Heck, I took a big pay cut to be happier. I was a .NET enterprise developer in the six figures.
There is something about building things outside the box instead of being part of an assembly line at corporate shops. The lack of politics and endless meetings is a bonus too. It's not always about the money.
This thread is indicative of the bias I see on HN. .Net and Java are "uncool" and therefore must not be suited for solving real world problems or doing interesting things. They are also often synonymous with bloated corporate bureaucracies and meetings. By these same stereotypes, should I assume that every Ruby developer is living in a party house with his 4 other co-founders, eating ramen and making social networking applications?
It's not bias, it's just a realistic observation of the market forces at work. People are willing to put up with bureaucracy and dull projects for more pay. There is no shortage of talent, there is merely an abundance of employers who are not realistic about market rates.
Until recently those were the only situations in which you could get a job as a Ruby developer – hamming it out on your own, in a small startup or at a consultancy.
It's still hard to get an Enterprise job as a Ruby developer.
It would be great if Mozilla followed through on their projects. Prism to Chromeless to stalled. Chromeless has potential to expand their core product, which is the browser. Why does everyone have the need to be Google and have their hands in everything?
Except you left out setting the prototype chain to extend from the super class. CoffeeScript expresses it succinctly. The example above, while readable, already has much more noise than signal.
Love CoffeeScript, but yeah omitting parens makes it hard to read in this case. I follow Visual Basic convention. Use parentheses when using the return value. In this case, the constructor function returns an object. Omit parentheses otherwise, i.e. using a function as a method (no return value).
It's a big baloon payment. It is not FREE after the probationary period. There are definitely strings attached. There was a big stink about this with a well known open source .NET developer who worked at MS. It would have ended costing his startup a lot more based on the cost of a SQL Server license, etc. He settled on Rails + MySQL. Search for Rob Conery.
May I ask what is so bloated and unpolished? Back up your dribbling. I have been using iTerm for a while now and it's as fast normal Terminal. It has profiles. It has 256 colors so I can use the same VIM colorschemes.
Nobody stays king for long. Social networking sites are only good until the next best thing. I'll bet a good dollar within 5 years Facebook will lose much of its popularity. Then Google+, ... In the meantime, Facebook will do little things like this to slow the exodus. Is anybody really that attached to Facebook?
