In other news in 9 months:
Closing of "Adblock Plus" forces millions of ABP users to waste 90 seconds to search for an alternative. Film at eleven.
Seriously, WTF?
This is probably just some publishers organisation trying to show publishers that "they are doing something!".
If these guys know how to play it right, Node.js is history. He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.
I hope this new project knows how to manage things and do good marketing.
Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.
So my post got marked troll? That's interesting.
Could there be some techno-religious blindness going on here?
How about an insightful rebuttal?
Like, "no you're wrong, there are new designs for fission reactors that are reasonably safe and leave no bad garbage and no nuclear wasteland if they blow up" or "study x,y and z show 70% of humanity is going to die of agonizing pain if we cut power usage by 40% so we're damned to use it" or something.
Nobody can take the responsibility of their garbage for 400 000 years or more. Nobody.
One gram of Plutonium can terminally poison 50 million people and has a half-life of 24 000 (twenty-four thousand) years.
The danger of nuclear may be exaggerated wrongly, but not to much. You can't exaggerate the risks of nuclear to much.
Nuclear fission power was a cute, albeit not very elegant, techno-romantic idea of the 70ies. Right now fauna is flourishing in chernobyl, because humans moved away. It's the last generation of mamal-scale life celebrating. If the microbiology in chernobyl is any indication, it will be a nuclear wasteland in a century, maybe with some fungi flourishing.
There is a plain and simple fact: Nuclear Fission is too dangerous, especially in the hands of short-sighted, rather unwise human beings. It's a naive toy that produces wast amounts of heat, small amounts of incredibly long-term dangerous waste and a little electricity on the side.
Anybody with two braincells to rub together can see that, TV sensationalism or not. Friggin' high-tech Germany isn't decommissioning fission for no reason.
Chernobyl, Fukushima and just these minutes some plant in the Ukraine again. A longer stretch of those in the next few decades, and we have yet another huge environmental problem on our planet. I hope we get the curve.
It's exactly the other way around.
Want experienced pros who can rescue your projects from total disaster?
Treat them like humans.
It's the companies that need to hone their social skills. End of Story.
Point in case: I am - once again - in a gig with an agency. They took some effort to convince me to give them a try. We did 2 months of contracting to try things out, then I came on.
"Change Management" "Corporate Publishing"
However, and here is where it gets interesting:
I've rarely worked with such kind, forthcoming and polite people. The respect that I'm treated with and the patience with which the team treats me when I can barely hold back my techie-frustration I've rarely seen. I've seen so many asshole agencies in my life that I'm still genuinely suprised how this shop completely breaks the mold in my book. It's a team that lacks the in-house experience and actually is aware of the fact. Aside from that, they are a refreshing experience after years of too much crap.
I've seen so many shops in which devs are treated like shit - that they themselves have lost their social skills or have no interest in using them, is of no surprise to me.
I've come to the conclusion, that I'd rather work with the sort of company I am in now that with some so-called dedicated web-development team that can't treat their members like normal people.
Bottom line:
That social skill thing works both ways. I've taken such amounts of crap from corps and companies in this industry that I find conclusions like those of the GP laughable at best. In most cases their just plain wrong.
I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd.
Never said PHP was good.
But PHP *is* better - in more ways than one. If anything, PHPs badness is its advantage.
Rails and the Ruby team try to do everthing right - that's why they get stuck in layer and layers of package management, mandatory deployment automation, to many options, crummy documentation and constant breakage, dependancy hell, etc.
It takes minutes to get to real work on the app layer in PHP, days in Rails/Ruby. I can download the newest Zip of Wordpress and have a site running in 30 minutes. Yes, WPs architecture is bizar and beyond sanity, its ERD is a crime against humanity, but it works! Same with Joomla, Drupal and the lot.
Yet the PHP people had Frameworks up and running in no time. CakePHP is an official Rails clone in PHP - and by now way more stable and consistent. Symfony, Zend and Flow are all three Frameworks that tout the newest and bravest of programming paradigms and just as easy to deploy and set up as any old PHP WebCMS. Meantime Rails is still navel-gazing. I doubt it will maintain its critical mass. If anything JavaScript all-over (Client- and Serverside) is coming with Node.js. If anything, that will touple the PHP reign - allthough I'm not holding my breath on that one - for one, Node.js is callback hell for large non-trivial applications.
David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.
I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.
The Rails crew knows the Django crew and vice-versa from the very beginning. They're basically drinking-buddies.
Rails simply was the favourite scripting language inside 37 Signals (DHHs favourite PL to be percise), so they developed their internal Basecamp Tool with it.
And built Rails as a foundation for that.
Basecamp became so popular with 37 Signals customers, they decided to turn it into a service.
Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)
Rails was and is a fad - plain and simple.
