j1z0

While it may not mean jobs for laid off rust belt workers if there were a number of tech workers living in the rust belt they would spend most of their salary in the rust belt which could very well lead to jobs in other sectors in the region.

Hillary guarantee more wars than a man who is openly prejudiced and hostile to both Muslims and Mexicans? As Secretary of State did she not work on building foreign relationships and brokering peace deals? Why would you say her election guarantees war?

this is an extremely self serving article given that the author sells a tool (for $29/ month no less) that writes the code for you. Wonder why he doesn't like code academy's. There is some truth to the fact that a lot of people don't make it through code academy, but I would take this article with a grain of salt.

What about the power wall for utilities. I haven't heard of any other similar offerings. That seems even more important than the home based ones. Plus open sourcing designs to the gigafactory. Hey Branson want to step up and build one on your side of the pond?

Correct me if I'm wrong but are not hydrogen and helium two of the most abundant elements in the galaxy? If we ever were to let it all float into outer space (if that's even possible) by then couldn't we just harvest it in space? I know that's by no means cost effective with today's technology but we're talking decades before we might actually run out right.

It's funny, regarding the "indies can't be profitable anymore aspect of the article" I read a very similar article 10 years ago entitled, custom web development is dead... then five years ago entitled 3rd part web design is dead, now it's app development. My guess in a couple years we will be reading iOS extension development is dead...

That's just the world we live in. Init? There is no standing still in the IT industry.

Yes let's move towards more coarse grained tests so we can lets the fine grained subtle bugs slip through. You know stuff like heartbleed. Theres a good idea.

To be fair a lot of unit test regimes wouldn't have caught something like heartbleed. Specifically cause it's a security issue and not necessarily a functional issue. But the point is software is damn complex and easy to screw up.

Maybe rather than doing ultimately less test (system instead of unit). We should be slowing down doing even more test at ALL levels (unit, system, GUI, security, performance, whatever) and building something to the best of our abilities. Or does that even matter anymore in the MVP build and sell quick software world?

Thanks for the link.

As for CBS. I don't want your g@$

It seems to me it's just a matter or priority. The line share of US Gov spending is Healthcare (+ medicare / medicare) covert that to a BI + take a bit out of defines and "income protection / veteran benefits" and you wouldn't have to raise taxes at all.

The question is would it be more effective than "specialised" programs, and all the literature I have read seems to say yes (although, it's all based on educated guesses). So switch all the "specialised" programs to BI plus take a bit extra from defense and your there.

What's more important? Total domination of all oceans in the world, or peoples happiness? (Assuming that BI actually works as described in the article)

Wow. Such an awesome article. I really enjoyed reading it.

To anybody reading this article, While Dr. Spencer does have real credentials, he is a know denier. I'm not saying that makes him necessarily wrong, but he is extremely biased in his views, and often publish research to back up those biased views. So I think he's comments should be taken with a grain of salt.

This is an excerpt (modified to fit a blog post) from the book I'm currently writing on Python web development with Django. Would love to get feedback from people. Is it useful? Does it cover the topic well? Thanks.

j1z0

I for one don't really care about the motivations of these companies. Im just glad they are doing something about it.

This NSA debacle is just one more nail In the coffin of American Emperialism. And America better wake up and change her ways if she wants to continue to enjoyed the privllaged global position she has had for so many years.

Your post on flask and rethinkdb is great. Very helpful indeed.

I don't entirely agree. I see your point, but let's not make perfection the enemy of progress. The more vendors that take bitcoin, regardless of what they do with it after they receive it, the more viable the currency is. "Real People" want a currency they can spend. So the more vendors that accept bitcoin the more long term widespread adoption bitcoin will have. Which is what you want right?

I agreed totally with the every american should change a tire thing. And learning to code is awesome, we need more developers, or even if people won't be developers at leafs they have some idea what is involved.

