solofounder2

I think enormous sprawling enterprises who's infrastructure has evolved over decades really need something like docker in order to consolidate what used to feel like a tangled mass of different tech. For that use case docker probably saves top firms a ton of money by reducing overall complexity in their operations.

However for early stage web startups especially ones that use the JVM there are only really likely to be a handful of diverse technologies in play. A typical example: nginx, jruby, redis, kafka, <primary persistence tech goes here>. Now at first glance you might look at this and see 5 diverse systems and think "these guys could probably benefit from docker", and perhaps some could, but I personally think that a growing number of shops feel like it's a waste of time and resources, and here is why:

Although there are five separate systems in the example above the truth is that developers are not sitting around writing nginx config files all day, nor kafka config, nor redis config, nor Mysql config files. Those are things that you only have to setup correctly once and then you only change gradually, a few lines here and there over the lifetime of the business until you settle in on the most optimized configuration for your workload.

99.9% of your team's changes will only touch the "application layer" which in this example resides on a single runtime environment (the JVM). Teams who utilize the JVM in this way usually don't feel "pinned in" by it since after all the performance is there, the mature profiling tools are there, the library ecosystem is there, and there are diverse programming languages, frameworks, and multiple programming paradigms all of which ride atop the JVM. examples: (Java, JRuby, Scala, Clojure, Vertx.io (non-blocking io/javascript), Lift, Akka, spray.io, Play, Immutant, Wildfly, etc)

What I'm getting at is there's really no good excuse for a team who standardizes on the JVM to ever need to go outside of that paradigm unless perhaps they're writing a C extension to optimize some tight loop, but these days the JVM's optimizing bytecode compiler is getting pretty decent at doing that for you.

If 99% of your application code (the code that is updated continually) runs on the JVM then even if you have a micro-services architecture with several different programming languages in use you don't really need to lean on a containerization technology to standardize deployment because all of it is already under the same runtime environment roof anyways. From an operations standpoint all your build/deploy step really needs to do is ship jar files around over the network irregardless whether it's a clojure service, or a scala, or ruby app. And all of it can be monitored in a clean way thanks to the monitoring support built into the JVM called JMX.

To use docker in such a situation is to just waste system resources and to increase network IO (moving heavy disk images around) for no reason. Instead you can just use shell scripts or Ansible to provision an instance and then rely on the JVM's own venerable mini-containerization primitive (the jar file) as the standard way to deploy apps across your fleet.

To each his own though..

One wrong does not make another wrong right.

True but the two neutralize each other when thinking in terms of a running tally of gender-specific offensive terminology.

used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning

the fact that it's considered less offensive simply illustrates a bias towards the acceptance of gender-specific negative remarks or "putdowns" when they're directed away from the feminine and towards the masculine. This goes to my point that actually women do throw a lot of these remarks around but we've just learned to tune them out. If a man makes a 'putdown' remark towards a young lady in class which references the female reproductive anatomy then he's on shaky ground and theoretically could have to worry about a lawsuit, but not the other way around.

4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"

I don't know a ton about the word "emo" but I assume it means "overly emotional" and the word "bitch" is a gender-specific word which insinuates that she's not attractive. While I'm sure we both agree that such a rude and insulting phrase is a terrible thing to say to anyone it's still only aimed at the individual.

On the other hand when you use a phallus reference as an implied negative connotation then you've just made a sexist remark because it denigrates an entire gender.

If I had to choose one or the other I'd rather my mother or daughter be exposed to rudeness or insult before obvious yet normalized sexist remarks.

If that were the case then the first step might be to somehow get grown up women to accept the root cause of the problem (young girls antagonizing other girls) because if older women are blaming the entire issue on men then they're never going to recognize that they may need to have difficult conversations with young women about their biases and behaviors in order to reverse this unfortunate situation..

Instead of accepting the responsibility of doing their part to foster an understanding in young women about subtle forms of bullying they instead prefer to embrace the victim role which is the view that little can be done to resolve the issue without somehow breaking free from their (imaginary) male oppressors.

I agree with Ben Thompson's previous sentiment about Twitter although I take it perhaps slightly further than he would which in my own words is this:

At one point years ago, perhaps for the first time in history, a single company (Twitter) had the opportunity for it's privately owned HTTP API to become a ubiquitous defacto Internet Protocol for a particular type of global communication (the notification message) potentially replacing email. (tweet + privmsg could have threatened email)

If they would have stepped into this integrative role, by keeping the API access open and available as a building block for third party developers then I think this may be precipitated quite naturally.

