Health care is generally included on top of salary in the US, so Canadian health care wouldn't be a consideration for engineers working at established companies.
Even significant health costs per month are ignored in a corporate environment in the US, though small startups may be different. For entrepreneurs, health care costs would matter before the company was large enough to have figured out benefits.
Any startup employees\founders willing to comment on how health insurance is generally handled at US startups?
You're probably right at the lower-end of the income spectrum, but any non-joke, non-freelance software development job in the US will include health insurance on top of the quoted salary at little or no cost to the employee.
I have a chronic health condition that needs some fairly expensive drugs and relatively frequent doctor visits and procedures. My total out of pocket healthcare expenses are less than $500 per year.
Except, before the ACA they could refuse to take you on because of "pre-existing conditions". I know several people who did not switch away from jobs they hated because they risked losing health care. And freelancers, even if they commanded high salaries, also had problems getting reasonable insurance.
I'm up-to-date as of 2011, I'm sure things have (and still are) radically changing - but the health insurance situation in the US was a horrible mess until recently - Everything worked fine until the day it didn't, and then you were possibly shut out of healthcare.
HIPAA in 1996 limited the ability of insurance plans to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. As long as you didn't have a gap of more than 63 days with no insurance coverage, they couldn't deny you coverage.
Fair point. So it is probably incompatible with workers who have their own families. And probably more 23 year old hackers are unattached than 35 year old ones.
Moai is opensource, lower-level engine that appeals more to those that want full control and customization. Tooling is mostly "bring your own editor/ide" (Intellij has a good Lua plugin[1] and there's also Zen Braine studio[2]). Personally, I would rather use it over Corona, but those aspects are appealing to me, but could be off-putting to others. You'll be looking through the Doxygen documentation and perhaps even the C++ source at times to figure things out in Moai. The plus side is much of the design/best practices of Corona Game Examples (or any other Lua Game framework, like LÖVE) can be used to model your Moai development, omitting the API differences.
Corona is more for those that want a high level game engine and all the tools for it built in as well as more beginner friendly (larger community, documentation, ease of use). The drawbacks are limitations from the source being closed and in the past there were performance issues for Android/iOS, but I have not tried Corona lately so it may have improved in that area.
I would recommend against it. They become a real pain down the road.
I wish I had something to suggest as a replacement. We're still trying to figure that one out ourselves. We just know we won't use submodules again. For now, we're manually managing disjoint repositories.
The replacement is definitely the article's first suggestion: Cocoapods. Cocoapods is awesome and is rapidly being adopted by major repositories like AFNetworking, Kiwi, TTTAttributedLabel, MagicalRecord, and more: http://www.cocoacontrols.com/cocoapods
It has been super easy compared to git submodules.
The first thing you should do is fork the repository and set up a remote for pulling in upstream changes.
There are a lot of useful libraries out there, but I find I occasionally need to make changes. Sometimes there are bugs; sometimes the maintainer has lost interest. I need to be able to pick up the slack when that happens.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/12/20/iraq-scores-hordes-of...