Next step, teach everyone in america, how to keep windows free of viruses... nah... maybe teaching everybody to code is easier. :)

The three main reasons the article gives for why bit coin will fail:

"Its value is uncertain, its legal status is unclear, and it could easily become valueless if users lose faith"

Is this not also true of state run currency? Have we not seen massive deflation during the great depression, in Israel, in Russian and in many other part of the world?

The legal status is an interesting one, but given that the feds got some 31million (and rising) USD worth of BTC from the Silk Road seizure I doubt they will make BTC illegal.... But it could happen in the future.

Loosing faith, well believe it or not this is true of all currencies. That is why it's called Fiat, there is nothing other than faith behind currencies.

So really the only issue is the legality, which basically translates into government regulation, which is what we already have for "state run currencies", so at worst BTC becomes regulated by the state and becomes more of a "state run currency". In some views I guess that is failing, but that means that worst case it will end up like cash but with a lot of technical benefits.

I think the real issue with BTC is deflation, and that will probably continue for a long time. At least until all the BTC are out, if not for much longer.

When you say "but without government important initial >research which is costly and unprofitable can't be done"

No that is not what I said at all. If your going to quote somebody quote them correctly. What I did say is that SpaceX wouldn't be possible without NASA. And not to short change SpaceX cause it's an amazing company and they do really cool stuff, it is true that they are building on-top of the tech developed by NASA, and that NASA, in the form of a very large contract to shoot rockets into space also funds (to an large extent) SpaceX. So I don't think you can really argue that point.

To your more general point... You obviously don't like the government, and honestly I don't really either, I agree with you that they are a bunch of bureaucrats and mess up a lot of stuff. But don't let you feelings about the government cloud your vision. As said in the original article for the vast majority of cases Industry does not have the appetite to fund Huge project, i.e. large capital expenditures with very long timelines to pay back the money.

Yes you could come up with cases where industry has, but the majority of these type of project have been funded by the government, and unless we change the rules by which our entire economy operates the government is likely to be the only one to continue to fund them. So rather than just hate the man (if we really want to get these type of things done) we would be better served figuring out how to work with him, or change the quick profit driven model which drives our economy... To me working with the government, as bad as it may sound, is probably an easier task.

Don't forget it was the Government that INVENTED the internet. They also heavily funded or helped to invent cellphones technology and micro-chips not to mention the research that brought us touch screens and GPS as well. So perhaps the government isn't all bad and for things like the Hyperloop they should get involved.

I think the real issue that is being talked about in the article is that long term, large scale "moon-shot" type projects are extremely difficult to launch in the private market, but history has shown us that the government is actually much better at such long term "moon-shot" things.

Sure SpaceX is cool and makes rockets for far cheaper than the government ever did, but with out a few decades of NASA spending a ton of money trying to figure out how to get into space in the first place there would be no SpaceX.

So I think what really needs to be looked at for projects like the Hyperloop is Government / Private partnership. Maybe even let the government take a stake in the company and earn revenue in the future to offset / repay all the tax dollars invested. Because unlike private equity, cash-flow is actually quite important to the government and they they are well suited to help out in situations like this.

Flask is awesome. Tdd is awesome and this tutorial is awesome! Thanks for sharing.

I for one really like the article. Yes it's true engineering projects aren't anywhere near as perfect or on-time as people often given them credit for, but that's exactly the point. People often expect engineering project to fit a agh exile exactly. The article is about changing that perception and dealing with the reality that as an industry we don't estimate very well at all. So we need to change the metaphors to get people to understand more clearly what is I we are doing. And the Gardner metaphors is apt. Great Article!

Given that I run a consulting company I spend a fair amount of time on each side of the interview table. Both recruiting for contractors to help with a project and trying to convince others that I'm the right guy / company to develop the system.

That being said I think this list of questions is excellent. I would be much more inclined to hire someone who asked these questions than someone that didn't.

