Caillebotte

20% coding is very sad. I hate to think how many great minds are being wasted this way. After starting work at a startup, I feel more fulfilled in my daily life. I can easily say I spend around 80-90% of my time coding and feel I contribute much more than I ever did at any of these jobs.

I agree. This article is a case for an alt-economy more than giving evidence of the decline of Silicon Valley.

Don't build rocket fuel in your house.

Haskell is fantastic. In fact, it is by far my favorite language. Strict types and functional programming come together in a perfect union. Monads are very similar to JavaScript callbacks, actually. After extensive use of the language, I finally decided to give it up for 2 reasons. 1) Stack and package management. Specifically, after building many websites with Haskell's "supposedly" production ready framework, Yesod. After an upgrade, every site I made completely broke and there was almost no documentation on any version changes for this framework. Which leads me into complaint 2) Lack of good documentation. I'm not trying to take sides on the debate of self documenting code, however, when using higher level libraries, it is completely infeasible to rely on reading source code to determine what a function does. Haskell programmers believe that because of such strict typing, the code should speak for itself. Unfortunately, the real side effect of this is you end up coding trying to match up your types instead of focusing on your goal at hand.

Back in my high school days, I made a beautiful damascus blade from 5160 leaf springs and 1095. After having worked in the labs at https://www.scotforge.com/, it is apparent damascus has very little large scale use due to weak tensile strengths(which of course depends on the forging process). However, in personal, small scale use, I've noticed my damascus blade has withstood much more than say, a pure 1095 blade could endure. Essentially, the higher the carbon the more brittle the blade despite the heat treatment process. Damascus in a small blade seemed to yield properties of each steel involved without using a costly alloy. It is very difficult to combine high carbon steels with stainless steels due to the large difference in heat treatment processes, as stainless steels are very often air hardened, and carbon steels are hardened in a brine or oil solution.

Yes, I agree they are helping people. But who are they helping? They don't seem to be helping the little people like that Tanzanian hospital the way the developers did who found a free software solution. It seems we weaponize situations of desperate need in order to accomplish our own means. If these companies truly cared for the people they are helping, they wouldn't even bother with the PR side of it at all. Their help certainly makes a huge difference, I agree, but intention is everything, and if they intend to aid their own purposes, that is what will see the most benefit from their efforts.

In my CS education, very very little of what I learned was directly applicable to the outside world. My school did not offer classes teaching languages and frameworks. That was left up to us in our free time. Much of what I did learn in school was mostly the math and theories of CS, and I am so glad that I have that experience. I believe it sets you apart and opens far more doors than many realize.

Glad to see ZFS adoption increasing. It is such a great filesystem and is one of the main reasons my home servers run FreeBSD.