Just as a small example of what I mean by procotol.. the entire "Internet of things" could likely be running on top of Twitter with the twitter @name serving as the defacto way for your refrigerator to claim it's unique global identity and to route messages to your toaster.

   In addition to kitchen appliances Twitter could largely be serving as the messaging backbone for hundreds of the most popular apps and games if it had opted to embrace the Open Web.  Sure serving as a messaging backbone for the whole world would have put additional burden on their server infrastructure, and it would have allowed third parties to monetize tweets, but it also widens Twitter's on-boarding funnel dramatically because it locks myriad diverse products, games, and services into their API.  

  Instead Twitter chose to lock down their API and focus instead on monetizing what traffic they had already captured.  They turned it into an content discovery portal when it could have been a content discovery portal *and* the defacto Internet architecture primitive powering diverse social communities and integrated into just about every network-enabled device on Earth.  After all even the TV news networks were embracing both the @name and the #hashtag.  But then the executives at Twitter somehow decided to dig a moat around the platform, and then a swamp, and then fill it with alligators I mean lawyers, and now in 2015 Twitter has of all things a growth problem.

  I believe that the true hidden potential of the platform lies in Twitter's potential role as the world's ubiquitous identity and reputation broker.. In other words the @name was more valuable than the tweet.

 I think that if somehow the iron fist is relaxed so that the tweets flow open and free then the world at large would learn to embrace the @name as their preferred way to establish digital identity & reputation in place of the fragmented email+linkedin+website that people use today.

but then individuals like Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall, and Maria Mayer (to name a few) come along and inspire a generation of young women. Maybe the problem is that we simply don't have a worldwide recognized women's role model for Tech yet. Hell there are only a handful of male ones.. people like Gates, Jobs & Wozniacki, Zukerberg, Knuth, Kay, Turing, etc.. inventors of programming languages, famous tech authors (W. Richard Stevens, Sussman & Abelson, etc).. they're pretty much all men. I think that eventually this will change.

"emo bitch"

"that guy was kind of a dick" is an offhand comment that just means "rude" or "jerk" and you hear it all the time from college age women when referencing the slightest deviations from their standards of behavior. It refers to the male genitalia in a negative connotation and is terefor far more explicit than the dog word.

I suspect a more realistic scenario is that it's the other girls who do the mocking and rejecting as a reaction to one person's interest in computer science.. that's the thing.

the question then becomes.. why does the little girl care what the other little girls think ? Why isn't she more than happy hanging out with the more open and accepting group of computer cherishing boys ?

I assume it has to do with social norms, early childhood developmental experiences, not wanting to break certain social guidelines passed down through family values, the anticipation of "dating"..

I believe that it likely begins at middle school or high school instead because this is the age an individual can more easily comprehend what computer engineering is actually all about. What I suspect is that generally speaking both men and women start out on equal footing in terms of having access to a computer to learn on and the capability to learn the craft. I suspect they are also on equal footing in terms of both feeling the same intellectual stimulation, challenge, rush, and sense of self-empowerment that comes after they've built their first program.

Unfortunately from that point on more male than female students go on to more fully grok programming. I believe this is because the hidden costs associated with pursuing the craft are unequal between the two genders. For either gender it can represent a 'ding' on their popularity scorecard so to speak, but the ding is felt far more profoundly for women. One can certainly debate why this is and of course it's possible to trace this phenomena historically back into the days of ancient greek culture and before.

My feeling on the matter personally though is that the cultural norms of highschoolers have simply not had time to adapt to the idea that "geek is sheik" because the sentiment has only existed (outside of hacker culture) for the last decade (and perhaps it's still only a thing in California). In addition to that there has never been a "female astronaut moment" for computer science, so to speak in terms of it breaking into the consciousness of the average teen. This may be a chicken/egg type problem.

I think this is shifting now, but my opinion is that the biases which effected how highschoolers were feeling 15 or 20 years ago about computer science are still skewing the hiring statistics today because there are far fewer women job applicants who have been doing this kind of programming work for 15 or 20+ years...

How many were programming BBS systems in ANSI C back before AOL was a thing, or how many were following along with the early web as the standards (things like CSS) were being flushed out and it's possibilities were being explored (intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_B31nF3sU0&t=2m10s)

According to the statistics there are a lot more men who have been engaged in "Internet engineering" in one form or another for most of their life and this kind of multidisciplinary computer-science background can skew a hiring decision in their favor assuming both candidates are equally well versed with the most current technologies. Young programmers find ways to make up for the often times narrower scope of their experience (lack of a lisp beard) by being really good at the things that they specialize in, and by tracking more closely the cutting edge. I feel there are more women who are joining this cohort every day, but there are still not as many and it's a shame.