Agree. When we had one kid, I started a business. Looking back, it was totally doable. When we had two kids, I was a solo freelancer, worked a ton, and don't remember any issues. The third one, though, we called him The Crusher. Even though he was as easy as the first two, all three constantly demanded attention, and we were outnumbered. There was no "relaxing with the baby". As they got older, the sheer logistics with school and multiple activities got ridiculous (let's say 3 children x 1 activity each x 2 days/wk (1 practice + 1 game) = 6 afternoons/evenings gone). Expenses suddenly got out of hand (preschool++).
Of course, wife & I always wanted three. I was not going to not have three kids, just so I could spend more time coding. I would never tell anyone who has < 3 kids that they have it easy, but this was a very interesting sub-topic of the OP.
Our company has doubled down on Meteor. We start all greenfield apps in meteor now.
The biggest negative is simply the immaturity of the ecosystem. Everyone has different standards. There are no de facto standard packages (yet). Everything is changing rapidly. What worked well last week may not work well this week. The bleeding edge truly bleeds.
From a pure technology perspective, I'm excited about meteor because (to use a cliché) it shifts the paradigm. I wouldn't compare it to Rails/Ember/Backbone/etc because meteor is full-stack. There is no client/server. There's no ajax. Everything is one codebase. Even though it's built on top of node, it doesn't even feel like node because of the reasons above, and most of meteor is synchronous.
We wrote a couple blog posts about making the jump to meteor. I think the 1st one directly answers your question. The 2nd caused quite a stir here on HN.
Yes, teaching to a test should be easy, and it is easy to your median 15-year-old. The gigantic problem with NCLB - and something I've not seen mentioned in this HN story - is that NCLB is a one-size-fits-all mandate, and there is NOTHING about education in the US or anywhere that is one-size-fits-all. Hundreds of factors influence the raw material (children) that teachers have to work with every day.
Countries like Finland do not try to graduate all of their children in the same way. 43% of Finland's HS graduates graduate from vocational schools (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...). The US has slowly moved further and further away from this type of "tracking" since the 70's. Things like NCLB and the over-valued notion of a college degree has only accelerated this problem. I am not optimistic.
As I was scanning the comments on this post, I was a bit surprised by the all the "This post was too basic. You are clearly an amateur and wasting my time" comments. Well, to those authors, not everyone on HN is an l337 hax0r such as yourselves.
Yes, the author still has some work to do. Maybe if he spent another couple weeks just on this, he could get response times down. Maybe he should use a reverse proxy or maybe he shouldn't. As with most problems of this type, the answer is, it depends.
To a young programmer with a few years experience who may be working on his/her first high traffice website, I thought the blog post was fantastically written. It was clear, concise, explained well the low-hanging fruit of optimization, explained the difference between performance and throughput, and decisions-making/tradeoffs made when preparing for a traffic spike. Well done.
Re: competition. When I mean work their way out, I mean retirement. Ineffective teachers will retire, and with higher pay, the increased number of applicants for teaching positions will raise the bar for new teachers. In the article, it said like 6000 applicants applied for 600 spots. That's the kind of ratios we need in the US.
This is the key takeaway for me from the article (and also supports my own beliefs). If teachers in the US started earning like doctors and lawyers ($100K-$200K), then many of our education problems would go away. Why? You'd start retaining good teachers, and attracting new, good teachers. Then these folks would continue to solve education problems. You'd be amazed at what highly paid, motivated professionals can accomplish. But low-paid teachers, no matter how dedicated, get burnt out a few years into a career. Bad teachers would eventually work their way out, due to increased competition. (Read the article about how applications shot up.) Some of the money (thought not all) for higher salaries is in education, but it's just not being spent in the right places.
The 2nd interesting point I took away is the ability grouping. Not grouping by ability works for young children, say K-6. But once older, the gap is too much for a unified curriculum. Taking this concept further out, Americans need more vocational high schools, like Finland. College is overvalued in this country, and a large segment of high school students are being misled by the college myth.
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