Every haphazard PHP project runs circles around it - for the simple fact that deploying PHP is dead simple, whereas with Rails it's a major PITA. Rails was discovered and hijacked/promoted by the Java community - and while they were all happy and gleeful about the lightweight convention-over-configuration approach they didn't know until then - the Rails & Ruby community bloated Rails beyond repair big-time-Java-style with libs, extensions, mandatory deployment systems that only a very small minority really needs, etc. Rails ran into walls in the real world and the abysmal arrogance of its community scared n00bs away.
The truth is, nobody needs rails. PHP and its big frameworks are faster and easyer to develop for, both PHPs and Pythons communities are way more n00by friendly and for people who need something big, easy and scalable there's projects like Plone (Python) or Typo3 Neos (PHP) for massive non-trivial installments, each with hundreds of active developers to back them.
The only thing that Rails had going for it was a website that didn't look like shit - back in a time when most FOSS websites mostly *did* look like shit - and the brand-new concept of screencasts to show of scaffolding and code-generation. That has changed thankfully, throughout the FOSS community. Scaffolding - definitely not a first with Rails - is now well know as a concept and commonplace. And the FOSS projects are finally aware that marketing, including websites that don't suck, is important. That's the overall improvement that Rails brought along.
But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated, unwieldy and buggy to be of any use for a web-project beyond enthusiasts fiddling with it. I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development. With PHP its download MAMP, XAMPP or "apt-get install mod-php" and start progging.
So, yeah, no steam, only hot air.
And, yes, from what I can tell, the hypes been over since about 2 years.
My 2 cents.
In private powered transport, cars aren't the most expesive element anymore. Unjamed roads and especially parking space are. In Europe at least.
So, yes, if we'd all take a step back and turn on our brain, no one would want to own a car, they'd rather own the right to use a reservationable parking space. Cars would be used on-demand.As they are in the car-sharing offerings poping up all over Europe - even in Germany! German automotive manufacturers actually are scratching their heads, because there is a whole generation growing up in Germany just now that simply isn't interested in buying cars.
Our cities are absolutely packed with them.
So, yes, there are tons of insentives to move the burden of ownership somewhere else, away from the private owner.
There's probably some truth to that.
Three possible explainations:
1) I could imagine that overall presence of higher education is more dense in Europe than in the US.
2) Right now, life in general probalby sucks more in the US than in central/western Europe, hence the need for more distraction.
3) The US is used to quick sensations in media due to their TV history. In Europe the viewing habits are more
Small? Specialize and get billing, taxes, legal and ERP covered. Legal and taxes are other people, billing an ERP can be done with online tools like FreshBooks or small to midsized softwarepackages like Lexware.
What practices you need is up to you - especially if you code alone.
It also depends on the code you write. If it's just custom ABAP scripting for a handful of clients at a time, point and click testing and a few manually checked testpositions ought to be enough.
If you want to deliver software to a wide range of customers, perhaps even online, with demo-versions and stuff you *have* to have your pipeline standing, even and especially if you are alone. You want to be able to compile and deploy a hotfix wih a mouseclick.
Ask yourself: if the worst possible szenario happens with my software, will I be able to fix it inmediatel? If the answer is yes, with a few night-shifts and my leet Google searching skill I ought to manage somehow - that's OK. If the answer is no, compiling for XYZ takes days of time each time around - then you're doing it wrong and need to automate your process (more).
As for the business itself: Specialize in a field and a subset of that. There is no other way you can keep up with the big boys as a small shop. ERP, Web, Embedded, DB, etc. They all have their ups and downs and each have countless subcategories you can specialize in. Do it! Do not look left or right, unless you don't have any customers in the current field.
Good luck!
You people talk about terraforming mars or venus as if that were so easy.
Newsflash: Mars and Venus are very far away. Like, I mean, enormously freaking huge distances.
It took rosetta 10 years to rendevous with a comet that's basically crossing through earths nearest neighborhood. And that was a satellite the size of a car. And it did not have to transport and sustain humans and their life-requirements.
Until significant advancemens in getting stuff to orbit, massive advancements in material and propulsion technology and massive advancements in synthesizing materials, food, air and water have come by, we're pretty much stuck on this planet. If these advancements don't come, then we're stuck here for ever. We might aswell learn to behave that way.
Bottom line:
If humanity is to dumb to stop itself from killing itself on this planet, it has nothing lost on some other planet. That's my opinion anyway.
If we're talking about the kind of hacks you'd normaly think of when thinking of cars that would probably be some 2-3 decade old ex-soviet military car. In a pinch you can repair those with a paperclip. Some of them also have awesome features. I've heard of a transporter that can deflate and inflate its tires... while driving! They used that feature to adjust the tires to the ground the transporter would pass over. More traction in snow and sand and stuff like that.
An old us-army jeep probably is pretty hackable aswell. As goes for dune-buggies and other kit-cars.
As for hackable electronics in cars - I'd rather add those myself.
It's not that there are not enough viable alternatives to Overlord Google.
This is a spider.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
