adrianhoward

That problem, at least, seems to have improved. I backed up ~250GB a couple of months back and while I don't recall the exact time - might have been several days - it was certainly well under a month.

https://vimeo.com/79866979

along with his talk on Programmer Anarchy which is more about the resulting team / working patterns

https://vimeo.com/79866978

It's moved playing with much finer-grained service architectures way up my to to list.

Really it's just inertia. We were using git before repositoryhosting, github, etc. were around - and what we have works fine, is backed up, etc. Changing it isn't worth the pain involved.

* Skype / Facetime for videoconferencing

* Misc. chat apps

* Dropbox / Google Drive for file sharing

* Some git repos on a VPS box for source control

* Google calendar for calendars

* pinboard.in for link sharing (not perfect, but does the job)

* trello for project / business management

* Google Docs - for pairing on writing documents

* CrashPlan - for backups

* Office 365 - for dealing with MS docs from other people. LibreOffice just doesn't seem to cut it enough unfortunately when it comes to document exchange.

So the question becomes - what is the best for the majority. What makes a useful default.

Over the years doing usability tests I've seen far more complaints about text being too small, along with no complaints but obvious problems (watching people move their head closer to the screen, etc.).

Putting that together with the fact that almost nobody in the "real world" knows how to zoom in or out. That there are lots and lots of people whose eyesight is not even close 20/20. That as age your pupil size decreases and you just get less light into the eye (see http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/EHSL-Moran-Ne... for example). That a bunch of research work on font size and legibility has been done (see the sources on http://guidelines.usability.gov/guidelines/113 for example.)... and I'd rather err on the size of slightly too large than slightly too small.

Again and again I come across designs put together by a designer in their twenties with 20/20 or better vision that just fails miserably when used by "normal" people.

And it will certainly not please everybody. No design pleases everybody. There's a huge amount of non-utilitarian stuff around how people react to designs. Just having things be different from "normal" can cause folk to react badly against something.

I sometimes wonder if the approach some developers have to typography is driven from us spending so much time looking at code full of of long lines where getting the most text possible on the page is utilitarian in ways unrelated to just reading from top-to-bottom.

The two should also not be opposites. There should be room for commercial open-source typography.

If it isn't the typography world is going to be poorer - coz designing good fonts is a hard, skilled, time consuming task and not everybody has the time and inclination to do it for free.

(Otherwise we're going to see more things like the recent non-OSS fork of Merriweather for example http://ebensorkin.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/the-pro-merriweat...)

If it was easy to guess the next big thing everybody would do it ;-) A 5-10 year horizon is a very long time in computing years. Look back ten years. How many people were accurately guessing the current environment? How many of the big-things now even existed ten years ago?

When I look back at my career I can't point to a single instance of seeing the next-big-thing.

I can point to lots of great things that have happened because I'm continually poking at new ideas, new processes and new bits of tech. So I'm ready to take advantage when one of those does become the next-big-thing.

So yeah. Take a look at JavaScript and the node.js world. Or robotics. Or architecture as code - or whatever. But for god's sake don't bet your career on it in five years time. Explore lots of things. Find stuff you're good at and enjoy. Be ready for when one of those starts turning into the next big thing.

Almost certainly a sign that you're not the target market for basecamp. They do a lot of testing on their landing pages (see http://signalvnoise.com/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-test... for example.)

You also need to look at when basecamp & campfire were first released. They were significantly better in comparison to the competition at the time. And while basecamp doesn't personally fit with how I run and manage projects, I know a lot of people who are very happy with it. It fits in with how a lot of companies (many of them not "technical" companies) run their projects. For a certain kind of business it's a very good product.

"Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself"

A company that's not good at marketing and sales doesn't stay a company - no matter how good the products are ;-)

Just not true in my experience. I spend most of my time outside the valley/VC world. Seems to be common among twenty-something dev types everywhere. I've not noticed any change for the worse over the last twenty years (although now I'm in my forties I'm seeing more of the disadvantages of ageism ;-)

There is no time limit on getting your shit together. Seriously.

Please don't buy into the valley hype of everybody-is-a-success-in-their-twenties. It's bullshit.

> So, I'm interested to see the discussion about what those of us who are life long hackers (with a ton of varied experiences) can do besides keep writing code or moving into people management.

