majority of the states, having a car is a necessity to work. Loans cost more if you can even get one so you end up spending what little is there on a clunker and all the time and energy that goes in to that heap. Uh oh, now you can get to your job, but if you're working anywhere near minimum wage and have a family (that doesn't just include kids and spouses, but also elderly parents (whose social security and medicare aren't enough), you won't have the cashflow to keep everything going. So you end up with a payday loan and so on. I think everyone has the picture by now.
You mention that the 'right' industries will shrink and the 'wrong' will expand. Let's make that leap and follow it through, ignoring the pedantry of arguing what's a 'right' and 'wrong' industry. I get the point you're trying to make with that. There are two obvious paths. First, that as it stands now, increased corporate profits has not translated to increasing wages or employment. Regardless of whether the 'right' or 'wrong' industries expand, that still translates to less money in the hands of those that have the most need to spend it. The article does a much better job communicating the consequences of that. On the second path, I'll ignore the previous and just look at the overall growth consequences. If we assume that indeed only the industries producing things consumers need expand that eliminates a ton of research, development and source of unexpected discoveries (and jobs and wages and... I digress). How many 'useless' web apps and services are out there that also contribute to open source? Did consumers really need Google? Not at all, but damn if we don't all enjoy many of the things Google has contributed to our sector.
The following isn't in reply to you, Kokey, but I want to get it out there.
Of course government spending on things that don't contribute to real growth are a terrible idea. Government spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare, however, contribute more than the sum total of their costs. Most like to use the NASA example to illustrate that point, but how about finally investing in upgrading our power grid? A nationwide upgrade would put hundreds of thousands to work including a huge number of engineers and other knowledge jobs. Not to mention, we'd also be increasing our knowledge, expertise and intellectual property as a nation in a sector vital to every country on the globe during the process. What about using the next few billion we were going to subsidize telcoms with to upgrade our internet infrastructure (I don't know anyone who has been informed of the billions given to telcoms to upgrade infrastructure that wasn't used for that at all, that wasn't furious about it)? But what about healthcare? Surely that's just a money pit, right? A healthy population is more productive. Simple as that.
I doubt anyone reading this can't see that these kinds of large government spending projects and programs pay for themselves many times over in all sorts of varying ways.
Yeah, who needs those pesky regulations. We should just start deregulating. Let's start with banks. Oh wait, that didn't turn out so well did it? Remember a certain massive explosion in Texas recently. I guess deregulation there just didn't come fast enough to stop it? What about energy? Surely they must have the tightest and most restrictive regulations with OSHA being such a pest. I think some people on the gulf coast would like to have a word with you.
Surely deregulation will lead to more competitive free markets! Take a look at the 19th and early 20th century economy for some excellent examples of how wonderful monopolies are (railroads, oil, etc). I'll assume you're not against government regulation of utility infrastructure since I'll assume you wouldn't like hoping a company will decide your area is profitable enough to build out or having to have new wiring and piping run to your house to switch to a competitors infrastructure.
Labor laws. Pffft. Who needs those? We have unions to ensure businesses don't mistreat workers. Oh wait. Surely an employer would never take advantage of someone to pad their bottom line. Yeah.
Are there areas where the government does some ridiculous things? Sure. Does it cost money to protect and treat workers respectfully? Sure. Are we worth the ideals we stand for if we don't? NO.
Oh gee, better quit those social programs! We sure wouldn't want accidentally melt down the economy ensuring our population is healthy or providing benefits to veterans or pensions for government employees or teacher salaries or infrastructure -- I think the everyone gets the point there.
We don't have near the tax burden in the US that we did mid century so I guess we have a ways to go before our government is "collecting as much revenue as they possibly can".
No need to reply expecting a debate, I've said my piece. :)
You are arguing against a straw man. I didn't just say "regulation", I said onerous regulation.
There should be little doubt that onerous regulation not only exists but is commonplace in the US at the moment. The sheer size of the federal register is indication enough, it's simply not possible for any one person to fully understand the law that they are subject to, period.
Effective regulation is often good. For example, I don't think the western world would have so quickly improved its air quality in the mid to late 20th century without regulation, and that has improved the lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. But effective regulation is difficult and sometimes requires great skill to create. In contrast, the hodge podge of laws and business rules that we have today is downright kafkaesque in its maddening mixture of arbitrariness and severity.
Most importantly, even laws and rules put in place by people operating in good faith and with the best of intentions can have ill effects. The law of unintended consequences is perhaps the most important factor in creating regulation, but it is a law that is frequently ignored by policy makers.
Consider something simple, the labor laws which force a transition in employment type around the 40 hours per week boundary, such as offering benefits and so forth. This causes many employers to use a larger number of part-time workers. Is this because those employers are evil or shirking their responsibility? Well, not necessarily, it may not be feasible to have employees for a given position provided with benefits. And even if it were and the employers were merely being "greedy bastards", would it change anything? Has the law been able to compel employers to avoid hiring part-time workers? Not at all. And the unintended consequence is that if someone has a desire to work 40 hr weeks (or longer) at an entry-level position in order to have a higher income this is just not available to them (at least without working "under the table"). Instead they need to work multiple part-time jobs, but they end up spending more time traveling to/from each job and they may have difficulties with the schedule of each job meshing with the other. In the end many people end up worse off with these labor laws, because it is more difficult and more costly to be able to work enough hours to make a decent living. And these are the workers who are the poorest, working entry-level jobs, and with the greatest desire to work. Precisely the people most in need of help, and instead they are put at a disadvantage.
As to your point about the tax burden mid 20th century, it's utterly off base. The government is collecting a much higher percentage of the total GDP of the country today than it was then. Regardless of the nominal tax rates (which are rarely reflective of effective tax burdens) the actual revenue collection has gone up. Additionally, I wasn't talking about the US in that case, I was talking about countries such as Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. Each of those countries has a tax burden higher than 1/3 of the GDP, in some cases approaching half of the GDP as in Denmark and Sweden. When you consistently take so much of the GDP for government use and you use so much of it on programs that impact the daily lives and livelihoods of so many citizens there is frequently no room for paying off debt because doing so means not just reducing outlays to the level of a balanced budget but even deeper to provide a surplus.
