jbail

Is this just wishful thinking or is there a specific functioning democratic government that should we all trust?

My opinion is that nobody should trust any government. Not fully at least. Not their own. Certainly not somebody else's. History has shown this to be a generally prudent position to take. I mean, why should I trust the German government more than the United States government? How about Norway or Kenya or Thailand?

I do not think there's some magical country that is about to have a big business advantage based on "trust" because their citizens value privacy (as if that were even measurable). Most likely, countries will just become a touch more insular with their technology, noting that it, like food production, is somewhat of a national security issue.

That said, I don't think my unhappiness working for others has anything to do with other people making me feel that way or with my competence or the competence of others. Heck, I'm VP of Engineering right now at a company doing 10s of millions in revenue and growing like crazy and I still feel like something is missing.

My realization is that it needs to my skin in the game to not feel like I'm "just another dev" or perhaps more generally, "just another cog in the machine".

Working for someone else, I don't see how I could ever reach the level of personal risk, reward and gratification that it has taken me a long time to realize I need.

I can't escape it at someone else's startup or someone else's big company. I bounced from job to job, year after year, thinking it was just culture or not enough responsibilities, or too many responsibilities, not enough money, or too much money. These were all wrong.

This. A thousand times.

At every company I've EVER worked for, I eventually had this exact same feeling. Even as the lead engineer, team lead, tech lead, or whatever other "top developer" role I've held, I always feel like this. And I always eventually quit too.

It's gotten worse in the past few years. I can barely make it one year before I feel like "just another dev", become completely de-motivated and start heading for the exits.

I've realized, at age 31, that I am a shitty employee and I always will be. I'm not supposed to work for other people. It doesn't really make me happy. It doesn't matter if its at a startup or a Big Co, I always feel like "just another dev", bored and ultimately like my potential is being cut short.

In the past year, this was sort of an epiphany for me. I have to follow the beat of my own drummer, be my own boss, make my own destiny. Will this bring me to self actualization? Will this be what I'm looking for? Or, will I feel empty once I get there? I have no clue, but I've got to find out.

Thanks for sharing your story, Loren. You're in good company. Good luck with figuring out what's important to you.

When I order delivery, I always tip generously because somebody actually got in their car or bike and came to my house with food. That's extra effort in my book. Same goes for when I eat in and have a waiter or waitress waiting on me, refilling my water, etc.

Certainly $170 is a large grilled cheese order, but more generally, I'm asking if it's expected to tip when you are not getting service beyond having your food handed to you.

Edit: On the other hand, this seems so ridiculous that I need to question if it's accurate. Can Treehouse provide some proof that Apple said they can't have Android courses available in their app?

(BTW, I love how Gmail will attempt to unsubscribe you when you mark a marketing email as spam, which is also very nice)

Not offering WiFi or putting time limits on it would make me feel unwelcome. Feeling unwelcome will make me not want to patronize said coffee shop the other 9 out of 10 times.

What's the secret sauce that makes Starbucks so successful? They made it a comfy place to hang out...the "3rd place" between home and work where you can go and feel welcomed. Schultz is always talking about it. Obviously, Starbucks is one data point, but I think there's something to it.

For what its worth, it looks like a modern tech discussion forum built using modern tools. Nothing wrong with that, but that's how it should be branded. The feel good aspect without any real technical backend to enable it falls a bit flat.

This seems like an insane way to vet potential developers, by the way. Someone who bases a hiring decision on what brand of phone service your employee/contractor has chosen is probably not looking at the right metrics.

Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them.

But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In light of the total collapse of privacy we've experienced recently, it's really sad that that seems perfectly rational.

I think the "after 8pm" part is the secret sauce of not feeling guilty about how you're allocating your time. You've found a chunk of time that you really shouldn't be working on your startup anymore...and it's a time slot where most people are wasting time watching TV, drinking, etc. Keeping productive at that time is awesome.

I like this so much, I might give 8pm blogging a try.

I have a question for Ian: How do you find time to do such in depth teardowns and UI refactors of other people's apps? Actually let me re-phrase that: How do you justify spending time on these blog posts instead of focusing on your own application?

Maybe it's just a calculated cost you incur to get traffic? Even so, how did you determine this to be the highest value activity as a start up cofounder?

If I'm building a cross-platform app (or have the intention of going cross-platform eventually), I try to steer clear of any interactions or UI elements that are too obviously from one platform or another.

I really appreciate apps that have their own distinct look and feel which don't use "proprietary" UI features (like the header bar and back button). The most recent app that I've admired is Dots. It doesn't look Androidy or iOSy. It looks like it's own thing. The team behind that did a fantastic job.

Beyond the parallax effect, what are these new navigation and structural changes? I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely curious. I'm about to build a new iOS app and I did not see major navigation or structural changes that would drastically affect how I design an app's UI or UX.

If that's the standard you hold yourself to, I'd encourage you to expect more from yourself.

Anyone who's color blind want to weigh in?

http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

There are wide variations in company culture and work habits and my advice is to not be immediately turned on or off simply by the size or life stage of a company. You need to ask much more in depth questions to understand if the company is a good fit for what you're looking for at a particular stage in your life.

I believe you can export from Posterous to Blogger as well.

I don't think the average consumer will understand what it does and why it's priced the way it is. I understand what it does and does not do, I work in front end web engineering, and ultimately would really like to see Chrome OS take off (selfishly because my skillset would be very well suited for writing software for it). This is all a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. I just wouldn't plunk down $1300 for one.

It looks awesome, but at $1,299, I don't think it's priced well. That's $100 more than a 13" MacBook. I just don't see that much value in a Chromebook at this point in time.

There's really no comparison between using Bundler and mucking around with JAR files or Ant scripts in Java. I've even seen Python codebases with a Java-esque rats nest of dependencies that are just as painful to get setup correctly.

Bundler is way easier. I've never been on a Rails project where it took more than 30 minutes to get the env setup and it's in large part, thanks to Bundler. Admittedly, I haven't touched Java in a few years, but last I checked, Java had nothing like Bundler (which is a shame, because it could really use it).

It might just be bad timing to announce the next project more than anything.