Now we have websites that are unresponsive for the first five seconds as the supporting javascript is downloaded and the onload events executed..

He's saying that there should be an already-booted service ready to service requests before the local application has finished loading. eg, if it takes 5 minutes to download all your new mail and update the search index, have the application query the server for results to your inbox searches. I think it's a dumb concept in the photoshop sense. Maybe that would work on an intranet but the cost of implementing it an application like photoshop is ridiculous. After 30 seconds, the app needs to then sync down the state of the cloud-based app you've been using for 30 seconds? Ugh, a lot of engineering effort for very little payoff. Besides, most of the time the user will probably start by opening a locally-stored document..

I prefer 4:3 for multi-monitor setups. I have three 1600x1200 21" monitors laid out horizontally at work. I like having the consistent resolution so something fits the same regardless of which screen I drag it onto. My workflow wouldn't work so well if the resolutions didn't line up. For example, if I'm remoting into a machine at a 1600x1200 resolution, I can fullscreen it on any of the three monitors. It'd be annoying to adjust the resolution of those sessions if I were to move them around between different resolution screens.

At home, I have a large widescreen as my main monitor with a 4:3 on the side just to have that off-screen supplimental space, like browsing around for my next time-waster while watching some important video of a cat on the main screen.

These days, the competition is google apps and apple's desktop/tablet apps..

A masters in CS is just as valid towards a "software engineer" job title as a similarly focused degree from an engineering dept. Different schools have different organizational structures. A software engineering degree from a CS dept is no less valuable than one that comes with a ring. You should absolutely not equate a "software engineer" as someone with a ring. That's not to say that ring-based engineers can't be good software engineers. I'm not in any way saying that. I'm just saying that more software engineers come out of math and cs faculties than engineering faculties with an "actual engineering degree".

Find someone in your new office to show you the ropes. Every major piece of software tends to have its own issues. For server software you might be looking at analyzing piles of log output. For gaming it might be real time perf metrics. Chances are, the biggest thing to get comfortable with is your debugging->fixing->building->testing->checkin cycle. Make sure you figure out how to get the road blocks out of your way. If you're working on something painful where there's a ton of time wasted rebuilding to try out your ideas, maybe there's a better way to build/patch in a more granular way. Your peers will also be interested in any process improvements. If you can optimize and speed up a process that makes you more effective, share it with the team. People really respect and appreciate anyone who can make their life easier.

And *really* spend some serious time trying to learn your software's object model, lifecycles, and data structures. When you start there will be an overwhelming amount of information. You need to accept that. But once you've got a bit of a foothold, CONTINUE learning. You want to be an expert. It takes discipline to get a broad and deep enough understanding to truly be efficient and effective. Be interested in the work of your closest peers. Chances are, what they have learned over the years can be incredibly helpful to enhancing your efficiency. At the end of the day, you'll be primarily judged on reliability and throughput. Whatever you can do to meet your goals, the better! And never be afraid to get help. It doesn't matter if someone helps you finish something. All your manager cares about is that the task is done. If they assign it to you, you are responsible for driving that task to completion. If you don't have an a clear idea of how to do something, that's your cue to immediately find someone to brainstorm with.

And career-wise, it's easier to advance in the earlier years. So when optimizing towards success and a happy retirement, a lot of it comes down to how quickly you can advance in your early years. Down the road, it's as much time as ability. To start with, it's all work ethic. Put in that extra 10% to be the hardest worker and you'll be getting promotions year after year. Work through those lower levels as fast as you can so you can enjoy the rest.

Good luck :)

Can you please cite which groups of people can't learn from it? The studies I've seen on tech-based teaching has never identified certain groups students doing worse while others do better. Is this simply your intuition?

I decided to look it up.. turns out I was remembering things wrong. That's just strict variable declarations. What you want is the -l command-line option. That'll do full syntax checking for you.

Reference: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.options.php

I haven't touched PHP in years but isn't there a strict-mode you can turn on which will force the syntax to check out? Or does that still only do things line-by-line on the fly?

As a self-described "good programmer," there are a lot of language features which improve my productivity and the end-result. Easy examples include features like typed-variables, garbage collection, and exception handling. I can keep track of all that manually but I don't get it right 100% of the time, especially not the first time. Regardless of the language, framework, and existing codebase quality, we set our test-bar appropriately for the product and schedule the appropriate amount of time to get there. Most of the time, it works out fine. But if you don't think better tools HELP write better code, you're vastly overestimating people's talent. The fewer details I have to think about, the better the end-result.