FYI, your home page looks pretty messed up in IE9. Not that IE users would be your primary target market I assume. :)
604 karma · joined October 1, 2010
http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/
gaelian.ditchburn at that web based email service starting with "g".
"For those of you who do not yet know me, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Peter Weyland, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to change the world."[0]
Most people on FB are using FB assuming it's a utility something like email, without realising that it is like email, if email had its own agenda. It's really easy to forget that most people in this world do not live/work in the echo chamber that we do. When I talk to them about the issues, sure, at best they might profess to understand or even be concerned at the time of that conversation, but by and large they won't change their behaviour and the conversation will be quickly forgotten.
Never underestimate the indifference with which people can view the inner workings of technology.
0. I see the fact that I find this hard to imagine as a form of "Expert Blindness" or "Knowledge Blindness". If someone has a better or more accepted term for this phenomenon, I'd like to hear it.
In those days, my friends and I used to get into UT quite a lot. Most of the more experienced UT players I watched would use the double-tap of the left/right arrow button to trigger the short sideways leap as a means of rounding a corner (for a better chance of surprising an enemy), or to make it harder for an enemy to keep a bead on them when they were being fired on. I was always surprised at how - to me at least - this simple mechanic made such a difference to how dynamic the combat felt.
Thanks for the tip on Gore-tex, hadn't heard about them.
> What I don't think OA can survive is too-rapid growth. I think it can scale to thousands of employees. I don't think it can tolerate personnel growth at the 100-150%/year levels that VCs want to see.
So the important thing is to ensure that there remains a solid core of staff of an influential enough size that understands the open allocation process/culture in order to successfully orient new comers arriving at a reasonable pace. That's potentially quite an interesting insight, I'll remember that one.
Well I guess you'd have to take that up with Mike as you're really referencing his opinion not mine. In that instance I was neither trying to praise or criticise the kind of company structure that appears to be represented by Valve/GitHub (if "open allocation" better describes this phenomenon then I'll take your word for that). In fact I only mentioned it because it was the context within which my discussion of Atlassian's culture began on the evening in question.
I personally find this open allocation concept quite fascinating and think it potentially holds a lot promise. Most people working in corporate environments today would be lying if they said there wasn't huge room for innovation and efficiency gains at their workplace. To my knowledge however, I am unaware of any situation where an open allocation culture has been successfully retro-fitted to an existing corporate environment (if you know of one, I'd be interested). I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point. But for the sake of illustration, let's say I'd be interested to know how such a culture would work out when applied to an organization consisting of thousands of employees as opposed to dozens or even hundreds.
Obviously no one and no company is perfect and this story is a case in point, but I came away from that conversation with a much higher opinion of Atlassian than I had previously. It certainly seemed to me that Mike was serious about trying to cultivate a good culture at Atlassian and he also seemed like a genuine, no bullshit kind of guy.
I've also happened to have dealings of the professional networking/information exchange kind with one of the staff at Atlassian and was again impressed by how helpful that person was and the way they conducted themselves.
So in my anecdotal but first person experience, I would say that the culture at Atlassian is probably above par when compared to other similarly sized companies.
But all this is not to say I don't have a Plan B if against all reason, Apple was to decide to enrage just about every developer that builds on their platforms... I would sigh somewhat heavily, shake my head in disbelief and then it would be back to Linux with a touch of Windows (and possibly Android) on the side. Not my first preference obviously, but not such a bad thing all in all.
I think it's time for the big tech companies to put their lobbying efforts into overdrive and supplement that with another public awareness campaign across their web properties, modeled on the SOPA/PIPA protest.
Potential hyperbole and the fact that Rushkoff was talking about programming more so than general computer knowledge aside, I still think there's a relevant point there. I personally feel that giving up all pretense of needing to know how my computer works would put me at a far greater disadvantage in the coming years than were I to do the same with my car. My car is very useful yes, but I don't use it to view the world, my country and its politics, my culture, my future, my finances, and make decisions based on those views.
I can still vaguely remember a time, many years ago now where I just couldn't get my head around a garden variety "for" loop. Now I wonder what was so hard to understand about it. Many times over the years since those early "for" loops I have often felt that I wasn't really making any progress at all in grokking this programming thing. I look back now and in fact that was an illusion generated by a localised point of view. In fact I was making progress the whole time, just slowly enough that at times it didn't feel like it.
I probably came at things from a fairly opposite place to you, I started with the web. I started with HTML and CSS and kind of worked backwards. But regardless of where you start, there will always be challenges to your understanding. IMO, one thing that marks a promising developer is the ability to be comfortable with feeling like an idiot while you're learning something new but continuing to persevere, because the need to learn new things happens so often in our relatively young industry. In my experience, few people truly are able to be comfortable with this feeling, but those who are able can surmount amazing obstacles.
So don't get discouraged if it feels like you're not making progress. Stick with it, you will. It just won't seem like it at the time.
As you've experienced, the MVC pattern is still very much in ascendance in the web dev world. I would suggest that you invest in a couple of good books (if available) or lengthy tutorials on the framework of your choice (if available). If neither of these things are available, that may be a sign that you should choose a different framework. :) Don't invest in too many books though, because you'll find they date quite quickly and eventually it will become more efficient to just search for what you need on a case-by-case basis. But to get a good grounding, dropping a bit of coin can be a good thing in the early stages of learning a new technology.
