1,079 karma · joined December 29, 2010
This 'issue' only matters to developers. My mom or sister or any other non-developer would never make any of these claims. For them, it's all on the Internet. A web page is a web page and an app is an app. The thing that matters most is the connection to do something.
There's room for both and I get so tired hearing these pointless arguments..
The hard problem is to figure out how to machine categorize this stuff, for sure. But I don't think it's shit work on your users to give them the categorize features. This stuff takes a lot of machine learning and a big system graph that hints at how this stuff should be applied. I think calling it shit work is over simplifying..
The fact of the matter is that we live in a pro-car country. California in general is a very pro-car state. The drive in diner was invented in CA. In L.A. your car is your second home and this is true in most of CA, imo.
That said, I prefer a dense city because I am not a car person. I grew up in southern CA and you were, literally, a loser if you didn't have a car. In high school, that was me - no car, just a 10 speed. I consider living in dense cities in the U.S. (did live in NYC for a few years) because I prefer the benefits of non-car transportation.
Back in SF there is the local bike coalition that is lobbying city to build more bike lanes and that imo is really good. I've been riding in this city for a long time and the new bike lanes popping up all over are definitely nice. I see guys in suits and girls in dresses riding in to work all the time; it can be done!
But SF is also compact and hilly. We cyclists compete with cars all the time for space. I am not much of a red light or stop sign runner, but the thing people in cars don't quite grep is that momentum requires energy (or gravity). In a car, it's a tiny fraction of what it is on a bike. So, if no one is around (you can approach an intersection slowed down) you can cruise through with a 99% chance that you will be ok. Lots of people do this all the time.
However, there are plenty that disregard this (people that even blow past me when I'm stopped at an intersection). But, these are people of a similar mindset (I think) of those that speed up to go around me on a small street when I legally have to right to ride where I am and at the speed I do. I can't tell you how many times I've been cut off or 'wronged' by drivers. Far more times than I have gone through a stop sign.
The other thing drivers don't understand is sense of space. They are in a protected steel cage and are 'controlling' thousands of pounds of weight at high speeds. Me, 200 lbs of flesh, rubber, and steel tubes. There are some drivers that I feel are fine and nice people - they let you go first, they smile, they don't race around you just so they can make it to that stop sign a few seconds earlier. But more than not, people in cars - from my experience - just don't give a shit. You're in they're way, wtf, I don't have to deal with this, fuck off - you're not a valuable being.
Same thing goes as a pedestrian, which is my second mode of transportation. I love to walk. When I lived in NYC, I walked that city all the time. I will always walk. And in NYC, the cars are aggressive there, but there are also so many people that there's a different feel to the whole 'critical mass' of peds at a red light with cars coming. Anyone who's lived there knows what I'm talking about.
In SF, it's a different story. We have not yet reached that tipping point in terms of pedestrian density. So when you walk across a cross walk, with the right of way, it's not uncommon to have a car zoom by you before you get out of the middle of the street. Which in my mind, is total bullshit.
Ultimately, I don't feel bad for the cars at all nor do I share their plight. My gf drives a short distance to work (she's pregnant) and when I have to use her car to drop or pick her up, I know what it's like to be on the other side and I make sure I always yield to bikes and peds. I think I'm in a small minority.
Running reds and stop signs by bikes is not the smartest thing to do. But I don't think I'll ever side with car culture here in the U.S. There are just way too many negatives from it now and most people just don't care about you. One thing I'm absolutely waiting for is cars that navigate themselves. When they arrive, then I think I'll support cars again. Until then, I'm 100% on the side of bikes and peds.
He said: there is no need. In Obj-C the selectors should document themselves.
Sure, Java is faster, but people left for/use Ruby (mostly Rails) because making a web app in Java became horribly inefficient. I know, I did this for years and left for that exact reason. Spring, Hibernate, jars that all used different logging that leaked memory in different ways, deploying, verbose syntax - it all became too much for me.
I'm sure Scala will address some of these things, but if anything, I think what will materialize is the opposite of his argument. If anything, faster 'disks' and databases will just allow people to use Ruby or Python even more. I'm not sure Ruby will ever be as fast as Java, but again, that's never the reason why I left the Java world for Ruby/Rails. Productivity was.
NSObject.
I've left two very well paying positions (one at a very reputable design company that designed some of the early Apple & NeXT products) in the past year because I did look in the mirror and realized they were not right for me.
You have to follow your passion, back it up with action, and everything else will fall into place.
The reason to want to live longer? One word: space.