Somewhat conversely as an interviewee I would be at least slightly concerned with a company if I had to ask these questions. This is basic ground that any good interviewer should cover in an interview and if thy don't they may not be looking for the type of development styles that I like most.

Interviewing is a two way thing both sides should be choosey and neither side should settle for something less than ideal. If we all found jobs / employee that we love then the workplace would be some much better off for it

I have a software consulting firm in Malaysia and we use google hangouts, Skype, GitHub, and a cloud hosted CI setup to run all of our projects. We have a team that spans from south america to Australia and it works fantastically well.

The key for us is our daily SCRUM meetings, always on Skype chat room and a rule that everybody must commit and push something at least once a day.

This works beautifully for us and the people that we work with often really enjoy the experience. Also since we span time zones we have a couple Brazilian developers that work while the rest of us are asleep (but they do show up for the daily SCRUM meetings). This actually turns out to be really helpful sometimes when we have a hard deadline as we can effectively work round the clock.

For our company remote working is the only way to go.

I don't know about rails in particular. But there are zero Java jobs. That's gotta say something about Java, which ironically used to be seen as the innovators language.

Well if you use functools like you started with in your lead up examples your talking about what two lines of boilerplate (functools decorator and function definition)? Personally I often times just add the four lines of boiler plate and forgo functools.... Look I'm not saying that your library is a bad idea; Its neat, in fact it seems to handle a few thing better than the more well known decorator library does.

( Out of curiosity though how about the functions signature, I think functools doesn't maintain the original functions signature but I think decorator does, what does funcy do? )

For me personally I feel its better to have the decorator all in one place where you can see everything that is going on, and making it a class makes it pretty straight forward to understand.

The article is interesting but really if you want to make decorators easier to understand don't introduce another layer of abstraction, use a class. The __init__ function handles the decorator arguments just like you would expect from a class. The __call__ function is called when the decorator is called, just return your new function and well; your done. And it's all pretty straight forward.

100% agree here. Way to many Rails developers around for it to die. Also as cool as Meteor is, and it's pretty cool. There is a huge continent of developers that will resist javascript for as long as possible, because even though it is ubiquitous, let's be honesty, it does suck in a number of ways. Ruby / Python / Go / etc.. are all so much nicer languages from a developer happiness perspective. Ultimately javascript will become more and more prevalent for sure, and Meteor along with it, but only because all the browsers decided to support it, NOT because of developer happiness.

Look I'm American who has been living in SE Asia (mostly Malaysia) for the past 10 years. I've spent lots of time and worked in lots of countries here including Vietnam, Thailand, Philipines, Singapore, India and obviously Malaysia.

In Asia a work visa is intended for foreigners working for locally incorporated companies. Regardless of what it says on the websites, if you have a tourist visa you are free to startup / bootstrap your new enterprise. If your coding up a new website, hosting it on Amazon and serving customers over the internet your not really doing business and the country your living and honestly no body cares. It's cool.

If you want to start selling to locals, offering consultancy services to locals then yes you should probably get a visa. But of course you don't need the visa until you are actually doing that.

People who quote websites stating "facts" about visa's in SE Asia obviously don't know how the law works in SE Asia. In SE Asia the law is a guideline and your clout / how you treat people is much more important than the words written on the page, when it comes to the courts and the interpretation of the law.

So if you want to bootstrap in Asia, chillax and just do it. If your too worried about it, your probably won't adjust well anyways.

The Firebug story is a good and a bad thing. For starters the only reason I still use Firefox is because Firebug is awesome. In the article at least Firefox gives credit to Firebug where it's due, but it's a bit like OS X notifications taking Growl's idea and leaving Growl to rot. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but it's a common story now a days. Indie developer develops something awesome for big companies eco-system. Big company takes idea and leaves indie dev to die. I am not privy to the entire story but it sure would have been nice if mozilla could have at least done an acquire-hire for the Firebug team (assuming they wanted it). You know show some love for the greatness they gave to the dev community.