Being in Webdev for 15 years I can say that getting the job done quick is all that counts. Most of the web is run by the bizarest of contraptions in software you can imagine - but they get the job done. Take for instance Wordpress: It's a prime example for bad software architecture and the inner platform antipattern.

        But it works. It delivers, Any idiot can download and install WP, pop in a theme and start fiddling. The webev gets called in when the system is all gummed up and feature x,y or z has to be added with magic programming trick (i.e. dirty hacks) quickly.

Same goes for PHP as a PL. Strange, bizar and hilarious, but it get's the job done.

        That's what counts.

        All that been said, it's precisely because of this that your skills as a webdev determine wether you'll have some freedom to pick your job and a fair salary or if you'll be treaded badly. I've been through so many projects that I can tell you even the crappy devs don't mean it. If there's a crew of 5 coding without versioning, that's because their to dumb to know any better and they won't listen to you if you're not ready to walk out of a job that only pays you a McDs salary.

        If however, you've got the skills and the tools, most people will think you're a demi-god. Use whatever technology you want, but be able to deliver. I've started building my own toolkit a while ago - it involves bash-cli snippets and PHP code - and dive into any mess my client/boss requires me to work with, be it Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or whatever. I've since become good enough that I can make some demands, but I have no illusions about my outlook in the webdev world. It is a volatile occupation and unless you move into Java/Oralce, SAP or MS territory, it will stay that way.

        The upside is the freedom we have. We get to use FOSS most of the time as primary tools of trade and get to try out new things 5 times a week - neat. You can't have it both ways.

In a nutshell: If you want to stand your ground, you have to be good at both: Overall problem solving experience and proficient expert knowledge in the current tools of your trade. If you stick to building those mostly from tried-and-true FOSS technologies, you'll keep pointless learning to a minimum. For instance, I make a point of using grep to search for snippets of code in a project. My IDE may be dead 3 years from now, as may be the system I'm using. grep will be around until I die.

My 2 cents.

This looks like snake-oil all around to me.

However, it has me wondering: What if there were BTL chips like in the Shadowrun RPG (Pen & Paper) or those simulations like in the novel "Altered Carbon" were real?

In the Shadowrun RPG BTL ("Better than life" (sic!)) chips are *highly* adictive. Which raises the question: Would you give it a shot? ... I'd probably take a very close look at BTL junkies first. ... And then say no.

As for those simulations in Altered Carbon - I wouldn't mind trying one of those. :-)

My use of goto sounds like everybody else's: if(something_bad_has_happened) goto code_to_fix_it;

In highly modular code with lots of procedures the "goto" may end up as a longjmp(). So be it.

...laura

I've met people who think I'm sort of crazy. Aspergers and ADHD are mentioned.

Here's my take on it:
I do have concentration problems. I am absolutely positively 100% sure that those are due to bad/suboptimal diet and stress during my time in the womb and during early childhood. There is solid scientific evidence that stress in early childhood influences the brain, the perception and self-esteem/perception. That influences behaviour and social standing. No two ways about it. I consider quite a bit of my fellow humans behaviour bizar, unexplainable, pointless and silly. I'm a hunter gatherer in a settler/farmers world. I have a range of choices for my life: Rebel, Leader, Visionary, Terrorist, Criminal, Artist, Specialist.

Being a "normal" person by todays standards is *not* one of them.

I also suspect that I am above average intelligent and thus a lot of what I do or say, although smart, may actually appear crazy to people around me. The problem is that smart people look like crazy people to normal people.

>>>It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jippu Krishnamurty

My last years of school I spent in Waldorf School. It was a Godsend. Art, Manual Crafts, Stagecraft/Performing Arts, Music and vivid practical scientific education. Not a dull moment in School - ever.

I would strongly recommend that you see to it that your kid gets a broad education, and not just the brain treatment, but practical skills and a solid foundation in arts. He'll learn to express himself, he'll learn that there is more to life then the wreckage we often call society and he will also learn humility towards people who fly under the radar in other way - doing manual work or 'unintellectual' labor. Send him to the scouts.
Watch out for nutrition, minimalise media consumption and have him do adventure sports.

And he will also learn to turn the fact that he is a little different into a huge advantage.

My 2 cents.

I've got a mac mini hooked up to a logitech speaker system with a subwoofer and speakers. I use the MacMini remote and frontrow (one reason I won't update Snow Leopard!). Best home player UI ever. I run it over my 22" monitor.

As headphones on the go I now mostly use my new ones from Monster. My new mobile player is my new Yoga 2 tablet with n7 as softwareplayer. Great player, 5 bucks well invested. The search function, the touch UI and north of 6GB of music on the go in a player that can run 25 hours on one charge - that's all magic compared to even the best Aiwa money could by in the 80ies. ... Is that mid-range by todays standards? I would think so. I remember fiddling with cassette tapes and crackly records - that was high-end back then.