Living hundreds of years in good health will allow us all to become a space faring race. It will allow us to take the long view on interstellar travel, our species and relationships. I'm hoping to see that day and having Steve leave so early only solidifies the importance of longevity in my mind. Intelligence is not meant to die, it's meant to live. We accept death only because we have to and have been powerless to stop it. Technology is starting to change all that.
For the past 10 years I've made a living developing on all kinds of Macs. Couldn't imagine work without them.
Best of all, I loved watching Steve's keynotes. No one can distort reality the way he did.
I didn't even know him, but I feel like I'll miss knowing he's there, ready to present:
"one more thing.."
You have to figure how much is your time really worth?! All the AT&T network b.s. (esp in San Francisco & NYC) that we've had to deal with costs me and my gf much more than the cancellation fee ever will. That said, the cancellation fee is still a load of crap.
In fact, many times I wished for something better and when I would play around with a fat client I would think 'oh, it's not cross platform, never mind' and that was that. In my mind, mobile, specifically the iPhone, changed everything. And on top of that it was JSON.
Nowadays, after feeling like I've done it all, when I approach a project I look for the best user experience. I look for the best design. Then I figure out if it's just web based or a mobile client or both.
Having gone thought HTML on mobile, I don't believe it's as good of an experience as a native mobile app. We had this discussion at my last job - mobile web vs. mobile apps. I the customers voted app hands down.
Anyway, HTML is still great, but like I said, I completely agree with Hewitt on this topic, 100%.
That said, I'm not against people dressing however they want. I don't roll into the office looking like a slob, but I definitely don't obsess about my outfit for the day.
I obsess more about the thought and effort put into the products I'm creating..
Marco.org just had a post (http://www.marco.org/2011/09/23/business-insider) about how biz insider slices and dices his stories for their benefit. (After reading and thinking about his post, I removed BI from my morning reading list).
Honestly, I don't see this getting any better - and I'm usually an optimist. I think FB will make more of these deals with partners and we'll get more and more of the reactionary media type broadcast. All bites of info, very little substance; ADD to the extreme.
I'm in the middle of the argument that FB is bad and FB is here to stay get over it and assimilate. I developed a few FB apps in 09-10 and at first I thought it was awesome. The last app I did asked for a bunch of permissions because we needed access to someone's feed so we could create/read posts that were specific to our app. That was all good, but then I would look at the logs in our server for the feed updated callback and not only would it never stop (was kinda amazing to watch this), but we had access to all these people's feeds - like everything.
I have to think this is typical now and I know most of my relatives (young and old) grant this type of access and don't really understand what it means. In my mind, they clearly do not grep what is possible. And why should they? They're not programmers, they're just regular people.
This coupled with the FB copyright rules pushed me off the platform. My girlfriend still uses it (too much imo), my family uses it, and I still have my profile on there, but I'm not adding any more content. I think at this point it's more important to me - even as a programmer - to live life and create my own things. That's the only counterpoint I can see to a world where it's garbage in, garbage out.
Enjoyed the post, but Rails also provides helpers to 'help' you with view specific logic. Granted, this might not be as fun as a plain Ruby class, but I've used helpers extensively on various projects and whenever I join an existing project, it's one of the first places I look with dealing with the view layer.
One of the nice Rails conventions.
However, I'm all for domain modeling in the beginning, for a beginner. I learned OO the hard way - all by myself and pouring over books. I agree with the OP that a vehicle or duck was not a good model. Having worked with databases and crm's in the past (before they were 'crm's), I always dealt with people, organizations, calls, notes, etc. So when I came across an infamous car example, I was always wondering 'this has no bearing on anything I would do - why not talk about real objects like people?'.
Even before hitting any kind of patterns, it's crucial (in my mind) to understand datatypes, methods, scoping, inheritance, etc. 3 Simple classes like Person, Address, Organization can go a long way.
In my mind, there's no way a beginner is going to understand patterns first. They have to be shown the basics and the have to be handheld when entering the OO way of thinking. One those first few steps are taken, then it paves the way for more complex examples and patterns.
I felt immediately that I got the why and a co-worker and I used two drinks on the card. We talked about it and the concept of the goodwill behind it. We definitely didn't feel like yuppie developers and we talked more about how different the world would be if more things were like this. Even about startups along these lines and what bigger ideas like these could change the world. Yes, a fantasy, but we felt that's what this was about.
Anyway, Odio's OP felt very much like business as usual in a cynical world vs. JC's actually doing something positive (even if it is just yuppie coffee). Odio's recent apology seems hollow and in my mind the damage has been done.
That said, I am a huge fan of cubes/offices/personal spaces. The most productive I've ever been is in those types of environments.