Considering what you said about liking prototyping, product strategy, etc. you might want to consider looking at adding some UX-ish skills to your skill set. There's a lot of overlap in goal, if not necessarily technique, and from my perspective it's even harder to find good UX folk than it is good developers at the moment.

Also - pretty much any consulting or team lead job is - at some level - people management. Don't mix up people management skills with organisational hierarchy or "being the boss" or telling people what to do.

I'd imagine that if you go chat to your uncle about his consulting work he'll tell you that large chunks of it aren't figuring out what to do - but working with people to make sure that it gets done. Management is all about helping groups of people do stuff effectively together. It's hard to think of jobs that don't involve people management of one sort or the other.

* 100% remote working is rare

* Flexitime around core hours is relatively common

* Remote working from the start is very rare. Most employers want you on site to absorb the company culture and gel with the team before they would consider remote working. You need to show that you're effective and productive first.

* Companies measuring outcomes rather than effort - non-existent outside of the smaller startups.

If you want remote work and outcome based companies then currently you need to be looking to the smaller more startup-ish organisations. Which has associated impact on risk and salary. Or you need to get into a suitable position within the organisation to help make the change to more remote/outcome based work yourself.

A few things to consider from the employer's side:

* If you and the employer are in different countries it can add a considerable administration burden on the employer. In many cases they won't have the skills in-house so you are asking them to acquire a specialised set of HR skills and knowledge for one hire. This is a tough sell unless you have the answers to that problem to hand.

* Something you notice as an employer is that people often mistake their personal productivity with the team productivity. There is quite a lot of evidence that distributed teams are less productive than co-located ones (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 - any research based counter examples very welcome!). You need to have a good argument that remote working will pay off for them.

* Running distributed teams well takes effort and skill. You need to adopt new tools, new structures, take more effort on things that "naturally" happen when folk are co-located. Unless a company already has this in place it's a lot of effort to make for a single new hire.

Then I had a to-read shelf.

and then... and then...

Ended up with about two and a half 6 foot bookshelves full of stuff I hadn't read. Which is currently sitting in storage.

For the last few years I've had the rule that I don't buy a book until the point that I'm going to start reading it. Which the world of digital books has obviously made a lot easier.

Made my life simpler - I'd recommend it ;-)

For editing: Sublime Text on my netbooks/macbooks. Editorial on the iPad. WriteRoom on the iPhone.

Works for me ;-)

I'm interested that some of those seem more social than how I got into coding. I was the cliche fat-nerdy kid who spent many, many hours with the computer rather than interacting with humans ;-)

It's one of the things I noticed from the MySpace folk - they were very much more oriented towards sharing/showing their stuff with others.

I'm interested coz I'm involved with a new community site and think about different ways to grow the audience.

I'd be interested in understanding what pushed you in that direction. It would seem like it might slow down growth?

For example - a few years back I saw several young folk move over into coding by poking away at their MySpace pages to make them do "cool" things. For those people it seemed to be the same sort of starting point as the '10 PRINT "HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10;' type stuff did for mine.

"After tabulating all the major component costs (plus another $99.99 US for Windows 8 Pro), we are at a total of around $11,530.54 US using today’s prices at retailers that actually stock the hardware. I’m not afraid to admit that compared to the asking price of $9,599 US, the new Mac Pro seems like one heckuva deal for these components."

and

"You simply can’t build a smaller form factor PC that matches the Mac Pro today"

????

SPIN has an explicit focus on understanding the customer and their problems before selling solutions that's well aligned with the customer development / lean startup stuff that folk here will be more familiar with.

Can't speak for the poster - but this is something I've seen a lot in the enterprise. I think it's a more common reaction with larger organisations because, due to their size, they tend to silo and specialise work more. So you see this pattern:

* You find $solution to make X better

* You try and sell $solution for X into $company - who refer you to the X department that does nothing else but focus on X

* Since $solution is very disruptive for department X - it tends to get rejected.

This might not just be because department X is thinking "I'll be needed less" - but it's very often a component of it.

In these situations it's often better to approach the head of department X, or the person in charge of the head of department X. They often can see the value more easily since they're more invested in results that the way things are done currently.

A cogent explanation about how the technology behind a multi-billion pound industry affects pricing, distribution & product types - and how it means that certain market segments aren't served well… seems pretty darn on-topic to me ;)

If anybody has links to research (rather than anecdote) around the topic I'd love to have additions Especially any that show distributed teams performing to the same levels (or better) than co-located ones. Thanks ;-)