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dpritchetton Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

Ruby is not a hypertext preprocessor. You don't have a simple web server and a templating language in-scope unless you find them and set them up.

dpritchetton Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

There's nothing wrong with professionals building tools for other professionals. PHP surely requires less activation energy for a tiny project or a new developer, but that doesn't mean Rails et al aren't providing useful options for full-timers.

dpritchetton Overrun With Messaging Apps

Google killed Talk (XMPP), replaced it with hangouts, and is suddenly offering to replace my SMS app and send them all through hangouts. I get that this works as a direct competitor to Messages, but I'd really rather just see Jabber or something like it here.

dpritchetton How to go from Dev to PM

I've never worked at a product company per se, but that is exactly why I aspired to transition into project management back when I worked in corporate IT. Can't blame folks for wanting the money and the power after they see how things are for the Vics in their companies.

dpritchetton How to go from Dev to PM

Article fails to explain why a dev would desire to become a PM. My best guess is an entry point to a management career in shops run by non-devs.

Edit: I imagine that's perfectly natural - when I was in backoffice IT I strongly desired to transition into project management so that I could transition into people management so that I could make meaningful decisions and get credit for them. It's probably the same in product companies except low-level devs will want to manage products so they can manage divisions so they can run big-name tech companies. Currently I'm working as a consulting dev in a small dev consultancy and I don't feel the same pull in that direction that I used to. I think maybe all we really need is to be taken seriously and to have some meaningful work.

dpritchetton Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge

Ruby is an actual programming language that runs on most platforms, what's the problem? Do you have a specific flavor of Real Programming that you prefer?

dpritchetton Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler

Faster deploys means more deploys means more features and fixes and a better chance of survival. See: John Boyd.

dpritchetton Ask HN: I actually need a job now

Bravo. As a longtime enterprise reporting guy turned Rails dev, this resonates deeply with me.

dpritchetton Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Heroku customer here, can verify that dataclips are awesome. Haven't done the math on price vs. performance lately though.

dpritchetton John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations

Right, I don't think the scientific method captures the competitive timing aspects of the wider OODA framework.

dpritchetton How We Built a Lean Startup Inside a 200 Person Company

Plenty of people will spend years developing a product with no customers. I see small-l lean as more of a scientific method - fail fast, iterate rapidly. I'm a big fan of John Boyd's OODA loop so maybe I'm projecting.

dpritchetton Metrics and Hiring

I would imagine that it's hard to separate cause from effect in the case of well-known schools and employment performance. The cumulative benefits of working challenging, rewarding jobs should pile up throughout a career. Naturally folks with an easy-to-sell pedigree are going to have a good shot at securing those jobs.

dpritchetton Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...

You forget how many people get paid to specialize in Excel :)

dpritchetton Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

I didn't mean to imply that Rails was better than Django. I said that nothing beats it! Each offers some conveniences out of the box that the other doesn't. I wouldn't recommend you switch languages just to get Rails over Django or vice versa.

dpritchetton Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

Worse might be Better in the case of Node, though. It's also benefiting from a great package manager. NPM already has 2/3 as many packages as RubyGems and 20% more than PyPI.

dpritchetton Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...

I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now.

Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own game. The real question is whether or not the things that Rails does best will continue to be important in the marketplace.

We've already seen parts of Rails's core competencies carved out by other tools: Erlang/Node/Go enable saner async programming. Backbone/Angular/Ember enable rich web applications. Scala/Clojure/Go/etc. on the "fast compiled backend services" front. Even PHP is keeping pace with the times (Composer, Laravel) just enough to keep its adherents from having a real reason to jump ship.

Ruby and Rails are still pretty much as good as it gets for rapid development of web applications (the backend parts of MVC, anyway), and there's a growing Ruby niche for configuration management (Chef, Puppet, etc).

Personally I find my investment in learning and working with Ruby has been a great way for me to experience a much wider variety of technologies and architectures than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Rails work I've learned tons about AMQP, Postgres, Chef, Backbone, JavaScript, CSS, Ansible, DNS (bind), and more that I just wouldn't have had the same exposure to in a slower-paced development environment.

