I don't believe that BART was designed for 100,000/week number. I read that it carried that many riders *when it opened*, but there's no way anyone would design a grade-separated rail system for 100,000/week. That's not even a notable amount of riders for a single bus line.

Design capacity comes down to track layout, train capacity, headways and station design. The trains and stations are not particularly crowded by world standards. There is a bottleneck in the system (the transbay tube) that several different routes use, which limits headways. But honestly the system is doing pretty well serving 400,000/day.

The real issues are the electrical system, old rolling stock, and lack of maintenance. Not design capacity.

Talk to me about IOPS -- Input/Output operations Per Second -- or don't pretend you're talking to me about performance.

Not saying this isn't actually really exciting, but that's the metric in at least 90% of use cases.

World's largest *unclassified* tunnel boring machine.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

No really.

I took a pass at Python 3 a while back. The amount of hoops I needed to jump through, to deal with compilation errors around Unicode handling, was terrifying. It was simply a poor user experience.

Python 2.7 just works. Sure, it's a nightmare past a certain scale point. But until you get into the dregs of OO it really is executable pseudocode.

Python 3 is some other language that lost that property.

The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work. So things that are completely obvious to outsiders never make it to inner circles. Not that I can really see any way for Python 3 to mend its errors.

Seriously. Write some code, publish it on Github. Spin up a single serving web page, does one interesting thing as soon as you arrive. Remember, everyone else with resumes could be pretending, you're actually doing stuff.

For work experience, sign up on freelancing sites like odesk. Take jobs just to do them. Nobody knows how old you are, there. Even if all you can do is sysadmin -- well, admin some cloud services!

I agree, I'm a Candian and I use spelt, as well as kamut.

An ancient Eastern knowledge, predating our modern string theory by millenia!

Agreed. If I was only in a place for two days or less, then I almost never got any work done, except for maybe an hour or less at the train station or airport.

Think of it not as an alternative to vacation/traveling, but an alternative to living/working in the same city you always have.

I never had anyone ever ask me to access my computer, and I've had my fair share on enhanced pat downs. But yes, definitely use the feature to have your hard drive encrypted, since all your banking info etc will be on it.

If you stay at a hostel first, then you'll make friends to hang out with later, when you've moved into a short term lease apartment. Might even find flat mates. You don't want to miss out on the social connections of hostels while traveling for 2-3 years.

I found that when you have exciting things to do, then you really focus on working when you are working. You don't mess around on the Internet when you could instead be at the beach or partying. It's funny, when everyone else is bitching about bad weather, you're glad because that's the perfect time to work, and make more money for more fun later.

Traveling while working allows you to not just visit places, but stay for weeks and months, and get to experience actually living there. When you first arrive at a place, it usually only takes 3-5 days to see all the top sights. The thing is, you won't know until you're actually there if it's a place you would like to stay longer in, or if that's good enough, and you can move on. So planning ahead to segregate time as travel or life isn't necessarily doable. And instead of spurting between making money and spending money, it's a lot easier to budget with a semi-stable income and expense profile.

I recently did this myself, traveled for a year and a half through Europe, Australia and Hawaii, while writing software to pay the bills. It was much easier than saving up that much money before hand, and the work was more stable and dependable than trying to find temporary work at each new location. I stuck to countries with good Internet access, where I didn't have to worry about getting mugged or my rig stolen.

Some hostels provide free wifi, but in many cases it's painfully slow, and many hostels charge for wifi, but it can often be by the hour or for really small amounts of data. Basically they're assuming that you're just emailing and facebooking. Many do have a quiet area, but it might not be setup well for plugging in a laptop, and ergonomically sitting there for hours at a time. What worked best for me was to plan on participating with the other hostelers at all the peak times, such as the shared breakfast and possibly shared dinner times, and either afternoon treks or late night partying. Then I worked in all the gaps in-between, usually the late morning, afternoons, and before supper. Staying in the hostel quiet area all that time was very unappealing, so I would use any rooftop patio, or cafe, or pubs that aren't busy and so will allow you to camp out for hours after you've finished your meal, if asked nicely. Libraries are very good, as well as any post secondary schools that might be nearby. When I found a cafe with good wifi, I would return often, and they would usually accommodate me, even asking other patrons to move for me so I could access a plugin!

Since not every place has good cheap/free wifi, it quickly became necessary to get local SIMs for my iPhone, and get data plans that allow for tethering. Luckily in most places outside of North America, getting 1 GB pay as you go is pretty cheap and easy. At times I got 1.5 or 3 GB. It did take some effort to make sure that a wireless provider allowed both tethering and VPN through that tethering, so I could access my company's intranet for SVN etc. Also, having a local SIM will facilitate with communicating with fellow hostelers and locals that you meet. People seem to mostly stick to SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook for messaging and coordinating meeting up.

I always kept a very current Time Machine backup of my computer, which I stored separately from my computer bag, which saved the day when my computer did eventually get stolen. Don't rely on a computer that you can't afford to replace. If you can, keep your home insurance up, to cover your possessions abroad, like I did. Also, I use CrashPlan for an offsite backup, in case I lost everything. This helped get back my very most recent work that I hadn't yet backed up to my Time Machine. But beware, your data plan or limited wifi will not readily support regular backing up everything. I added rules to CrashPlan to not backup any temporary or built files, and I would regularly use the feature that allows suspending backing up for several hours, until I was back on a free wifi. Also, don't let your computer automatically download updates. It can take a while for an online backup service to upload everything for the first complete backup, so start that process well before leaving. I used Mozy first, and didn't like how slow it was and the trouble I had restoring files, so I needed to start all over again with CrashPlan. Also, a padded water proof or resistant computer case is a must. Many times I went to a cafe it wasn't raining, but on my return it was. Always lock up your computer in your locker in your room. Not every hostel has lockers in the rooms.

The main thing, is to not shut yourself off from the other backpackers, but to find a balance of socialising, seeing all the sights, relaxing, and also fitting in your work that will pay the bills. This way you will have an even better time than those who are not working but must live within a tight budget as they're burning through their savings.