PixelPusher

And where were people like you several years ago when the laws were signed that allow the government to tap into network lines?

A hero and their army are useless when they're late to the war.

I don't honor traitors, but go ahead and worship him all you want.

Are you serious? You can question everything you want as an ordinary citizen. The moment you sign a contract, specially for the military, you agree to keep your word.

So, right, how dare the government hold someone to their word? You're basically advocating lying and not honoring your promises.

BTW - I basically make a living honoring promises and contracts, otherwise we wouldn't have customers ;)

Bottom line, he's a traitor. Beyond that, most of the laws that helped start this were set into effect years ago. Where were the people crying then?

Most people complain about having their privacy taken away when using free online services. All I see are a bunch of ignorant loud mouths who got angry too late.

No way, I don't vote for traitors. All his US supporters are a bunch of Benedict Arnolds.

BTW, just voted for Miley. She definitely made my year.

Go anywhere outside of the US and Europe and they would laugh at you. Our culture (hispanic) takes it as a sign of weakness and petty complaints. Most people are too worried trying to feed themselves or their families to even think about being depressed. Furthermore, with the little money they have they tend to go to doctors for diseases that directly affect their bodies or ability to earn.

Agreed, I actually had some trouble with this sentence:

"Science — psychology in particular..."

Psychology, in itself, is not a science. This diminishes any of his further arguments and not being evidence based.

PS. Sorry was meant for parent comment.

We came across this issue as well, we'd been wasting too much time setting up Postgres. RDS seemed liked a good choice, except that MySQL is just that much worse than Postgres. We had just used things like concurrent indexes.

We ended up going with Heroku's hosted Postgres solution. It costs the exact same we were spending w/ two High CPU instances w/ provisioned IOPS volumes. Now we get fully managed, same price, and all the features of Postgres.

We still host our full application on AWS, the only thing is that we have a managed database. While Postgres makes it easy to setup replication and what not, AWS hardware just sucks. It takes time to properly tune it.

Seems stupid and pretentious. Furthermore, the market is so hot that I can reach whoever is employing directly. Convincing them to pay more because they don't have to spend anything on recruiters or silly agents.

No reason someone else should make money for me finding a job.

First, an office less world is a dream right now. If you plan to be hyper-competitive, there's no substitution to 'water-cooler' talk. Technology is nowhere near being able to reproduce that.

Second, why would they put the picture of a communist leader who used to shoot defectors and kill artists? Why is he any sort of hero?

Super sweet, good luck. I personally got started in High School and would have loved more advanced classes.

The issue was that they bundled people together into the same computer class. We used to have people who didn't even know how to turn on a computer, much less make a Pascal game.

Good luck!

What is there to explain? As a software developer, experience matters.

If you're building disposable demos, you probably have more problems than building software.

Absolutely agree, and I personally use this as a potential red flag for new people we hire.

Legacy systems have gone through so many fixes and shifts that it's almost impossible to recreate them without deep understanding of the business demands it meets.

The business part, I would say, is critical to being able to maintain (or re-write) a project.

Yeah, Chrome has been doing this for a while. It has actually been pretty annoying that FireFox wasn't doing so.

My main dev environment is FireFox and i hate it when things work for FF but not Chrome.

Thinking about it, I'm sure they can be just as good. Regardless of age. I would guess it's like anything else. Constant exposure and practicing will breed excellence. I would just be scared of all the mistakes they haven't made yet.

It's funny you mention Brian Wong, his company is a competitor of the company i work for. He's a smart guy, from what i can tell, but he would actually be one of the examples i'd use to cite lack of experience.

In software development, lack of experience can be a really big issue. For example, with lack of experience you may choose core piece of technology based on hype. coughmongodb and kiipcough

But, I digress, thanks for the article. Learned a bit about the Canadian start up eco-system.

Not to be mean, but the author looks really young.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I find it really hard to take advice from such young people. My personal take is that they're bypassing a lot of the experience it takes to make a well rounded business person.

I personally feel like a douche trying to give advice to other people, particularly people older than me.

Thank God I've never HAD to do a complete re-write of anything.

What the author describes sounds like a complete nightmare.

On the projects I've worked on, I would like to think that a rewrite will not be needed.

If it does, it will be because we've now understood the problem space so well that we can start from scratch and avoid all the 'pivots' that happened in the original code base.

Riak has been working really well for us at PaeDae. Thanks for such a great product! Can't wait what else is coming?

If i had a feature request, it would be bulk data insert kind of how Redis does it.

I'm a 'ghetto' kid. Grew up in LA and El Salvador.

The reason I haven't done a startup is because i simply don't have the monetary support. I have to pay for my mom and family, pay rent, etc. We don't have the privilege of a circle of people with money.

Our parents couldn't afford to send us to college, in fact it's better for them that we start working as early as possible. Our past generations weren't scientists, lawyers, etc. They were immigrants, mostly farm and home workers. So, we're one of the first generations to even have the opportunity to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.

The author is right, and a lot of people can't relate or even think about those types of problems.

But, the problems he listed are still pretty dear in our hearts and perhaps the next few generations will tackle it.

An average web developer in no way can compare to a lawyer or a doctor.

First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.

How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?

Average web developers are not that special. However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.

Asking for telecommuting, equity, and time to work on other projects is ridiculous. I've gotten these requests from developers who have only done basic Rails projects.

Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor? I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.

The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it. You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.

Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.

That's great, I don't expect an academic explanation but just having heard of it is pretty good. That question by itself is not a deal breaker. An 'engineer' should at least know about things like data structures or just anything beyond Rails. Most interesting problems require more than knowing how to create CRUD apps.

Well now you're arguing market value not entitlement, which I didn't say it was a bad thing.

If you're a Rails dev, yeah you're valuable and you should be getting paid that much.

However, you still have a lot to learn, and if you're asking for telecommuting and you don't even know what a thread is. That's entitlement, because you think that just because you know Rails, anyone will hire you and that you're 'good enough' to work from home.

Developers we'd want to hire don't just know Rails.

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it.

Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it.

Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

That's why i said it's a good thing. It bumps up the base developer salary and makes experienced developers even more valuable. At least those who are able to properly market themselves as such.

Honestly, I'd more likely work w/ someone like you and teach them Rails than the opposite. MVC frameworks are very similar and a good developer should be able to switch easily.

I suspect that employers who only look for Rails developers are hurting themselves.

We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else.

Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares.

This is good though, because it makes people who know those things that much more valuable as well they should be.

Why would listen to these silly points, he doesn't produce anything himself. He is no nerd and has no business judging other nerds.

He's an investor who's gotten lucky and been around smart people.

He's nothing special and I would never take any of his points seriously.

I've had a few exchanges w/ him via email and he just quotes silly sayings and has no real substance in him.

I haven't used Go yet, but love Erlang.

Honestly can't imagine a better way to build fault tolerant applications without the help of a supervision tree, errors that bubble up, and fast process restarts.

Would love to try out Scala or Go though, but Erlang has served me well so far. Not sure what they offer that's similar to OTP.

Awesome selling point.

There are things that are missing that are nice about Riak. Mainly libraries, map reduce, 2i, and solr-like text search.

This project definitely interesting for what it is though.

Ah yeah, I had to read it a second time to realize what you meant. That's true, that it's a bad example and doesn't make much sense.

I think what they meant to say was that they parallelized the image processing mechanism of the application as a whole.