Show him what you can do with programming. Show him something cool, which is still reachable so he can imagine himself doing that. Just some lame "you will get good jobs after 100 years" thing doesn't fly I think. For me the "defining moment" was when I saw Scandinavian "demo-scene" stuff at the age of roughly 11. After that, I really died to learn 3D-programming, and I've been coding pretty much every day since. :) I started with C, but it seemed so complicated and difficult to learn that I moved to x86 assembly, and learned that way. Couple of years later of course moved back to C, but that time with different perspective already -- as the projects grow in complication there was need for something more high-level. Pretty much same way ended up in OO-programming, I noticed I was more or less doing OO-programming already but just cumbersome way, so transitioned to C++... But anyway, get books, lots of them. I've met some programmers who have never read a programming book, but I still believe clearly organized and though-out book is a much better way to learn something "right way" even if basically all the information is in Internet.

One of guidelines I have found useful is that document interfaces as much and detailed as possible, but if you feel you should write a comment in implementation think twice if the implementation is too complicated, or maybe there is some problem with the design. Does the function do straightforward well-defined task? If the function gets too long or complicated maybe there are some independent well-defined tasks that should be own functions instead of part in the implementation. Write so clean code that it doesn't shout need for any documentation. One other useful guideline: Learn from bugs and improve code quality from the bugs. Always when encountering a bug, not only fix the bug but also ask "How could I prevented this in the first place?". That gives important hints about the quality issues in the code. Maybe you are not checking your assumptions/pre-conditions/post-conditions/variants enough. Maybe interface of that function was not well-defined. Maybe there was a test case missing. Maybe something else was wrong. Study the bug and make sure similar situation does not happen again.

Which one sounds better: "I work for insurance company." or... "I work in gambling business.", so go for it. :P

If you need a graphical user interface in your application go for Qt. Seriously, you won't regret it. I'm also using several other open source libs like Boost, but those won't help a bit to get your cross-platform GUI running. Qt, in contrast, handles that great, and has IPC, SQLite integration and thread abstractions a bonus. Besides, if you are starting as a "fresh" user , you will have benefit that once you have learned a bit Qt you will be comfortable with the other classes in the library as well. In contrast, if you decide to go for different lib for each purpose, you will have a lot more to learn (and to integrate).

I've had about 20-30 domains registered over several years, and I've never used private domain reg, and still it's very rare that spam gets through in my inbox in Gmail, which I have used several years as well. Maybe I'm just lucky or the gmail spam filtering works very well.

Benefit/not depends on many things: 1) Your values 2) Your employer 3) Your career path So best to get both, work experience while studying masters, that is. You get also extra points because you look so hard working while doing both same time. Also, as many people have pointed out, you might benefit a great deal from it later. Check out the management ladder in many companies, many times there are not a single guy without masters degree.

Jaiku was originally mobile-only microblogging, as far as I remember. The web interface came later. The original client was developed for Nokia Series 60 (C++). Not sure about the server side, might have been Python. Also, the Google Apps integration came later, after the acquisition. One of the unique selling points (from Google's point of view) was (disclaimer: I'm guessing) how Jaiku enhanced S60 default Contacts list to presence.

The problem in J2ME development is the cost of porting and QA. So my guess is that you will have hard time finding a publisher for your title, since the publisher would need to invest signifigant amount of resources to port and do QA for the title. Also, pretty much all mobile publishers have own porting platforms built on top of basic J2ME, so they would need to "port" your game to the platform as well. So in the worst case they would need to pretty much re-do your game. Plus they would need to negotiate some deal with you, which would cost time and money as well. So unless your game is extremely addictive and it shows in 2 minute gameplay, I think you can forget about finding a good mobile publisher for it.