I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the networks don't have the capacity to handle as much as they say they do. Add on to that that someone on a laptop is probably going to eat up more data. Multitasking is easier (I generally only look at one page at a time on my phone, but I might have five tabs loading on my laptop at any given time), and there are more applications available that can chew through a connection (MMOs, torrenting, etc).
I'm in essentially the same boat as you. I went to school for something non CS (Physics), found a job coding later on in life and discovered I really liked it, but now I'm withering away in a bad environment. It's pretty disheartening when you're trying to improve and really apply yourself to something, just to have bad management or coworker apathy destroy it.
All I can suggest (and it's what I'm doing) is to be constantly on the hunt. Spend a couple nights a week dedicated to the job search. Any other free time, try to hone your skills. If you're interested in something, whip up something in your free time. Portfolios are a good thing to have, even if it seems like interviewers never take a look at them. Just keep at it, you'll eventually get out.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've been looking in Houston for at least a year now, and I'm finding virtually nothing here, let alone anything at that sort of range. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the development jobs I've seen around are only offering 40-60k. I'd be interested in knowing where these cushy jobs are hiding.
Wow. You should move to Indianapolis. There are companies here dying to give some qualified programmer money. A salary of 80-100k is being offered to experienced Java, .NET -- even Ruby/Rails developers. (I just came from a Rails job at that level.) On top of that, it's a cheap place to live, and is building an interesting little community of tech/startup-minded people.
I dont know what your experience is but if you were coming in at a jr level that seems a bit low. 50-75k seems to be the range for 0-3 yrs of experience. If you are able to get in somewhere and work with the senior guys and find a good group of them who are willing to share knowledge with you it is very easy to get to mid/senior level with some effort.
I'll pipe up here. I've found it gets buggy once you move beyond basic editing. E.g. regular expression search or search/replace. I've run into several other things.
Overall, I'm left with the impression that it's "a mile wide and a foot deep".
Amen. I get so tired of the "mainstream rap has degenerated" argument. Every genre of music has tons of different artists, each with a different approach, and it's a general trend that people who listened to a genre of music in one era tend to not like the newer stuff (Try getting a classic rock or country fan to listen to a modern rock or country station, and watch the criticism flow!). It's just the nature of things.
The fact that you don't like the content/style/message/whatever doesn't make an art form any less an art form.
That's a lot faster than I thought they were going to get them out (I was figuring they'd be arriving around the beginning of the year). Well, here's to hoping that I get one. Definitely anticipating posts with user experiences.
There's always people who don't have large screens (even on desktops) or who don't have their browsers expanded to the size you are looking for. The goal of a website, before any sort of graphic design, is to communicate information to as many people as possible. By making the website difficult to read (or completely impossible in many situations (IE, iOS, etc)), you're alienating people. If you're freelancing, that's definitely not something you want to be doing. You never know who's going to be coming at you with a work offer.
Cross-browser/cross-device compatibility is one of the most tedious things about web design, but if you're trying to drum up business, especially _for_ web design, you need to demonstrate your competence at it. Your portfolio is really the best place to do this. I'll be honest, if I was thinking of hiring a web developer, I'd be put off by your portfolio, because you're putting form before function.
Definitely this. One of the real benefits of using Django is that the admin panel is already there. Adding items to be added by the admin panel takes minimal effort, and really simplifies things.
Once you start using the built in admin panel you'll be infinitely grateful that you don't have to roll your own anymore.