I worked with a company - as a contractor - for a number of years in the beginning of their startup mode. Out of the 4 developers in the company, I was the only one that came into the office. For me, it was lame. Everything over email, im, or phone is not the way I like to work. There's something about face to face that makes a difference. I saw many, many times things getting blown up out out of proportion because it was not conveyed correctly over email or im.
I want that social interaction that you can only get being face to face with other devs - lunches, coffee, after work drinks, etc. Not only that, there's all kinds of office activities like whiteboarding, pairing (I know you can do this via remote too, but again, face to face is still valuable), going over to someone's desk and just talking about something.
The other thing I've noticed at my office is we need to now bring in all these other tools to keep everyone apprised of when builds have been deployed, etc. And all these tools detract from the amount of time someone can focus on something - there are guys that have all this hooked into their im and it's really distracting when you're sitting with them.
In closing, I'm of the opinion that I would prefer to have everyone in the office 5 days a week. If someone wants to work at home a day here or there thats totally fine, but overall, I've just experienced it not being beneficial for the group.
I've often found that doing some kind of 'reset' helps. Sometimes this means completely stopping any kind of computer or business related effort. In the past, I've done things like traveling, etc.
As for failure, don't be too hard on yourself. If you do a little bit of searching about Silicon Valley stories, you'll see a repeated theme: people fail a few/many times before their big success. I'm on my fourth 'failure' already. ;) Bottom line is pick yourself up, dust off, and try again. You have plenty of time still - trust me.
Another suggestion might be to go to some kind of code/programming meet ups. You'll met all kinds of people there and that chance meeting that could spark it all to happen, you gotta be out there among other creative people.
Good Luck!
Just look at the thread on this email and you'll get the sense of the typical org finger pointing downward spiral.
But look at how Jobs handles something similar: "When you're the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."
I'll leave it at that.
For my day to day (Rails and iOS programming) there isn't a huge difference in the two.
Obviously Lion has more UI changes than SL. There are some nice little things - lots more polish. I don't really use the Mission Control stuff on Lion nor the LaunchPad (gives it iOS app groups/paradigm).
One nice thing about Lion is restarting the machine. You can have it pin the apps on different desktops on startup and 'resume' where you left off. This also happens with Terminal - open a new tab and you're in the same dir as the previous tab.
Some disk access/app launching seems faster in Lion. Other than that, there's not a lot of stuff that feels different. I suppose you'll have to upgrade at some point just to not be 'left behind'.
But overall, imo, very similar experience.
I'm reading a great book called Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, by Paul Dix. He states a lot of the issues that our team is running into with a monolithic app. Seems also that these issues can apply to other frameworks outside of Rails (I've run into some of these same issues years ago with Java web apps).
The main point of the book is figuring out how to abstract out various layers of the app into standalone services. I've talked to people about this and a lot of the time they recoil at the fact that you would increase the complexity of the app by adding yet more parts (services) that require separate machines, deployment dependencies, and their own data stores. However, looking at big sites like Amazon or Twitter shows how one needs and can break apart their systems to make it easier for developers to focus on particular pieces as well as increase system performance.
I'm going to be joining a new startup this year as the technology lead and all these things are on the table. I'm evaluating node, some NoSQL dbs, some cloud paas', etc. I'm also going to be designing from the beginning fast fail and services - or at least an architecture that makes it fairly easy to start migrating parts of the system over to their own standalone services should the need arise. I don't think you can plan for everything, but with the way technology is moving forward and the tools available today, you need to keep SOA at least in the back of your mind.
I've been in high level meetings with business guys before and watched them say "yah, we can do that", knowing we could not. While, in theory, saying yes might be a 'positive step in the right direction', what it usually means is all engineers will be working god-awful hours to get the work done. What is done is then usually sub-par because there wasn't enough time to think about the problems to be solved. Sometimes, code and great architecture come quick. But more often is slow and iterative. Having insane deadlines and workload because someone says yes is just a bad idea all around.
But I would even step back a bit from the computer science aspect for beginners. One thing that was very hard for me was abstraction. When I first tried learning OO programming, it was very frustrating. The problems that people modeled did not make any sense. A car has a wheel which is composed of a tire, etc... I felt like I needed real concepts. I always liked the 'User'. A user has as name, age, height, etc. It can also have multiple addresses. Once you have basic info like this, you can start doing things with or to it. Authentication is a perfect example.
Having a concept (a key) that you understand and can work with and model - like the User example - not only starts you on your way as a programmer, but also provides the bridge to learning other languages. And when I was younger, this is exactly what I did, I brought my 'key' (a User/Person) with me, started small, and built out from there. This was before understanding data structures, algorithms, patterns, etc.
