I'm a junior/mid-level developer. I wanna know how will I know that I'm ready to be a contractor, also the dos/donts about being one.
Jacques Mattheij has written a lot of useful stuff on this topic:
Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#42I hate 0-day exploits while defending my IT infrastructure.
Are you actually targeted with undisclosed vulnerabilities, or are you just concerned about quickly patching your infrastructure after a vulnerability is disclosed? If it's the latter, I'd love to hear more about your pain points as it's an area in which I've been kicking around ideas for a while.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#43Better golang package management.
Better erlang package management? (:
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#44Having my and my family's rent, food and health insurance paid for without having to hire myself out for it.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#45I don't expect you to solve it, but since you're looking for problems... I'm kind of a perfectionist (not in a good way) and whenever I want to learn something new, I spend days and days beforehand just searching for the p.e.r.f.e.c.t. books, video lectures and what not. For example, I'd like to get back into physics, especially quantum mechanics. A website that, given any scientific field, gives me a list of the mos…
I have the same problem , i always take days to look for perfect learning path and most of the time end up not using or learning anything , this problem is destroying my life (i am 20 years EECS student ) , any help or solution , and i will be thankful for you until the day i die .
Another "me too". I spend way too much time figuring out the optimal material and order for approaching new subjects. I'm trying to work on it, but it's tough. At the heart of it, I think, is a fear of wasting time, which is funny considering how much time I've wasted on it.
Having lived some time before the Web was around, and some time more before it was quite the resource that it is now, I think this is a problem that is, if not caused by the Web, at least severely aggravated by it. For as useful as it is, I can't shake the feeling that if I could entirely abandon the modern information world for a set of traditional media and the Real World for a few years I'd come out on the other side both better educated and far happier that I will if I don't, but it's so hard to live anything like a normal life without the 'net, and there aren't many (any?) jobs as all-around nice as working as a programmer that let you disconnect like that.
Probably I'd have made a good monk.
Also, to add to the problems-to-solve list: I'd like an Anki-alike that lets me type and/or freely draw on both sides of the card when I'm creating one on a device with a touch screen. I realized after ~3 hours of collecting images for some flash cards I didn't end up creating that if I could have just drawn my cards on a tablet and saved them directly—no stupid, slow shuffling between a graphics editor and the flash card app—I'd have already been done, and, not finding such a program, I abandoned my project. At that point I (obviously) considered using real notecards but I doubted I'd carry them around enough.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#46My wifi is ridiculously annoying - I live in an apartment block where there are literally 30 other wifi routers interfering with my own router. I pay through the nose for superfast broadband but it's completely redundant!
I've had this problem before. Try changing the "channel" for your wifi signal. You can do this via the admin interface for your router. If that doesn't help, the cause might be EM interference from other electronic devices physically near the router. Try moving other electronics (power supplies, cable modem, etc.) away from the router (at least 1 or 2 feet distance should do it).
Hope that helps!
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#47[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#48The economic system as it now stands makes it impossible for me to sustain my life through work that is meaningful and helpful to others.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#49I'm never satisfied with my multi computer setup / multi screen setup, i always ending with not knowing which one to use for what, or if i even need more than one, also i can never find that perfect keyboard...
A tiling window manager like xmonad, awesomewm can help
Re: Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it
#50I don't expect you to solve it, but since you're looking for problems... I'm kind of a perfectionist (not in a good way) and whenever I want to learn something new, I spend days and days beforehand just searching for the p.e.r.f.e.c.t. books, video lectures and what not. For example, I'd like to get back into physics, especially quantum mechanics. A website that, given any scientific field, gives me a list of the mos…
Open source courses would be cool. Not open source like mit's ocw or coursera, but a platform where everyone collectively decides on the material. So, for an algorithms course, maybe MIT's hashing lectures are second to none, but some guy on YouTube has better explanations for divide and conquer algorithms. The idea would be to find the best material for each lecture and compile it into a class