timwiseman

In short, I think you are completely right, but it seems the point is that you need to focus on achieving that "massive body of prior work".

In fact, I suspect most serious developers travel up and down this pyramid all the time. Sometimes they are trying to push the state of the art forward, sometimes something that "sorta works" and ships ontime is just fine.

As for "beautiful code" being fault tolerant, it could be argued that any code which is not fault tolerant is not beautiful. I am not sure if that is right or now, but beauty tends to be somewhat subjective and that seems a valid interpretation.

But if you really say want 5 gigs, then $10 a month seems a bit high, especially now that Gdrive gives you 5 gigs free.

Its also a bit of a pyschological barrier seeing that second digit in the monthly bill as opposed to say $5/month and knowing that the yearly cost breaches the triple digit barrier.

Unfortunately, this is a world constrained by time and by knowledge. I do not have the time or expertise to evaluate everything I read in a clinical fashion.

Given those constraints, who the author is becomes a very powerful signal. If Neil De Grasse Tyson says something about astrophysics I can probably take it at face value, at least until I have a reason to question. On the other hand, someone with a self-interested reason to get me to believe something will rightly get far more scrutiny, even if they are eventually proven completely right.

This is different from more constructive criticism like, "This would be better if it also had feature xyz". Even "I will pay for this service when, and only when, reliability is above xyz..." can be meaningful.

"I was just following orders" never makes a good excuse for doing something that is patently wrong. It is even less so for an independent lawyer who has tremendous discretion to refuse to take a case.*

*Just to be clear, once a lawyer begins working on a case for a client there are ethical rules that (within limits) require him/her to follow the client's directives and work for the clients best interests. The lawyer also may not be always be free to cease representation once it has begun. But an independent lawyer can generally freely refuse to accept a case.

They certainly play a role in governing, but where Contress is active (in theory), the Courts are reactive, waiting for a case to be brought to them. Where Congress is reaching for power and often places limitations on citizens, the Courts (in principle) ensure Congress does not claim too much power and limits Congress.

As to 3: Personally, I love gmail. But from a corporate perspective, you can still exert more control over exchange. This can be significant, especially for highly regulated businesses that need to worry about frequent e-discovery and may perhaps wish to take steps to limit what is sent.

With that said, schools right now often emphasize testing and test prep at the expense of any hands on work. Naturally, we should have the right balance, which seems to be what you are proposing, but if we must overreact, I would much rather overemphasize building, exploring, creating and underemphasize testing than the other way around.

Luck, working smarter, working harder.

Luck is a major factor for everyone, but you can't control it. You can certainly influence working smarter, but it is often a matter of juding in hindsight what was smart rather than determining it before hand. Working harder is much more under our control than the others.

It is important to acknowledge luck. This helps use be humble in our successes, not be too devestated in our failuers, and be compassionate to those less fortunate. It is also just plain true.

It is also important to try to work smart - creating a startup, writing a novel, etc at least has a chance of creating huge rewards and even changing the world...the odds of changing the world from inside the sweatshop you mention are close to nil.

But it is how hard we work that we can mostly control, and there is some truth to Goldwyn's quote...it just isn't all of the truth.

True, but worth pointing out that often the best way to succeed, especially on anything truly innovative, is to be ready to try stuff and fail a lot.

This title could easily have refferred to the correct meaning of 5 weeks with the programming language Go, 5 weeks playing and studying the game Go, or in a slightly colloquial usage, 5 weeks of constantly doing things and going.

And those are just the meanings that make sense in this context. It is also a verb with a wide variety of (related) meanings and forms a command part of a command in multiple computer languages (T-SQL uses Go, goto is infamous in Basic, etc).

Code is probably far and away the best example, as you point out. But this is true to a lesser degree in areas like metalworking. It is also true to an extent in biology where one biological system can be constructed specifically to help study or mass produce another.

And of course it is true in mathematics, where by moving up a level of abstraction you can develop techniques and knowledge that help in a huge array of problems.

In short, it will be true in any field where the material being worked with is also the material being worked on.

The same can be said of being a great orator. Cicero is still known today largely for his oratory skills, and similar skills have served president Obama.

So does being a great biologist and research doctor. Edward Jenner saved countless lives through is work.

Code can multiply your effort, and that is why I code, but it is not the only thing that can, and in fact many technologies exist to multiply the effort in some form or fashion.

I incidentally have stopped programmers from doing X or Y, but it was because the right answer was Z.

As for ORM's winning, I don't think its a war, For some things I use and recommend ORMs, but for others I recommend using pure SQL.

My experience has been different from yours. Everyone I have known well that attained or even sought a PhD has had curiosity, passion, and depth.

However, many of them had narrow curiosity and passion. Engaged within their specialty and their brilliance would shine through, but outside of it they were realtively intelligent but fairly ordinary people.

Of course, there may be a bit of sample bias on my side. The PhD's I got to know tended to be focused on math or a tightly related hard science. They also tended to be the ones that were tolerant of hanging around with someone like me that liked talking about math.

I had a problem keeping in touch with my extended family, Facebook has made this much easier.

I used to have issues with loosing touch with old friends (even ones you make a moderate effort to keep in touch with can become unreachable if you and they both move frequently), facebook helps.

Getting pictures of the kids distributed frequently without digital technology would have been difficult. Email made it substantially easier. Facebook makes it very easy.

I used to have a hard time finding resources for the game Go. Services like DragonGoServer let me play online and Google+ lets me find and talk to other Go enthusiasts.

Could you expand on this?

When you create something, barring some exception such as when you create it as a an employee, you own it. In certain cases, if the code is exactly implementing a narrow problem from a book there might be a question of it being a derivative work of the textbook itself, but when that is true it is probably not something worth publishing anyway. The other case would be that it is a shared copyright if the professor or another student significantly assited, which is fairly common in some grad work.

But the simple status of "student" does not change the rights to your own work. I have known more than one student to go on to publish work that is only a cleaned up version of an assignment and I have heard of others going on to start entire companies based on work they did as a student.

But more ephemeral topics benefit greatly from experience. When I was in the military, I benefitted greatly from the experience of my NCOs and much of what they passed on to me where things that would have been very hard to put into a book or discover through any process other than experience.

But I suspect most technical topics fall into the former category rather than the later.

But even if it were clear that the employee's actions did not fall into the category, a company is rightly concerned about anything that would create even a colorable cause of action (in otherwords, anything someone could sue for without it being immediately thrown out).

Also, the company might be worried about the appearance in the public's eyes even when lawsuits are entirely off the table.

I work as a SQL Server DBA and occassionally publish articles about technical aspects of SQL. But anything that rises above the level of a comment like this one gets vetted by the company before I publish it. I am quite comfortable with this because I agreed to it ahead of time and I understand why the company wants the right to review.