danjac

Is gaming not part of the software industry? What aspects of Japanese game development made it hugely successful compared to business and other software development?

And when production moved to Vancouver in the 90s, you had shows like the X-Files which often seemed to take place in a vague Pacific Northwest location.

Universities are institutions made of people. If SF becomes to expensive for those people to work and study in, they'll face the same problem of housing costs. And universities rise and fall over time: a great CS department one decade might slip down the ratings the next.

There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.

The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.

Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere.

Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.

There's literally a web site of Kubernetes failure stories: https://k8s.af/ where people experienced in Kubernetes have shot themselves in the foot.

To be fair, it's over a year old, and probably the state of the art and best practices have advanced to the point where many of these are unlikely to happen. But in general, Kubernetes is widely considered a very big complex thing full of footguns for the unwary for a reason.

So while I agree with you that sure, you can get up and running by watching some videos and copy-pasting a few YAML files, the problem is when you are deep into critical production and you run into issues (the classic "I get woken up at 3am by an alert or my boss and we need to fix this in 10 minutes") and you lack the deeper understanding of the framework to even know where to start.

Or even worse, you insert an insidious security issue through a misconfiguration and you are not even aware you have been owned. Security is notoriously difficult to get right, even for people with experience in frameworks and systems, let alone a newbie. Kubernetes is not "secure by default" and again, there are footguns for the unwary:

https://snyk.io/learn/kubernetes-security/

None of these things make Kubernetes bad, per se, and I'm sure the benefits outweigh the costs. But personally I would be cautious about adopting it for serious production without having some solid real-world experience first.

There's a bigger question here as well, regarding small teams (as in startups, not just pizza teams in a tech giant). Where do you want your very limited time and focus to be? If I'm building some SAAS application I want to put my coding focus close to 100% towards the business model. If that model requires me learning new tech then fine, but otherwise it's a case of "use what you know", because new tech that isn't focused on that is going to waste my precious time and resources down the line.

"Gross mismanagement" and "D&D" are kind of synonyms: from Gygax' losing control to the incompetent Blume brothers (whose genius business decisions included trying to raise a 19th century shipwreck), to the takeover by Buck Rogers heiress/grifter Lorraine Williams.

Thankfully the game has so far successfully rolled all its Bad Management Saving Throws.

Or use a PAAS (Fly.io, Render, maybe even Heroku I guess) if you just want to get your MVP out there while you focus on your product and business.

Getting something up and running and managing something long-term are two different things.

I'm sure - even though I'm not particularly smart - I could get a simple k8s solution up and running in a week with the help of a YouTube video.

What happens six months in when I hit some critical k8s related issue and I lack the basic understanding of where to even begin to debug and fix it? For example I may introduce a serious security issue in a CI pipeline or whatever just due to inexperience and unfamiliarity.

I'm not saying Kubernetes (or for that matter, microservices) is the wrong pick for a small 3-person team. You know your own business better than I or anyone else and I'm sure you made the right choice. But personally I would be cautious about adopting a core production technology where my experience consists of one week and a YouTube tutorial.

As with developers doing resume-driven development, designers need to build a strong portfolio to land their next gig.

So aesthetics comes into building their own distinctive "brand" (as opposed to the brand of the client/company they are currently working for). That's not to say they won't justify their design in terms of what the client needs, it just pushes them away from using "boring" aesthetics - for example, pushing for a trendy-looking design for a backend admin dashboard that would have been just as usable (and cheaper) to build with a bog-standard Bootstrap theme.

This isn't to blame designers, that's just the economic reality of the business.

a.k.a. resume-driven development

The thing is that "feature creep" is a symptom rather than cause.

"Feature creep" in a small company is a sign of flailing around trying to capture a market. Sometimes a whole new feature is developed under pressure from Sales to land a big whale client, or a desperate CEO who thinks runaway success is just that one key feature away.

In a big company feature creep may be the result of a corporate culture that doles out promotions and bonuses for building shiny new things rather than the boring work of maintaining old things. Google is a good example of this, only with entire new services rather than features.

Either way feature creep is symptomatic of deeper problems with a company, regardless of size.

My favourite tin-foil hat conspiracy theory is that Kubernetes, microservices etc are promoted by big tech to lure potentially disruptive small teams into adopting momentum-killing rabbit-hole solutions because they are "best practice"...

This also holds for project management practices such as Scrum.

Just as with scientific research, asteroid mining will be the domain of robots. There's no economic case for sending humans for that job, and AI is improving year on year. So sadly no Belters, whatever the value of mining space rocks.