Your ending line about "still in wide use but not frequently selected for the best new projects" is a bit complicated. Certainly any language stays in wide use once it falls out of fashion and its projects categorically move to the "legacy" phase, but "best new projects" is a bit much. A lot of what we might think of as the 'best' projects are driven by fashion just as much as technical merits.

dpritchetton Introducing Trello Gold

Fog Creek has a github repo at least: https://github.com/fogcreek

I'm totally OK with paying companies to build useful proprietary stuff when they're spinning out a few open source artifacts now and then.

dpritchetton Docker: Git for deployment

I'm really curious what these "don't know linux" devs are doing with Vagrant in their day to day jobs. Do they get one team member who 'knows linux' to set up a Vagrantfile and then force them all to use it?

dpritchetton Docker: Git for deployment

As a dev whose 2010 MBP doesn't do so hot spinning up multiple Vagrants, I've been strongly contemplating Linux for my next laptop just so I can run containers natively.

Docker-on-linux-on-vagrant is a nice compromise though.

dpritchetton On Lisp

Although I'm second-guessing my let example now. Lets are great for assigning names to your building blocks, but I don't really like using them to obscure my processing flow as above. Perhaps this would be a better compromise:

    (defn example [n]
      (let [square #(* % %)
            halve  #(/ % 2.0)
            add3   #(+ % 3)]
        (-> n square halve add3 str)))
    
    > (example 1)
    "3.5"

dpritchetton What would you like to see most in minix? (1991)

Legend has it that Urs Hölzle sorted out their Java problems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle#cite_note-1

dpritchetton On Lisp

Yep, that's what the link in my original post was hoping to demonstrate. I find rolling up a few lets one after the other more natural in some other situations.

dpritchetton On Lisp

Here's a link to an example of that coping strategy from some bad Clojure I wrote last night [1]. I sometimes use an accumulation of lets for a similar effect, but only when describing simpler transformations.

The lets might look like so (warning- silly example):

    (defn n-squared-over-two-plus-three-as-str [n]
      (let [squared (* n n)
            halved  (/ squared 2.0)
            added   (+ halved 3)]
        (str added)))
     
    > (n-squared-over-two-plus-three-as-str 1)
    "3.5"

Sure, I could've just done this as a deeply-nested structure:

    > ((fn [n] (str (+ 3 (#(/ % 2.0) (* n n))))) 1)
    "3.5"

... but it's harder to read, debug, and reason about. You wouldn't do that in a non-functional language either! I suppose the tolerance for deep nesting is different for different programmers.

[1] https://github.com/dpritchett/cloball/blob/62300d31666ab1261...

dpritchetton Why You Don't A/B Test, and How You Can Start This August

Accessibility, I'd guess. Same reason "lift heavy three times a week" is a perfectly good training recommendation for 90% of the U.S.

dpritchetton Work for Pie is Shutting Down

Github helps technical managers get a feel for an unknown candidate. This helps when capturing arbitrage opportunities in the talent market. Your business is built on selling known candidates at a premium, or at least using the social signals of big name degrees and employers. Someone like daeken has enough of a track record to not even need those.

dpritchetton Reinvented in His 60s, After 26 Jobless Months

I would think leaving the field happens more than management promotions. Otherwise we'd have more managers than engineers.

dpritchetton How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

You'd think they'd look for cultural fit, but instead they're looking for "growth in terms of the size and importance of the teams the person has been assigned". Feels bigco-oriented to me.

dpritchetton Ask HN: How do you apply for a tech job?

Ask a question about the interviewer's workday! A few years back I asked a stakeholder in a one-on-one interview to describe some of the issues he was hoping I could help with. Soon enough we wound up in his office going over his existing systems while I extemporized some solutions. Got the job, too.

dpritchetton My self-published book on being a great developer

And the benefit has to be multiplied by the odds I'll ever actually read it after purchase. Ebooks are so tempting!

dpritchetton My self-published book on being a great developer

This blurb needs to be on the landing page!