So my ultimate advice (besides staying honest and being able to say no or I don't know) is have a simple 'key' concept you understand inside and out. This can open all the doors later down the road.
Kinda like that one girlfriend that messed you up so bad that once you got over everything and realized life was ok, you never felt like rolling by her house ever again. :)
If you asked me today what language would I use for a new web project, I don't think I'd pick a C based language. I don't really have much against that class - I use Objective-C every day. But I think it really comes down to the frameworks and libraries.
I spent the better part of the dot com coding in Java and C++. Towards the end of my Java days, the time it took to get ideas from paper to usable screen with JSPs, Spring, Hibernate - for one developer - seemed like forever. To make matters worse (and not so much Java's fault), I normalized the shit outta the database (a dba would have loved it) and having that fine grain of a data model just added insult to injury. So when I look at 'Java hate', I don't per say outright hate it, but I'm adverse to using it - especially for anything web. If you have a nice SOA, then I could see maybe using it for some services.
The last Java coding I did was in 2006 - that was my last Java contract client. After that, I switched to Ruby/Rails and that was that. A typical story I'm sure. Do I go to meetups and bash Java? No. Is the "eww, that would be like Java" heard around our office (current company is a Rails shop)? Yes.
However, my current company is hitting a ceiling with Rails. The fat model paradigm is starting to break down. Like us, as your project/app/company starts getting bigger and bigger, you start to hit growing pains with Rails. So I've been looking back at my Java history to find other patterns that were used to take some of the weight off the models and Modules where people have been putting things. Basically, Rails (IMO) is great to get you to a certain point, but after your system grows to a certain size, you have to start thinking about other ways to architect it. I think this is where SOA comes in and the data exchange is all done via json.
Would we consider using Java for any service? Probably not. Why? Because of the time and resources required to actually deploy the services. Like TFA says, Java picked XML. If someone actually made a simple app server where apps could be setup and deployed via properties (remember those?), then that might take some of the Java deployment sting out. Or, maybe if our team grabbed a dedicated release engineer, that might help.
So in the end, I don't think of myself or anyone I work with insecure about learning a new language. Most of the devs I work with came from a Java background. What makes more sense is being able to iterate very quickly over your ideas and just get shit done. This is why Ruby/Rails has been so successful. I don't find being cynical about Java a weakness at all. What would be worse in my mind is to get someone in who is not productive with the tools they're using. And for me writing web apps, I just don't feel productive using Java and its associated frameworks/libs/tools/servers.
I'm probably a little older than most of the Y crowd. I've worked at a few very successful startups - pre and post dot com. For one of them, which changed the travel industry, I was literally one of the first people to put down code and my own stab at defining their architecture - I was there before there were any formal employees.
But now, I have a kid on the way, never really made millions (sorta got close), can't seem to find that 'magic' again, and there is definitely that notion that time is fleeting. Over the past decade I studied a lot of philosophy - mostly buddhist and hindu. I meditated, quieted my mind, enjoyed my moments, and felt very peaceful while the world flew by. I dropped out of working for a year to learn how to write electronic music (played music my whole life, got pretty good at the electronic stuff) - this was probably the happiest I'd been in a long time and I 100% did live day to day, creating, constantly getting better.
Lately over the past few years though, life's changed. The thought that I am getting closer to getting older and starting a family adds additional pressure. It seems much simpler when you're by yourself - which is why monks follow that route. Ultimately, we make the decisions we make and we have to learn from them.
As someone who's been programming most of my life, loves technology, and still appreciates the latest and greatest, I'm still drawn to it. At this point, I can see how things should work and feel like I really appreciate things that are designed well. However, there's only so much time in the day and I don't really crank on code for 10+ hours anymore. I keep thinking that I can compete with a lot of people for tech knowhow, but maybe my real potential is to pass all this on to the next generation.
I'm sure that I've been more fortunate that a lot of people on this rock, but I still don't feel I've felt that success I've wanted and, yah, it does feel like time is running out.
However, it hurts the artists disproportionately more, but this is because artists get a paltry amount anyway. So they get less or none of their $.35, but labels get none of their $15.
My hope for all this is that artists will just empower themselves and use the newer channels of distribution the internet offers. I can't in the least bit, after all their congressional lobbying to restrict the public rights and expand their corrupt initiatives, feel bad - ever - for the RIAA or labels. Everyone knows their fat, lumbering, dinosaurs..
I think back there's a common belief in nerddom that it's gotta cover all these technical topics or else it's bad. Most people that use iCloud will not care about anything else other than the fact that their data 'magically' appears where it's needed. This is where I completely agree with Apple and diverge from the tech crowd - the best experience should just work.