So let's just allow people to lie and promote violence or even committing crimes 'cuz there's an ammendment that protects that.
BTW does anyone in Amerikka even understand what the heck "ammending" even means...?
If it's not working, change it. Not that I expect people who think Texas' electricity bills aren't fucked up to understand that "maaaaybe you're not actually right"...
But yeah. To be plain, maybe you're wrong. Probably. Most likely.
Front-end now has an "ecosystem". Now everyone loves Babel and EcmaScriot 6 and JS is starting to look a lot like Java shit, and there are build tools every-fucking-where. If Front-End devs had JS as their Ruby, build tools are the shitty assets pipeline with the damned turbolinks. They promise awesome, they get in your way all the time.
Pro-tip: Decide on an MVP, then research frameworks and Libraries. I suggest taking a look at Progressive Web Apps, the deciding on React, Angular or Vue, then deciding on some material design library/UI Kit.
Remember that, if you use Google's repo to start a Progressive Web App (Or pretty much any boilerplate nowadays), it will use Gulp (Or Grunt or Bower or whatever). Anything you wanna plug, first thing to do is integrating with it. If it uses Babel, check that you can import it and that it doesn't depend on Globals, and write everything in ES6. If it doesn't, your code may be messier but you won't hate your life as much, so rejoice. Integrating everything early and properly will save you many hours, especially if you use ES6/Babel.
For the back-end, NodeJS is great but, as with front-end, a mess, Elixir feels like Ruby from the future (And Phoenix is to Elixir what Rails is to Ruby), but it's still small, Ruby and Python are still there and pretty solid, and PHP still sucks.
MySQL is still out there but if you're not going the PostgreSQL way then check MariaDB, it's Open Source MySQL being updated by the original MySQL team.
For Deployment and/or managing this shitload of dependencies (NodeJS versions, databases, webservers and whatnot) you may want to check Docker, though it may be overkill if you're not going all the way down the rabbit hole.
Edit: Forgot to add, instead of freelancing jump at some lesser known open source projects. Maintainers will usually welcome your help, and will also help you figure stuff out. Maintainers win, you win, the community wins.
And you probably run circles around a lot of people. If anybody said you were gifted it would be a lie, it's the result of dedication. I've never seen anyone say "I have talent", and I've been to music and computer science colleges. I've seen a lot of people saying that other people have talent though.
But my point is not that everyone faces the same hardships, is just that those hardships or lack thereof are not genetic but acquired, probably mostly during early childhood but I'm not a psychologist so I don't know.
I just think we shouldn't dismiss achievements as a result of just talent (or luck). Luck actually plays a role, as well as many other things (As I said, economic and social situations and a lot more).
We just need to be sceptical of linking stuff to genes, humans are not so simple. There are many other factors at play, and even if we can't change ourselves, we may be able to raise our kids better by considering these subtleties and their possible impact.
Plus those "geniuses" love when people acknowledge their hard work, try talking to them about it. I find the amount of effort some people put into their craft to be staggering.
Not sure what it's called in English, but there's perfect/absolute hearing, in which a person somehow knows the actual frequency of a note.
I know a couple musicians that have it, one of them lost it in an accident, both studied a lot, and most musicians I know, including some of the most successful ones, don't have this.
It's a good point, but empirically not verifiable, musicians train to identify intervals (Even the ones with perfect hearing), and in a similar discussion in class when I studied for a music degree, the only things the class disagreed were the impact of perfect hearing in the likelihood of becoming a musician, and that there may be some innate ability to maintain rhythm. On everything else we were unanimous in believing there is no such thing as talent.
Now you're free to believe differently, still, people that you think have "talent" will mostly be offended and feel that their hard work is not being recognized. Phelps isn't amazing BECAUSE of his body. His body is just a very small part of what makes him awesome, and though maybe a bit less awesome, he could still be awesome with a different body.
And obviously some people have easier or harder times. I am simply more aligned with modern humanist psychology, believing environment is way more relevant than genetics.
This doesn't mean you're at fault for sometimes having a hard time keeping up, this just means that it's most likely not in your genes.
I use Gitlab and the DB issue only affected me in regards to CI, and I believe this is true to anyone that was affected at all.
They did a manual Backup before meddling with stuff so they only lost data from a really small timeframe.
CI downtime, on the other hand, is troublesome. I love using Gitlab CI and it didn't take me more than a few minutes to manually deploy what I had to, but I decided I need most of my CI to be controlled by me.
