mistyfud

I recently left the Mac ecosystem and bought myself a System 76 laptop. I do a lot of server-side development and running Docker at native speed is a big productivity boost for me. I really do hope they get this sorted out, it's a great technology that has measurably improved the local development experience.

I wonder if services like https://garden.io/ will see more business as a result of these issues? That or more folks will move to Windows or Linux as their primary development machine and reach for cloud-based Mac environments when they need to develop for Apple?

They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt others. You will be complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy dragnets, union busting, monopolistic behavior and lobbying, faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and actual-slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to nations committing actual ongoing genocide — this is only possible because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to work for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to these efforts.

This is the highlight of the article to me. We software engineers are paid a lot of money and gifted many cushy benefits to ignore the negative impact of our work. Just read some of the other responses in this thread for examples!

My question to those who feel this way: do you need that second property? That new car? If you were less insulated from the negative externalities, would you make the same choice?

Not all of us are driven solely by a paycheck. I know I could be earning 2-3x times more at a company like Facebook, but I chose not to because I want to sleep at night. As I have gotten older I've started to learn what actually makes me happy verses what I am told should make me happy. Endless consumption and unfettered capitalism do not make me happy. I can achieve the standard of living that keeps me fed, sheltered, entertained, and saving for retirement without working for a megacorp that hurts people less privileged than myself.

I've been using Elixir for three years in a production setting with a small team of engineers. I still love the language, the community, and everything it has taught me as an engineer. However, there are real downsides to moving forward with Elixir:

- If your engineers are used to the Ruby, JS, Python etc. ecosystems of finding a library for everything, they may become frustrated with the smaller Elixir ecosystem. In my experience, this is actually fine because it means you have fewer external dependencies to wrangle.

- Differences between compile-time and run-time configuration is a foot gun. We ended up moving almost everything to run-time configuration, which is not what you see recommended by many libraries and examples. This is slowly changing however.

- Deployment is a bit unique, and working with building releases can be confusing for those used to deploying dynamic languages that are not compiled.

- Functional programming requires unlearning many OOP best practices. This can slow down engineers new to the language.

A lot of these issues IMO comes from how Elixir was initially marketed as a "fast Ruby" and Phoneix "fast Rails". Once you get past the syntactical similarities you realize the semantics are very, very different. Elixir is much closer to Erlang and Clojure than it is to Ruby.

Elixir is an excellent language for motivated engineers solving novel problems. If you are building a standard CRUD app, I think you will find more success with Rails or Django in 2020.