Or they are lucky to be born into a wealthy family with connections and safety net (Musk, Gates etc)

Whatever Ballmer's faults, lack of passion wasn't one of them, and he was a founding member of MSFT (probably the first founder after Gates, going back to their salad days as roommates at Harvard), not a parachuted-in hedge-fund MBA. And who can forget "Developers, developers, developers!"?

Old Russian proverb: "when fish begins to rot, it starts from the head".

Yes these crypto bros are young grifters out for the big score with zero integrity or morals and hopefully they will look forward to spending their best years in a jail cell. But they are enabled and encouraged by a good old boys network of VCs, journalists, and other influential figures in the tech community. Madoff at least picked rich people as his marks; the media have blown up the likes of SBF as geniuses and encouraged ordinary people to invest money they can't afford to lose in crypto.

Hetzner (or Digital Ocean) + Dokku is cheap & easy to run for small side projects.

Constitutions, at the end of the day, are just pieces of paper that can be ignored entirely. The 1977 Soviet Constitution was a landmark in human rights and freedom of expression, but nobody was kidding themselves that this was the reality of Brezhnev's USSR. On the other hand a country like the UK can wing it without a solid constitution at all - just a bedrock of tradition and past legal precedent - yet still remain (despite many glaring faults and recent backsliding) a relatively free country in global and historical terms.

What matters is that the society itself believes in the traditions of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. If that withers and dies, perhaps because people no longer consider these ideals to be as important as their pet ideologies, or because the citizens no longer share a common epistemological reality, or because oligarchs are given free reign to buy politicians, courts and media, then it doesn't really matter any more what your vaunted Constitution says.

It's a scam. If just a fraction pay up they will have made money.

There's also the Byzantine Empire, which referred to itself as Roman ("Byzantine" being an early modern name for the eastern Empire).

Finnish does not have grammatical gender.

Chapter 11?

I have yet to get a moderately-complex Django project working with django-stubs. It seems to break with basic idioms like custom QuerySets, and I immediately run into new bugs every time I try it. Usually I give up and use dialled-down mypy settings.

I felt completely left out, because although I had seen the last Spiderman movie, I hadn't watched Wandavision or half of the TV shows. It was like trying to follow a game in a sport you only have a casual interest in: you kind of know the rules but have no idea who the main teams or players are or who is up or down in the league, so your enjoyment is limited to the occasional good goal or pass (or VFX shot in this case).

In contrast to DC movies - very hit and miss in quality, but you can at least watch a movie without having to follow a dozen other TV shows and other films in the franchise.

At this point the emergence (or re-emergence) of the instant grocery startup in is like the apocryphal story of Joseph Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe-shine boy - a sign that the market is about to crash.

There's no "Rails for Go" either, so not sure why that is brought up as a comparison.

I suspect (from dabbling in Clojure some years ago) that the Clojure community has more enthusiasts than practical users, who enjoy building stuff that meets a Platonic ideal of language purity instead of the messy work of supporting long-term libraries that are far from Lispy perfection but meet the needs of real world projects.

There is a trade-off. Starting a new job is a roll of the dice. You might not get along with your new team, their codebase could be a mess, your manager an asshole, their business model a disaster. You might not spot red flags during the interview process because they'll be putting up their best front and Glassdoor is gamed these days. The higher salary reflects the risk that you might end up in a situation where you go from a secure job to one where you get fired because you're not a good fit.

You know whenever there's some TV history show about the early days of air flight, they show some old footage of a bicycle-powered helicopter or a ten-winged contraption crashing into the ground?

That was pretty much early 2000s web development.

Is this an example of the Market for Lemons? If I hire a developer I have a pretty good idea what to look for (and to a lesser degree, a designer, as I have worked with enough designers to know how the good ones work). But I would have no idea what makes for a good accountant or corporate lawyer or plumber, so would need to depend on referrals and a certain amount of blind trust.

Scrum is really for low-trust environments where management fundamentally don't trust the developers to deliver - whether because the developers aren't experienced, not very good at self-management, or too easily distracted by shiny things, or because you're an archetypal MBA type who distrusts any underling who might be smarter than you.

If you trust your developers (whether in-house or contractors) to do the job you can pretty much let them manage themselves with whatever kanban-ish system that works for them. If you don't, you have a ready methodology that gives you meetings upon meetings and two week deliverables and every little thing broken down to the smallest unit under the guise of "empowerment".