Yes, this definitely needs at least a joke on the homepage. You have space on the right side. You could have a few jokes that are shown randomly on page load. That would be nice.
I think it is the acoustic equivalent to the Clippy effect: Human voices tend to take up a substantial portion of our mental bandwidth, because it is not just a sound our brain has to recognize, but then it has to go and actually understand the words being said or sung.
Instrumental music tends to have - at least on me - the opposite effect, it occupies the parts of my mind that otherwise might distract me, leaving the parts doing the hard work alone.
The trick is to actually use it. If you auto complete then your coding should be typing 2-3 characters, hit enter, 2-3 characters, enter and so on. It should feel like you're entering hotkeys not typing.
Only real typing should be defining variables and methods.
Your coding speed can go way up depending on how good the autocomplete is.
I've been freelancing on the web for a few years now and I agree about the $100/hr rate being ridiculous, at least for freelancing on the Internet.
Keep these 2 things in mind:
1) Not all clients are from the US on freelancing websites!
2) Clients are on there because they want a cheaper rate!
Now I'm not telling anyone to work for cheap. $50-60/hr is perfectly achievable. Just remember to start low and buildup on sites like oDesk/Elance.
Another route you might try is http://www.toptal.com/. They only hire the very best developers, and their interviews/tests reflect that. It's worth nothing that even they will advise you that $100/hr is a rather expensive rate for someone outside the US.
This is great!
XSS is one of the hardest things to get right when it comes to security. I'll be sure to complete all the challenges, because I'm working on a product that could use some good HTML sanitizing.