The end result is a simple refactor of my test and deploy specs to their own rake tasks (Could be Bash scriots or whatever) and I'll have Gitlab run a simple gle command, if it goes down I run the command manually...
Now some eventual downtime is not such a deal breaker anymore, and I continue having private repos and CI (Awesome CI) for even the smallest (And private) projects I work on... Not a bad deal if I do say so myself.
Finding something that applies to both (Or in this case something that works in neither, which makes it even clearer) is not the same as treating both as requiring the same solutions.
Assumes Correlation and Causation, ignores Social and Economic situations of the twins groups, doesn't account for the fact that identical twins tend to share (being geared towards) more experiences due to being perceived almost as a single "being", ignores cultural differences in upbringing of different-gender twins, doesn't account for indirect training (i.e. strategy, memorization, sequential steps etc. are parts of a Chess game), doesn't account for perception of time (Time passes slowly when we don't like what we're doing) and completely ignores training "quality" (Playing chess against newbies is useless as practice, playing against masters is enlightening).
It's ALSO not your "fault" that you do not excel at something. Your experiences ever since you were a baby shaped you, your tastes and pretty much determined your whole life.
Still, there is no talent, ask any great programmer, musician, illustrator or whatever, every single one of them will say he/she was shitty, but loved it, so kept doing it. This doesn't completely discards the possibility of genetic disposition to liking something, but undeniably everyone starts on even ground.
Obviously, being complex areas they are affected by many indirect skills, and the more something is loved, the safer it is to assume the indirect skills involved are also loved or at least liked, indirect skills matter. Clearly fiddling with computers and watching movies that involve technology is not programming, but will make you better at it.
In the end, the best explanation so far is that your tastes are the defining factor. And yes, it can be argued that tastes are genetic, but currently there's not nearly enough data to debunk the standing theory, we need more studies and we need better studies, taking all variables into account and actually monitoring the subjects throughout their lives.
Maybe in 50 years we'll find out where our tastes come from. Not that it actually matters since it's out of our control anyways.
Had to stop reading at "...largely mythical war between science and religion..."
History, countries, continents were shaped by religion persecuting shit. Paganism was burned at the stake, and herbal medicine in European cultures is almost inexistent when compared to Asian and (Native) American cultures. Religion wages war on everything, which is epitomized by the crusades.
Galileo was persecuted because he voiced uncomfortable truths. Much like Einstein and many others, he wasn't the only one who knew those truths. And much like Einstein, he had the passion and the guts to pursue his path and voice his findings.
This is his merit, and calling it Hyperbolic to recognize the worth of someone risking their life for something shows at the very least a very poor understanding of history.
A good way to criticize history would be to focus on the "History is written by the winners" though.
Yep, but nobody ever includes them. Nice stuff to automate, gotta chek if there is already DevOpsy stuff to fix that, and if there isn't, got me a new weekend project...
It is obviously gonna be hosted on GitHub. Oh, the irony...
So I had to install Gems from RubyGems, not that big of a deal, and I had to look them up on RubyGems since Google gives me GitHub first, but that's OK too, but then all the documentation seems to be on.... Github. Except not, it's also on RDoc. (Though RDoc kinda sucks, compared to GitHub...)
Pretty big win imho, Rails got a few more points with that. :D
Building on the other answers, I think it is more awful for pros. Hobbyists don't have deadlines and spend time on computers because of love, not to pay rent.
That said, you do have a point, and you decide what matters to you as a hobbyist (or whatever you decide to call yourself).
I personally like (and need, most of the time) stuff that "just works", so I totally get your point about optimizing and agree with it.
Congratulations on GitLab, I personally use it and love it, and it's awesome to see amazing people like the VLC team considering GitLab.
A suggestion I have is to consider open-sourcing and re-branding EE on a GPL-Like license that also requires projects hosted with it to be open sourced, while specifying that contributions to this version can be re-licensed by GitLab to be used by paying customers (Or re-licensed to MIT and released on CE). This way open source people get it all, and if you want to use it on closed source you pay GitLab.
This also has the benefit of allowing open source developers to work with GPL, and the changing to MIT could even be decided before merging (Sending to either CE on MIT or EE on GPL+GitLabProprietary, according to developer decision).
There's a lot to fix on the OpenSource world, but there are also so many possible ways. Best of luck to the GitLab team, I hope we see more amazing stuff from you (Btw, GitLab CI got a lot better recently, I hope you keep improving it. :D)