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Yeah. I feel a lot like this too. I left my most recent job in May and don’t have plans to return to tech anytime soon. To fill my time and to try to do something actually useful, I decided to start writing about learning more and thinking better.

Until you are more experienced. Then you should ignore tutorials and read the manuals.

An intuitive, intelligent performance debugging tool that works for any programming language.

A similar tool that finds common errors like race conditions, missing null checks, etc.

Before it became a TLD, .dev was commonly used as an extension in /etc/hosts to point a fake domain to localhost during development.

These days I use .localhost for that.

On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. The problem is that, once you look at the details, you realize there are none.

How is this going to work? Where does that $68bn get re-allocated? Who will benefit from this? What is the economic advantage of investing in transit infrastructure in dollars and cents?

I've seen a few of these proposals that sell hopes and dreams with no discussion of how it's going to work. Until I see that, I can't support this.

Giving away money is not generally an effective solution. Where is that money going to come from?

Can you clarify what you mean by "transit oriented development"? As a general rule of thumb, 10-20 story tall buildings are an eye sore. I don't think it makes sense to make things denser if it's going to be so ugly that no one wants to live there.

I think it's a stretch to say that the peninsula will remain majority single family home cities. Everywhere I look all I see are new apartment complexes being built.

Yes. :(

Edit: I'm in San Francisco.

Well, it depends. I personally don't feel the need to self-promote to get a raise. I'll probably lose out on a few raises or promotions because of that, but I make a good amount of money and I'm good at what I do. That's enough for me.

You mean you follow good software development practices? Heresy!

Absolutely! Unfortunately, this is very hard to sell to teammates on the SPA bandwagon and management who require all developers to be buzzword-compliant.

Run `( find -E ./ -regex '.*\.jsx?' -print0 | xargs -0 cat ) | wc -l` inside your `node_modules/` folder. It counts lines of code in JS files. Prepare to be sad.

True. There's another thread in here somewhere talking about premature generalization. I think that's what you're getting at with "Do it too soon and you end up choosing the wrong boundaries".

If you still use Rails and jQuery, why both with Polymer or Vue? What is the benefit they give you?

Promise I'm not giving you a hard time. I'm honestly curious if there's something I'm overlooking.

> There's still a lot of work out there that really boils down to basic CRUD and reporting at the end of the day, and developers naturally begin to invent complexities on top of that CRUD to make the work interesting and challenging.

I'd go so far as to say that _most_ work today (at least in startups) is building CRUD apps. The technology has changed, but the work hasn't. Inside of building CRUD apps in Rails, we now build them in React.

Building a website doesn't have to be complicated. You build a Rails site 10 years ago. You probably used jQuery, if you used JavaScript at all. Why can't you do the same today?

The real problem here is that not enough developers understand that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Once more of us get a handle on that, life will be better.

The day I learned about premature generalization is that day my speed as a developer jumped by a factor of three. When you're generalizing, it's easy to overlook how much time that takes.

My rule these days is that, in most cases, I shouldn't generalize before the same code exists in three places. Why not two? In my experience, things that are done twice aren't necessarily done three times. But things that are done three times are likely to be done a fourth.

> Less code is better.

I'd change this to "Write as little code as necessary, but no less." The problem with "Less code is better" is that some folks use that as justification to write clever one-liners that are difficult for other developers to read. That is not better.

That aside, I agree with everything else you said!

Ego is one of the larger problems I've seen over the years. This usually shows, as you mention, with someone trying to sound smart. The irony here is that I've consistently found -- both inside and outside the software industry -- that the smartest people in the room are the ones who can speak about complex topics in a simple way.

At the last company I was at, our search microservice was fast (average response was well under 100ms) and it didn't crash once while I was there. At a larger company, this may not be an accomplishment. At a startup, this is the bees knees.

Meanwhile, the rest of our codebase (a monolith) crashed every few days for one reason or another. We had an on-call rotation not because that's what you're supposed to do, but because we actually needed it.

