Nick Janetakis

> At my last company we had a React interface (a specialized IDE, really) that needed to juggle (sort, filter, process) and work with sometimes hundreds of thousands of entities at once, all in-memory.

The author's example inserts 4M elements.

> and the user experience (and the API design) really benefitted from not having a bunch of extra round-trips to the server.

Possibly, but unless you benchmarked both scenarios, this might not be the case.

Performance over networked devices often has trade offs, sometimes those trade offs are directly contradictory, eg sorting/filtering/mapping/etc data on client side versus server side via api call - sometimes one is better than the other but you wont wont know unless you benchmark.

I get the impression that your company did not go through that exercise, considering you guys are building an IDE with scripting language.[1]

[1] https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/switching-to-vscode-from-sublime-text#:~:text=Performance,an%20i5%203.2GHz%20CPU.&text=CTRL%2BP%20searching%20is%20slightly,or%20getting%20in%20the%20way.

> But they've always seemed kind of shady with the whole "$200, now $10.99 with 2 days left"

I read about this from frustrated training content developers all the time. The pricing in particular, esp. w.r.t. programming / technical content which takes a lot of effort to put together, only to find that udemy forces you to list it at 10, 20$ at 70, 80% 'discounts'.

Don't want to re-hash but here are a few links....

Less than 24 Hours on Udemy as an Instructor and I Am Close to Leaving: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/less-than-24-hours-on-udemy-as-an-instructor-and-i-am-close-to-leaving

Why I stopped selling courses on udemy - The Udemy Pyramid Scheme: http://osherove.com/blog/2014/5/7/why-i-stopped-selling-courses-on-udemy.html

My Revenue Increased 300% After Leaving Udemy: http://www.courseminded.com/why-i-left-udemy/

Why I Won’t Be Releasing More Courses On Udemy, And Neither Should You: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-wont-releasing-more-courses-udemy-neither-should-mike-stemple-/

I'm all for being frugal, but from my few interactions with Nick's blog, he appears to like to nickel and dime almost everything (building his own standup desk[0], cheap linux laptop[1]), so the Amazon Basics keyboard (and him loving it) is no surprise.

IIRC he also has a course where he teaches you to build a SaaS app with flask, but you don't build it from scratch - he starts with a fully built app and walks you through it/has you implement parts of it. It's a project he used for clients, and instead of investing time to reimplement it from scratch he just made a course based on the existing app (which is fine and better than no course, but an example of his frugality)

[0] https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/build-a-home-made-standing-desk-for-50-dollars-in-10-easy-steps

[1] https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos

>The thing that I don’t enjoy is when people ask me if they should drop out of school or university to ‘start their own business’

Amazingly enough, it's not a binary decision. You can stay in school and start your own company. In fact, your school may even have an incubator program to help you. Being is school is probably one of the best times to start a company since you have free o cheap access to many resources that are expensive outside of school, and you have fallback when your first few ventures fail.

With that in mind, I'm always amused at the subset of programmers who rail against degrees. The most recent example I found was this: http://nickjanetakis.com/, where the author thinks a degree is a fancy piece of paper. A degree in computer science or software engineering can only help you in your career, and it probably has one of the best ROIs for any degree program.

Check out GalliumOS. One of the best, Chrome specific, distros around. The question on hardware comes down to what you want. Many of the newest releases of ChromeBooks do not have removable media (M.2 form factor). So, choose wisely up front: hardware that is supported by current releases and storage and RAM suitable to your needs. The latest CB I have is a Toshiba Chromebook 2 with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. That model has a removable M.2 and so mine has an upgraded 128GB of storage. It has received app support for ChromeOS and also runs Gallium with full support. You can dual boot these machines easily, which is how mine is setup.

Nick Janetakis had a nice write-up on setting it up from back when the machine was newer, but to give you an idea:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY.

Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company?

(Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.).

Edit: If you're interested, my site is https://nickjanetakis.com.

If you sign up anywhere on the site, you'll get notified when I release content related to starting your own business / building up your brand as a software developer.

I recommend filling out the form at https://nickjanetakis.com/learn-in/2017, because you can include what you want to learn most about which helps me figure out what I should start writing about first.