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brandonsavage

48 karma · joined January 15, 2013

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brandonsavage··on Twenty dollars in an envelope
I disagree with your percentage breakdown.

Brennan made $106,443 from his products, for 45% of his income. He could have dropped the consulting altogether and still would have made a nice six figure salary.

Nathan earned 76% of his income from his products.

Amy earned 100% of her income from products (as best I can tell).

Products are not the same as software. An ebook is no less a product than a paper book you buy in a store.

brandonsavage··on Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?
I think that most people leave it configured for default and never bother to do any kind of caching. My server was down less than five minutes because I knew what to look for.
brandonsavage··on Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?
It has to do with the number of requests plus the number of allowed processes plus the requests each process was allowed to serve. At a limit of 300 requests per process, the processes fell over at about 3 seconds time. With only 20 processes, dying every three seconds, the server was overwhelmed. So it's really a combination of issues.

Looking at the records for MySQL data, there wasn't that much of an issue there with MySQL connections. This is probably due to the fact that the page cache was working correctly.

brandonsavage··on Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?
A misconfigured site that serves all its own assets will perform terribly because 200 hits per minute x 20 assets = 4,000 hits per minute. Wordpress has tons of assets too.
brandonsavage··on Ask HN: How can so many people be wrong?
Your question assumes that humanity, at least in large quantities, is a rational actor. I think history shows us that's not true.
brandonsavage··on When To Write Bad Code
This is a great suggestion. I've done this with PHP (the first language I learned) for work I'm doing in Python. It also helps sometimes when you have to translate code from one language to another to use an intermediary language.
brandonsavage··on When To Write Bad Code
It's not original to me. Not sure where I heard it, but I know it's not mine.
brandonsavage··on When To Write Bad Code
The person I was mentoring (that prompted this blog post) was having trouble getting ANY code down on the screen. Being able to write SOMETHING was the hurdle for this developer to overcome.

In most cases though, I agree with you.

brandonsavage··on Apple fires Chinese supplier for using underage workers
Any time Apple does anything it pretty much gets reported. I imagine most other major companies don't care or their supply chains are ignored by the average person. For example, do you know where your television was made, by what suppliers, and how old they were? Me either.
brandonsavage··on Helium - lightweight PHP MVC Framework
As much as I appreciate innovation and inventiveness, the last thing PHP needs is another framework.
brandonsavage··on Stripe Checkout
This actually wouldn't surprise me. Similarly, not asking for the card type is confusing to some people (even though the card type is identified in the first characters of the card number).
brandonsavage··on Naked-Image Scanners to Be Removed From U.S. Airports
They're still not removing the body scanners entirely though, just the ones that can't display a generic outline. The privacy violations and radiation exposure will continue.
brandonsavage··on Why Don't Designers Talk About Money?
Discussing money, at least in the United States, is frowned upon. It's not that way in the rest of the world though.
brandonsavage··on The Problem with Kickstarter
Being rejected by Kickstarter doesn't make Kickstarter the problem.
brandonsavage··on Five Ways To Write Better Code
I have to disagree with one point: that writing tests doesn't make you a better developer. Here's why:

Writing a test requires you to think about your code in different ways than just creating it. TDD requires you to plan your code. And the more code you write, theoretically, the better your skills will be.

Now, will it make you the best developer? Probably not. I doubt writing tests is the most productive use of time. But for the practice of software development, writing tests is critical.

brandonsavage··on Five Ways To Write Better Code
Languages exist to solve certain classes of problems. PHP, for example, is primarily designed as a web language. Learning ANY language designed for other uses will teach the developer something new. Once you have learned something like Python or Ruby, learning C would probably be the next logical step.
brandonsavage··on Five Ways To Write Better Code
Through my work at Mozilla, I regularly contribute to a large number of open source projects. I do my best to follow my own advice, but I'm always working to do better. Sadly sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day!
brandonsavage··on Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners
I don't know that firing people is necessarily the best way to approach the problem. It might make us feel better but it won't solve the actual problem, which is the overly prosecutorial society we have.
brandonsavage··on Petition to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
The concept that ignorance of the law is not an excuse is certainly critical here. The principle exists since it would be easy to simply claim ignorance.

At the same time, the concept of "mens rea" or "a guilty mind" plays an important part in criminal law. If you knew what you were doing was wrong, and you did it anyway, that establishes intent. For example, you can't typically be punished for trespassing until you've been told you are trespassing (hence signs that say "Posted - No Tresspassing"). Once you continue onto the property, you've committed the act overtly, and are therefore guilty of a crime.

brandonsavage··on Petition to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
The problem is wider than the CFRA. The problem is with criminal prosecution of citizens that were not intending to commit a crime. Criminal intent is a cornerstone of our legal system but more and more it's becoming unimportant in prosecutions.
brandonsavage··on Finding a Developer
I wouldn't be surprised to see some up front cost to a developer as a deposit. I always collect them, especially if I haven't worked with the client before.