My current setup is lightyears ahead of all that. In the nineties when I could finally afford the portable top-notch walkman I had always wanted as a kid and youngster I bought a Sharp MD700 MiniDisk player/recorder which was state-of-the-art. Still works. Also very good and lightyears ahead of anything that we had 12 years before. However, my wristwatch has 10x more memory than one of those disks today and any 5$ mp3 player-stick will run circles around that MD700 in every aspect.

So relative to the past, my entire audio equiment is nothing short of magic.
But I guess I could spend orders of magnitude more money - only wouldn't I get that much out of it.

In short: I voted mid-range, despite being well under 500$ for my entire audio equipment (not counting the Mac Mini).

Simplicity needs to be the new goal in a FOSS OS project like Linux. 20 years ago it was all about getting an alternative to systems that cost north of 100 000$ up and running to be able to do the stuff we all wanted to do but couldn't afford to.

Today leading FOSS solutions and extremely powerful hardware is available in abundance, as are network and cyperpunk-working-coding-and-collaboration resources. It is now that we need to push for simplicity and perhaps even an own hardware standard.

To be honest, putting emphasis on FOSS hardware might even provide the right incentive for exactly that simplicity. Apple won all the Unixers over a decade ago, because it offered exactly that. Zero-fuss out-of-the-box FOSS-*nix functionality. It started losing them ever since the golden cage starting to close and lock. This is a gap the FOSS community needs to fill.

It is, in my opinion, high time for FOSS hardware to move into the limelight. We need to start crowdfunding our own NixBook Airs, flashy pro desktops and servers. ... The librem 15 is a step in the right direction - we need more of that.

If sites like those are your primary sales vector, you're better off at a counter at McD's. Seriously.

As a freelancer, a website (your own!) is mostly or even - most of the time - *only* an amplifier for contacts established in person. You want to do projects for people who couldn't be bothered to look into the internet. You talk to them, give them your card and when they check you out on the web they find this awesome site that underlines and emphasises every positive impression you made. Then they grab the phone and call you. That's what you want. Anything else is non-sense.

Project websites are scooping territory for shady headhunters at best and at worst and most of the time the software developments equivalent of a used-car-sales lot or a flea market.

Exception (sort of) / When registering with a project site might be feasible:
There is one thing were some of the more respectable sites - often those that cost a monthly fee to joing - are a good sales vector: When you are a specialist who's exotic or rare field can easyly be searched for. For instance, if you're particularly good as a Java Developer for some specific environment like JBoss or an SAP ABAP developer or some ultra-certified Oracle person, then the more professional project sites might get you the one or other Gig and the one or other stream of projects going. But even then, these are only a side-orchestra.

Never rely on such sites as your main soucre of income. Stretch out your feelers and get in contact with folks in the real world, that's where the money is anyway. As a specialist freelancer - and in IT you always are a specialist - networking, paperwork and relations is at least 50% of the work.

Good luck from a fellow (former/semi) freelancer.

... Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

Yes, they did.

In another job interview I was asked to write a program to generate prime numbers. I clarified a couple of requirements ("is memory usage an issue?"), and implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It works, you know why it works, any idiot can read the code and understand it, and if testing shows you need something better (in some sense), you know where to start.

...laura

Thanks for the feedback. My conclusion is, that I'm going to look into a few variants of solutions, one main track being ready-made VMs of my favourite installation, the other being Debian FAI. ... I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with Debian for this task, so FAI is probably the way to go. I will look into Puppet aswell, although I'm not sure yet if it's usefull for speeding initial installation and setup of individual systems.

I wasn't aware of the Turnkey Linux stuff, so thanks for that tip aswell.

I also understand the notion that setup and configuration is bascially our job as devs and IT experts, nevertheless, I suspected that the strong presence of LAMP might have brought about something ready-made that speeds up the task a little. ... I'll start rolling my own solution and perhaps put it online some day for others to use. ... Scratch your own itch, they say, don't they?

Once again, thanks for the feedback.

Regardless of the final implementation, there are problems where the simplest, clearest solution is a recursive one. You type it in to the computer as fast as you can type, it compiles and runs correctly the first time, and then, if you need to change it, you have a place to start.

On a job interview some years ago I was asked to write C code to reverse a string. I wrote it recursively: interchange the first and last elements, then reverse what's inside.

They liked my creativity. I got the job. :-)

...laura

The hangers are the adult stage, and if you open your closet very quickly sometimes you can catch them mating.

I told this joke in Japan once and got a polite explanation that (1) socks don't go missing because Japanese people usually hang up their laundry to dry (2) they don't keep other people's pens because they are other people's property and besides they have their own pens (3) hangers don't accumulate because they return them to the cleaners.