So I wanted to find out more about this author....

Eric Spiegel is CEO and co-founder of XTS, which provides software for planning, managing and auditing Citrix and other virtualization platforms.

This web site at www.xtsinc.com has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

CLASSIC, so much for "smarter white collared developers" ;)

But I digress...

Look, plain and simple, in the field of software development, education means NOTHING. Why you ask? because unlike true engineering, there are no globally studied curriculums. Now, you may argue about this all you want, but these are facts. CS programs vary so wildly, it's amazing.

Secondly, since most developers don't do any actually engineering, those core CS principles rarely come to play.

That being said, what matters is the individual. There are huge differences from people that went to a tech school 'cause it was cool, someone that went to a top tier school, someone that dropped out ( for any of the reasons ), someone that went to a mediocre schoo, and someone that skipped college and just wanted to speed up their career.

But usually, those differences boil down more so to "candidate pools", and who they "mostly attract".

The good developers, come from all walks. They are the people that go beyond the taught knowledge ( wherever this knowledge may have come from ), and actually understand things from a raw, as close to true engineering perspective as possible, view.

But what do i know, I'm one of those that went to a top tier ivy, EE btw, and then decided to leave on his third year because it was too boring.

www.daylife.com

hehe, shameless plug. But seriously, the future of news is curation and aggregation. :)

Yeah, agreed. Most people get scared of the work, not realizing the savings in time later.

Missed a part..

So you say its hard to package your software? Most scripting languages have modules that allow you to automatically build rpm or debs. Java and C are also trivial to general .spec or deb definition files. Its at most a few days worth of work for one person, and weeks of work in savings.

Automation is key!

What's hard about building packages?

The thing you are not getting, is that with packages, and the infrastructure to support them, you only do the hard work ONCE. So you say its hard to package your software?

A good systems engineer or admin, knows that sometimes taking a little time more to setup things right in the first place, saves an invalable amount of time later.

And to your staff snide.. well, i've managed 300 os installs ( virtual and physical ), with only a developer as a release engineer and me as the admin. Yes, eventually we needed more admins, but it was because of the complexity of our environment, and SLA's, not because of the work of packaging + deployment.

Its amazing, how this seemingly obvious question, always gets weird and overly complex answers.

Think about how every unix os handles this. Packaging!

Without getting into a flame war about the merits of any packaging systems:

- Use your native distributions packaging system.
- Create a naming convention for pkgs ( ie, web-fronted-php-1.2.4, web-prod-configs-1.27 )
- Use meta-packages ( packages, whose only purpose is to list out what makes out a complete systems )
- Make the developers package their software, or write scripts for them to do so easily ( this is a lot easier than it seems )
- Put your packages in different repositories ( dev for dev servers, stg for staging systems,qa for qa systems , prod for production, etc et c
- Use other system management tools to deploy said packages ( either your native package manager, or puppet, cfgengine, func, sshcmd scripts, etc )

And the pluses? you always know absolutely whats running on your system. You can always reproduce and clone a systems.

It takes discipline, but this is how its done in large environments.

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...and that's what has brought both his genius, and his impractical arrogance. He sees the world as a series of yes/no, black/white,1/0 events.

He doesn't compromise, he detests those who disagree with him. while he has brought the gnu license, emacs, and assorted gnu utilities..

- He never finished hurd.
- Constantly criticizes Linus as basically a heretic.
- Doesn't believe in the use of cell phones.
- Doesn't believe in personal hygiene.
- Thinks Bill gates is geniunely evil ( as a person, not the MS guy ), to the point of criticizing the charity work of his foundation.. in his view, who the fuck cares about aids research and feeding the poor, he didnt give us the source code ::sigh::
- Among may other things that would brand the common man an insane diagnosis.

He probably suffers from some form of Asberger, or at least has some other mental illness.

Which has again, brought us free software users many goods... but you have to always be awared of the bad.

Richard Stallman, right or wrong, makes as much sense as "my mom, drunk or sober" ( yes, i stole that remark :-P)

It's interesting to hear this, coming from someone that had a similar experience.

I've always wondered whether my self perceived lazyness was a product of my personality, or the fact that I had such an easy time in K-12.

( Then again, in what am interested in, i'm FAR from lazy... )

Centos is arguably the biggest used "upstream distro" out there... and it's not even listed!!
What gives?

Bah!