I had trouble voting as I have both managed and unmanaged servers. I keep a Digital Ocean server around for small things such as hosting a web service that generates license keys for products I sell. I host my web site using SquareSpace. I use Xojo Cloud for hosting Xojo web apps, although I can also run those on Digital Ocean myself when I want to.

Xojo fits the bill. A couple cool features: Native, cross-platform desktop apps from a single project file Event Handling Animal example using events Create a new class called Animal. Add to it a Speak method that returns String with this code: Return SpeakSound Now add to the Animal class an Event Definition called SpeakSound and set its return value to String. Next, create a subclass of Animal, called Cat. Click on the button “+” button on the toolbar and select “Add Event Handler”. In the dialog, you will see the SpeakSound event handler. Select and and press OK. The code for this event handler is: Return "Meow!" Create another subclass of Animal, called Dog, and also add the SpeakSound event handler with this code: Return "Woof!" To test this, create a button on a window. In the Action event of the button add code to create an array of Animals: Dim animals() As Animal animals.Append( New Cat) animals.Append( New Dog) For Each a As Animal In animals MsgBox(a.Speak) Next When you run this code, you will see “Meow!” and then “Woof!”.

Networking is a huge benefit, especially if you don't work in a large company with lots of other developers. Sure, the conference and travel might cost a lot but many companies have budgets for this and it does force you to spend the time learning things. If you try to watch a stream or videos while at your regular job, you either probably will never get around to it or you won't give it your full attention. And for developers it can be a great opportunity if you submit to be a speaker at a conference. It really increases your credibility and speaking effectively in front of a group is a great skill to have.

WeWorkRemotely.com has lots of stuff.

Old history: Atari 800XL OS GEM/TOS (Atari ST) Windows 3.1 OS/2 Warp Windows NT 4 Windows 2000 Windows XP As a cross-platform developer , these days I use all the operating systems. Windows 10, macOS, Linux (primarily Mint and Raspbian), iOS, a little Android.

Six spaces does seem excessive, but really your work should have coding standards for this sort of thing for everyone to use. If you use 6 and a co-worker uses 2 that is a pain. Agree on standards, write them down and have everyone use them. It doesn't even really matter what they are specifically.

I've been a part of 2 major rewrites and in both cases it was because of a significant technological change. The first was moving a DOS app to Windows. The second was moving a desktop-based VB solution to a web-based .NET solution. In your situation, since it sounds like you're not changing technology then perhaps you are really talking about some serious "refactoring". With careful planning I suspect you can figure out a way to make the changes a little bit at a time without having to get management to support a "rewrite". In conversations with management instead go with terms like "refactoring", "optimization", "performance improvements", "better maintainability", etc and work to get time scheduled into the normal project cycle for these things.

IDEs are great! Being a developer is about creating and shipping software. Not being an elitist about the tools you use. Sure, I could hand-code stuff using plain text editors if I wanted to, but that is slow and unproductive which is why I prefer IDEs such as Xojo (or even PowerBuilder back in the day).

A typo in code suggests a lack of attention to detail, something that is pretty important when writing code. Typos happen, but if you can't be bothered to fix them or don't even notice them, then why should I trust the code you've written?

I was self-taught and then went to university for CS. I think a blend like this was helpful because it keeps me grounded in practicality. I've often found that many that only learned coding through CS tend to not really like coding and are very academic. To me this means they are not good at getting stuff done. Being self-taught is great because it demonstrates some major motivations. But it also means you could be doing things the wrong or inefficient way as they are some techniques taught in CS that are certainly useful. So even if you are self-taught take the time to get at least some CS background. I think it will also help.