Now I'm not saying that microservices make sense for everyone. In general, I agree that they are used incorrectly. Microservices are hot and software developers, generally speaking, like to use hot technologies. Yes, moving to a microservice was costly. We had to re-write a lot of code, we had to set up our own servers, and we had to get permission from the guardians that be to do all of this. But, for our use case, and I assume there are other use cases too, the benefits of detaching ourselves from the company's monolithic codebase far outweighed the costs for doing so.

TL;DR No argument is the end to every conversation. Few things are so black and white.

I owe every ounce of my love of reading to Richard Adams and Watership Down.

Watership Down was the first book of its size that I read and it had a profound effect on me that has significantly directed my life. I enjoyed it so much that I kept reading after the book was finished. This led to reading and loving anything written by J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov, Ernest Cline, John Grisham, Robert Greene, Orson Scott Card (despite later finding out of his personal flaws), and many other amazing authors.

Many years later, I'm still a huge fan of books, although I no longer read as much fiction as I'd like.

Perhaps it's time to sit down again and go on an adventure with some rabbits.

Uber doesn't stand to make any money by doing that. Drivers are a huge expense for Uber. Assuming they get these self driving cars with a bulk discount, the cost of not having to pay drivers would quickly offset the price of the cars.

If anything, after hearing that Uber lost $800m in Q3, I'd say they want these self driving cars badly so they can finally become profitable.

Anecdotally, one of Google's autonomous cars was pulled over in Mountain View, CA a while back[1]. The car was going 24 MPH in a 35 and the officer didn't realize the car was driving itself.

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pul...

Ah. We might be talking past each other. Looking back, a number of the advantages I mentioned are inherent in having self-driving cars. But the benefits compound when we have shared self-driving cars.

Example:

Traffic is improved with self-driving cars because most traffic jams are caused by humans. However, traffic is improved even more when carpooling is automated with a shared self-driving fleet.

Shared autonomous cars will become popular as these compounded benefits are realized.

This is the point that I see everyone discounting. Whether autonomous cars turn out to be feasible or not, we know for a fact that humans are bad drivers. Don't we owe it to ourselves to try something different?

That would be pretty great. How do you handle the movements of the car though? Bumps in the road and stuff like that?

I think you may be experiencing recall bias.

How do you get to work every day? How often do you go to the grocery store? What about going out to dinner?

For myself, living in the Bay Area, anything related to driving or owning a car is a nightmare -- not that that has stopped me from owning a car. Driving from Mountain View to San Mateo takes about 45 minutes in the morning at 75 minutes in the evening. I went to SF to have breakfast with a friend this past weekend and finding parking took half an hour. I'd love a self-driving car that could just drop me at my door. Autonomous cars should also lead to drastic traffic improvements, assuming the cars will eventually be able to communicate with each other in a reliable way.

Maybe you live in a less densely-populated area? I have an aunt that lives in a rural area and I couldn't imagine a need or desire for autonomous cars there.

There is definitely a long way to go, but think of all the advantages! Parking can be automated and condensed, which means more land is available for buildings or parks or anything else. If you suffer from traffic problems now, your daily commute could be cut by 50% or more. Shared vehicles should cost less than what you pay for gas and insurance now. High availability is a real possibility if someone can figure out how to make the economics work. Ride sharing can be almost completely automated, leading to less pollution.

I think the concern is more about availability. How long does it take for a car to show up each time OP needs to go to the store?

This is a problem with Uber now. I need to be at the airport at 5:00 AM tomorrow morning and I'm just hoping like hell that there will be an Uber around. Most drivers will be home sleeping.

Low-volume times like my example above are where autonomous vehicles can shine. Making the economics work during times of high volume is more difficult. You can always buy more cars, but that's just that many more cars you need storage space for outside of peak hours.

OP said their team is only three people.