That's not a good analogy. The problem isn't an intern writing a line of code that takes out the database (although that does sometimes happen). The problem is a failure to understand a complex software system and creating years of technical debt.
Heck, funding my own competition would be the least of my worries. What's concerning is they have full control over your data, your infrastructure, aspects of your whole business... perhaps they could "accidentally" do something that ruins you. Oops.
Amazon's goal is to devour everything, which means they compete with tons of industries.
Well, this is the way I saw it as a student: the purpose isn't to provide "the right answer," the purpose was to understand the test, give the answer that they wanted, and use school as a springboard to better things. If you treat it as a system to be gamed you don't have to worry about what the truth really is.
I actually was always better at English than I was at math (much better). I even won an NCTE writing award in high school, and found math difficult. But I studied physics in college because I'm someone who can't stand BS and don't like the way English is taught at the college level. The idea of pure, simple truths deeply appeals to me.
But I feel even writing this is heresy. Maybe I'm just being a smug STEM type and I don't appreciate the world of literature. Maybe I just don't get it. But I went into college wanting to understand things, and making a game out of extracting hidden meanings from books just didn't offer anything I was looking for.
I'm assuming you mean you try to give people honest feedback, but people object to it because it's too harsh?
It's completely possible to honest, assertive and kind at the same time. I see this false dichotomy all the time: "be honest and make enemies" or "be silent and watch a project tank." There's a third option: be frank and kind. (And yes, there are environments where no form of honesty, gentle or harsh, is welcome -- smile, put in your 40 hours and try to find employment elsewhere.)
If you're constantly angering people with your honesty, the problem is not with your honesty but with your people skills. You need to cut the pity party and take a hard look at your communication habits.
America copied a lot of ideas from England during the industrial revolution. From my cursory understanding of things it seems like copying technology is how you get up to speed, before you can start really innovating yourself.
I think a lot of the ideas about how China isn't capable of innovation for cultural reasons is frankly rooted in racism. Not long ago they were a developing country, and they are rapidly, rapidly getting up to speed. If you were raised by subsistence farmers, you can rise above that but it's hard to become a technological prodigy.
But there's a whole generation of Chinese people being raised in a modern, prosperous economy, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be capable of the same contributions that Western students will make.
I switched a company's web API with background tasks to a serverless architecture. In some ways it's kind of magical, because it means we just need a few web API boxes and a bunch of services which scale automatically.
However, debugging is a major PITA. If I could go back and do it again, I would be less zealous and only move truly computationally-intensive services to Azure Functions. It turned out one major service I moved to functions could have simply been fixed to use the ORM correctly, and if I had done that it wouldn't have significantly increased the server load.
Also, do not move a task where ordering matters to function fed by a queue.
Just some thoughts from a mid-level programmer who was given keys to the kingdom and re-architect everything.
It's fake work until your web application reaches a point where server loads take your web API down, and endpoints frequently take well over 10 seconds to respond.
Yes, I worked at a place where both of those things were true.
Switching some services out to a service (in this case, Azure functions) saved my company like $10k/mo, too.
Keep in mind if you're the company that can make ads 10% more effective than everyone else, then you're going to be extremely successful. Even if that means going from "horrible" to "less horrible."
Maybe you got an ad for a BMW and you'd never buy a BMW because you're frugal. But maybe it's showing those ads to everyone within your income band, which is several times more effective than showing them to every random site visitor.
We could also eliminate farm technology and bring back all those farm jobs. 99% of us could work the fields again, and there'd never be a jobs shortage again.
> All that said, I of course don't promote saying only hello and then waiting for a reply before proceeding. That's just silly.
Well, that's what the article is arguing against. No one is saying you shouldn't start your question with hello. You should just say, "Hello X, I was wondering..."
Someone needs to write a Slack extension (or whatever the plugins are called) that simply replies to "hi" or "hello" with "Hello! How can I help you?" and hides those opening salvos from you.
This is a writer's blog, not a professional developer. Heck, I'm a professional developer and if someone asked me how they should create their blog, I'd suggest going to Wordpress too.
I know a little about CDNs and statically generated sites, but only through skimming a few articles and reading online comments.
How is a writer supposed to know about the latest trends for serving content to a high number of users -- just to handle rare one-off cases when your blog gets hammered?