warren_s

We started getting SQS errors from us-east-1 around 05:08 UTC.

We also have a bunch of files on S3 which Cross-Region Replication hasn't yet replicated... I think that depends on SQS as well.

This is where regular company or team-wide meetups are worthwhile. GitHub do this semi-annually I think, I know Engine Yard do it with their remote support staff, and the company I work with does a monthly hack day.

Distractions can be overcome if you're willing to work on them. I find with daily standups, it's pretty hard to hide from a lack of progress, but if you don't have these then teaming up with a few colleagues to keep each other accountable is one option.

I stay away from TV, movies, etc during work hours, but I do tend to prepare proper meals in my lunch hour, rather than just grabbing whatever junk I can find. It's a good way to combat the extra weight you can gain when you start working from home too.

Talk to your GF about it. The best part of living with someone, is you don't have to give them your attention every second you're together. If you need time to spend on your interests, surely she does too?

Try to schedule some guilt free time so each of you can do something you enjoy. Just make sure you respect that schedule that you've agreed to, otherwise you'll find yourself with all the free time in the world and no one to share it with.

It's a glib statement, but it's not coming from a place of envy - more likely cynicism than anything else :) As I said, he has real world experience, he's made his money and continues to do so...

I am both self-taught, and have a CS-type degree. I've walked both sides of the street on this issue, at times I've thought I wasted 4 years at uni, and at others I've been glad I sat through at times dry and disinteresting lectures, when I get to apply that theory in the "real world."

Disagree. There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can code, what's more dangerous is a programmer with gaping holes in their theoretical knowledge.

A friend of mine who both has years of real world experience and a PhD in CS is fond of saying: "A 'Web Developer' is a person militantly ignorant of computer science who spends most of their career re-implementing elementary computer science."

It's sheer hubris to think that one can disregard decades of CS theory and be a good developer. You might know the syntax of a language or have a great memory for APIs, but if you don't know how to efficiently apply that knowledge, what's the point?

There was a study done on this a while ago: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8914028...

I agree with the premise that there are diminishing returns after the 2nd screen, but I personally always use my 13" Macbook screen alongside the cinema display when I'm at my desk.

My own experience suggests you are truly burnt out when you are no longer capable of doing work in the face of dire consequences like missing mortgage repayments and feeding your children.

Of course, this feeds back on itself, with further stress causing even more difficulty in fulfilling one's obligations.

Just as long as they stay away from that Eve kid, I hear she just wants to know EVERYTHING!

At an ethical/moral level, they should care, but at a business level, they should also care. Every time a staff member walks out the door, how much does it cost a company in terms of replacing them?

Not to mention the kind of bad will employee horror stories can generate in the talent pool you're trying to hire from.

The end doesn't always justify the means.

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, will we realise that we cannot eat money"

Staff shouldn't be treated as some kind of natural resource to be burned through and discarded after 12 months just to make a few bucks for investors when you flip. I'd classify that as the hollowest form of "success."

I can't imagine Rackspace would be happy with the impact that would have on their clients...

We skipped unit tests when we built desksnear.me for the rails rumble, but we DID have a cucumber test suite for integration testing. It wasn't that much of an impost for us, and it meant we spent more time coding, and less time manually testing stuff.

I think this approach fits well with the idea of an MVP - you express your minimum set of features in such a way that you can automatically test them, while still freeing yourself to throw away parts of the underlying code if you need to.

At the end of the day it's not an all or nothing thing, if there's a particularly gnarly bit of code that you want to unit test, then just unit test it!

Yeah, I had wondered if it was something like that. It IS a tad concerning.

"They store your password in cleartext" Do you have a reference for this to back up your claim? Preferably before I sign up.

Mining money isn't a good fit for dotcoms, I've seen it first hand, as an employee of a startup with investors there (WA). These guys get edgy in businesses they don't understand, and IT is a long way from digging shit up and selling it to the Chinese. You want savvy investors who move in the right circles, not just ones with fat bank accounts and no clue how to turn a PC on.

