A new manager came in who systematically replaced over half of the team with people from his last company. I went from having the best performance review on the team with one manager to somehow having the worst performance review on the team with the new manager.

It all worked out for the best though. I've been happily self employed since then. Teaching C++, speaking at conferences and running my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/l...

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

In ~2nd grade my brother exposed me to programming with doing simple character animations in TI 99/4A BASIC.

I actually just two weeks ago recreated that experience for the first time in 21 years and posted it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I've been thinking a lot about how programming used to be fun lately so I decided to start showing some of those old fun things in some YouTube videos: https://youtu.be/pvxPknoVmzs

Found something that I thought was missing, implemented it and made it open source ( http://chaiscript.com/ ). Now I consider it to be a rather significant part of my resume, having spent many years developing / maintaining / improving / supporting the same project.

As a project maintainer the things *I most need* from my users:

1. Tell me how you are using the tool! Very few people seem to be willing to share that information. It's huge. If I know how the average user is using the project, I know where to focus my efforts. Otherwise the squeakiest wheel is who gets my attention.
2. You tried my project and it didn't meet your needs, or the learning curve was too high? Tell me! I need to know where users are getting hung up so that I can improve and address those issues.
3. Submit bug reports. Specific bug reports. A complete compiling example is best, but any level of detail is necessary.

I've made a point of providing easy places ( http://discourse.chaiscript.co... https://github.com/ChaiScript/... ) for users to provide feedback.

Oh and:

4. Your favorite project is probably maintained by only 1 - 4 people. Understand that they cannot tailor the project to meet everyone's needs, or address everyone's issues. They have to prioritize their time. I'm in the fortunate situation to have a lot of time to work on my project today, but it could EASILY be a > full time job, and it's just a small scripting engine.

So, of the answers here the "participate in the community" is probably the most helpful to me, as a developer.

-Jason

Hmm... each function call has its own stack, but individual scripts do not. The scripting engine itself is quite self contained (no singletons of any kind), so you could instantiate multiple engines, but that would get heavy handed...

I'll think about it and see what the possibilities are.

I've created this discourse topic to discuss the options http://discourse.chaiscript.co... feel free to chime in.

http://chaiscript.com/

Been working on it for over 5 years now. Stable and easy to use scripting for your C++ application.

I've felt that same little death when reading the Google C++ coding standards doc. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Nobody Understands C++.

-Jason

I may as well take the opportunity to mention a FOSS programming language I have been working on that is designed to enable the merging of the speed of C++ with the flexibility of a scripting language. It is a scripting language designed for embedding in your C++ application, and it makes it trivial to your C++ classes/objects/functions to the scripting language. It's called ChaiScript, we've been working on it for about 6 months now and have made several releases.

ChaiScript works with your existing C++ code and doesn't require you to rewrite your application, like moving to a whole other language would.

Plenty of people are talking about the Nokia Internet Tablet series, but I actually have one for sale right now. It's a great device, but not quite what I was looking for. I now own an Acer Aspire One.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to mention the flash based adventure game engine I've been working on. The idea is to revolutionize the webcomic and make it interactive. It's open source, uses actionscript/php/drupal to allow you to build your mini adventure game in drupal and share it on your site.

Source is hosted at google code.
Pinheads: the first game written for it and 2nd place in the "Creativity" catagory in this year's Chistian Developer's Network Speedgame contest.
Covered City: A weekly updated mini scifi adventure game, currently on episode 2 (episodes 3 and 4 are already produced, but not public).

Oh yeah, and anyone is free to create an account at http://game.emptycrate.com/ and make your own adventure game.