brecht

16 年前議論

You can read all you want, but ultimately you have to do it. Get a job at a place where you're part of the backend team, and see how it grows over a few years. You learn a lot of little things that coalesce into a big picture: for example, until you've experienced the 3am phone call (or a week of them!) you never really appreciate the full meaning or importance of "site reliability".

brecht

16 年前議論

Taking a 6 week course in Ruby will only give you enough knowledge to be annoying and dangerous to your tech leads in whatever future business you start. Even beyond that, I'd bet the sort of thing they'd cover in 6 weeks (syntax, hello worlds, basic I/O) would be wasted on someone with managerial aspirations. Find something like a survey of web technologies instead, become conversant in the language without miring yourself with technical details that won't really help you.

brecht

16 年前議論

I thought this was going to be about electronic music :(

brecht

16 年前議論

That's simultaneously quite cool and quite disconcerting.

I wonder if there's any work being done in large "control room" type installations these days? Power plants, NASA... ?

brecht

17 年前議論

I was expecting a view from the block's perspective, looking down. This was a little disappointing, but still quite interesting.

brecht

17 年前議論

Why is this being downvoted? It's an interesting parallel.

brecht

17 年前議論

Why? How? Git was purpose-built for the Linux kernel. Like any DVCS it has a big learning curve, but it's even more complex than Hg -- and for reasons that are largely irrelevant to people not using it for massive distributed open-source projects with thousands of contributors.

I know git has enjoyed a surge of popularity among the web 2.0/3.0 intelligentsia, but honestly, Mercurial is the more suitable DVCS for 99% of the stuff on github.

brecht

17 年前議論

Netbooks are the manifestation of a sort of inverse Moore's law, the race to the bottom in consumer electronics. I don't understand people who say they use these things on a daily basis. Do they have baby hands and eagle-eyed vision? Maybe I've been using Macs for too long, but mashing on a 0.8mm plastic bit for a left click just makes me want to break something. I go from a 15 inch screen to one of those 10 inch jobs and I want to kill myself. For any situation where one may conceivably use a netbook, either an iPhone or a real laptop always seems to be a better choice.

And Jesus H. Christ, this article is exactly the sort of eye-roll-inducing, echo-chamber sycophancy that makes Jeff Atwood such a pain in the ass to read.

  "...this pivotal moment in computing ... I'm talking about unlimited access
  to the complete sum of human knowledge, and free, unfettered communication with 
  anyone on earth ... Netbooks aren't an alternative to notebook computers. They 
  are the new computers."

Gag me. I mean, there's a point in there, probably, somewhere, beneath all the layers of self-important ego-stroking. But Atwood just can't seem to write a persuasive piece without resorting to this Ivory Tower holier-than-thou bullshit. I can't be the only one that thinks this, can I?

brecht

17 年前議論

Are you implying Rand was secretly critical of a selfishness-driven capitalism? If so, that's a pretty radical interpretation of her work, and one that I doubt many objectivists would support...

brecht

17 年前議論

Man, what a great question for a technical interview. Show the candidate the first portion of this list, and ask them to sketch out a program that would generate that list for a given year. If they get it quickly, move on to the other permutations.

brecht

17 年前議論

Your comments reveal a person who's never worked in a sizable programming team for any length of time, be it at a large firm, a large collaborative project, or what-have-you. Which is fine; the article is not directed at the basement hacker, or the fad-du-jour startup slave, or whomever. It's toward the person who's been working long enough to prove themselves capable as a producer, and who's developed a (very common!) ego about their own abilities. Overcoming that ego can be a surprisingly difficult thing to do, if you're reasonably competent. But it's definitely a necessary step to "becoming a better software developer".

brecht

17 年前議論

Your site has to become cool before anyone is going to bother reporting on it. You don't get automatic reporter points just because you feel strongly that you should, or even because you work hard at it. As it stands, your site is Yet Another Portal or News Aggregator or whatever and it's just not a particularly compelling... thing.

brecht

17 年前議論

A lot of the analysis of Wave so far has (stupidly) focused on the web app that Google was showing off, on the whiz-bang HTML5 bullshit that ultimately doesn't much matter. I think it's really important to think of Wave not in terms of the front-end they were showing off, but rather in terms of the underlying protocol that powered it. Google envisions it as a sort of SMTP 2.0, powering most person-to-person communication on the internet; if (and only if) the industry gets behind it unilaterally, I think it has a real chance of success.

The paucity of existing documentation can be forgiven, but only to a point -- it's definitely on Google to make the complex elements of that protocol (and there are many) developer-accessible. As cool as the technology is, it'll wither and die without proper support.

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"Beauty" in code and programming languages

Optimism about Wave and the Wave Protocol

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