Did you actually read the article? retraining other devs to use Ruby was identified as one solution. Nevertheless, bringing new developers in who need training is not a zero-cost process compared to hiring an experienced developer.

Unless you're hiring someone fresh out of school, they've likely had some experience in the job market and base their expectations of salary and conditions on that.

It's not really a sense of entitlement if I can point to similar positions x, y, and z and ask why you're not offering the same, is it?

Expectations, whether or not you find them realistic, are not created in a vacuum. I can't pay my mortgage or feed my kids on a "pre-money equity-only" job. Taking a deep pay cut for a stake in NewCo? Been there before - at the end of the day, 5% of nothing is still nothing.

If you're looking for someone who is willing to take a big risk for very little (immediate) reward, you aren't looking for an employee, you're looking for another co-founder.

What have you done to improve your networking opportunities and the community in YOUR city? I started a monthly lunch group where a bunch of us get together and just talk tech. Some of us are devs, some are sysadmins, others designers, we even have a couple of academics from the CS dept of the local university.

Because it's a small city, it's a diverse group, but this is a strength as much as it's a weakness.

So before you throw your hands up and complain that there's "no real community", at least have a go at creating one.

Hey, at least they're using something. There's no need to waste time on a religious war within the church of version control, when there are non-believers who must be shown the light.

There was no version control available to me when I started programming BASIC on a BBC Model B in 1987. :) It's a bit of a different story in 2010. I would sincerely hope that anyone who aspires to be a professional developer would be aware that there is a thing called a version control system, and that using one is a Very Good Idea for all but the most trivial of programming tasks.

Not trolling, but seriously, is there really a significant number of developers out there who aren't using any form of version control?

I doubt much/any of this will come to pass, speaking as someone who has always had to deal with download limits, it's really not THAT big a deal.

We here in Australia have been subject to tiered broadband pricing since day 1 - I feel pretty comfortable in saying that whatever pricing US carriers come up with, it will be much lower than here in AU, simply because you don't need to haul most of your data thousands of KMs via undersea cables. My ISP has a range of ADSL2+ plans from AU$50/month for 150GB data through to AU$120/month for 1TB data. (There's also an entry level 30Gb for $30 plan for your grandparents)

I've tested the link on Chrome, Safari and Firefox under OS X while logged out of google and in none of these cases was I asked for a password. Other people have been able to successfully complete the form too. I'm not sure why this has happened to you, and I'm sorry for wasting your time. :(

It's a google docs webform. A few clicks, a submit, and you're done. Did you actually wait for it to load before passing judgement?

clickable link: http://bit.ly/gcFlDv

counterpoint: trademe.co.nz - started up in 1999 and pretty much owned the NZ auction space because eBay didn't have a presence there at the time. Sold for 3/4 billion NZ$ in 2006.

Being a big fish in a small pond can be profitable - these days, its Groupon clones setting up outside the US. I think this stands a higher than average chance of working - simply because the model does require direct interaction with businesses, and therefore local operators are going to have an advantage in terms of cultural/local knowledge.

If you're lucky to win your local market, you'll probably end up getting acquired by Groupon itself.

He showed slides of a normal distribution for the previous semester's results, vs a bimodal distribution for the current semester - that's the aberration I'm talking about.

So, if it was known in previous semesters that a test bank was used, why such a large statistical aberration this time around? It seems implausible that 1/3rd of the class just happened to memorise the answers accurately, and indeed, the distribution suggests that another factor was in play this time around.

Grades are for college, but ethics are for life.

Part of the reason many niche markets exist is due to a need for domain knowledge, be it about the product itself, or the particular community you are servicing. I would argue that most niche players have either or both of these attributes, which allows them to hold their ground against would-be competitors.

If domain knowledge is the main barrier to entry, the competitive advantage is not the fact that it's a niche, but the fact that you know something that your competitors don't about that niche.