I suspect the "if you’re reading this blog, there’s a pretty good chance that we know each other already" bit is intended to be interpreted as him not thinking that anyone other than those already acquainted with him would care or know about his blog. Self-deprecation is a fairly typical Australian trait, by the way.
Most likely possbilities in my mind: this is all simply a bizarre coincidence, as has already been suggested. Or... well, he is starting a software company apparently, so assumedly he's in our industry, that makes it somewhat more likely that he knows the history of the domain. Maybe he has unwisely decided to try and grab some free attention by taking this domain name knowing full well its history. I hope it's not the latter.
But until then, to me, the people complaining about Rails security sound a lot like the people that complain about Windows security. When you have a product that's used by a whole lot of people, then there's going to be a lot of incentive to find security holes and a whole lot of people using the product in sometimes hard to predict ways. This does not necessarily mean that the product is inherently less secure than alternatives, it just means it's popular.
It's not the only way to do it, but it's one way. I would never have known about Richard K Morgan if a friend of mine hadn't been looking through a brick and mortar library one day, literally judging books by their covers, found one of his books and subsequently recommended it to me. But once I've found a good writer via whatever means, I usually find that you can follow threads from them to other good writers.
> The less time we spend obsessing over our shiny new devices, the more time we’ll have to use them for stuff that’s interesting, useful, important. Because in the end, what’s a smartphone but another tool? Sure, you can build a slightly better hammer — sturdier wood, stronger metal. But the real power comes in how you swing it.
That's an insight that resonates with me. I am one of those people that will shortly be upgrading to the 5S, but from a 3GS. I don't feel the need to upgrade to each and every new shiny thing, but 3GS to 5S is a worthwhile upgrade for me and I look forward to the new phone becoming 'boring' so that I can get on with using it for the day-to-day interesting, useful and important things, both from a user's and developer's point of view.
I also wonder if this article is conflating incremental improvement too closely with stagnation. Surely it is only the natural way of things for every large technological inflection point to be bracketed by periods of incremental improvement, which serve to fuel the next inflection point.
I do agree though that a mix of foods does seem to trump a formula, at least at our current level of understanding. And I can’t say I’d really be willing to make myself a guinea pig in this experiment at this juncture, but I’m still glad people are thinking about this issue and trying new things.
I'm not disregarding what Herman says, he seems knowledgeable. But if you act like a dick, it's less likely that most people will really warm to your advice.
But I'd like to see some actual user testing on whether this kind of progress bar does in fact show a typical user how long they have to wait or allows them to 'Time Travel'. In my own (anecdotal) experience, non-technical users are amazingly blind to small details on screen, sometimes even when they are changing/moving.
> It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble.
I completely agree and I would add that a large part of that bubble - particularly for many military/intelligence folk - is the 'them and us' or perhaps more accurately 'them vs us' paradigm. People in these professions tend to see the world in a very black and white view. In my country at least, some of our intelligence agencies have a long history of being staffed by people with a fairly fundamental religious background. So when this kind of black and white, "them vs us", religious or quasi-religious (and quite likely racist) view is applied to national security, matters of immigration and so on, the result is pretty predictable IMO. Many of these people truly live in a different world than I do, one that harks back all the way to attitudes that were forged during the events of WWII and before.
Not to say that everyone involved on a government's side is blinded by dogma, but I believe enough of them are (in certain spheres) to keep the culture alive.
The main thing that I look for is a good balance of technical aptitude and cultural fit. I will generally prefer a person that can communicate well (in writing and in person) over a similarly technically skilled person that cannot.
Current skils are not usually as important as an ability and willingness to learn.
I don't like it when candidates are obviously just looking for a paycheck and really don't care what they'll be doing. These kind of punch in/punch out, 'take the money and run' people are a slowly debilitating cancer that it is super important to root out as early as possible.
So overall, I'd say for me it's attitude and communication skills more so than anything else.
My earlier post was really concerned more with those actors within relevant industries whose motive is to maximise profit, not with those actors whose motive is to win a dick measuring competition between their country/empire and someone else’s. If the latter guys win out then yeah, all bets are off I'd say.
Perhaps I'm overestimating their adherence to logic and reason, but I don't think those actors motivated primarily by greed want such a big, uncontrollable war, the outcome of which is not foregone. They want little controllable ones like Gulf War 1 and 2 (or failing this, the surveillance state).
I don't think anyone is wanting the next war, IMO more likely what has happened is around about the wrap up of Gulf War 2, people in relevant industries started to realise that there won't be that many more fortuitously sized 'sandboxable' (if I may coin a term) hot wars that profit can consistently be extracted from. So what do you do instead? Get on the surveillance gravy train. It certainly seems like a pretty good gig doesn't it? Huge amounts of government spending up for grabs, very little informed oversight or ability for anyone to argue that too much is being spent. It's a government contractor's (or a government offical taking the revolving door's) dream.
I wouldn't credit them with enough foresight to be thinking about depopulation. It's all just about next quarter's profits.
Did you contact the developer? She seems quite eager to help.