How many more companies have these contracts?

Seems like you can pick which vendor gives you the best value based on the use case of your application. Doesn't seem that absurd to me at all.

yeah when i started it was "here's your certs, here's the VPN server IP.. by and don't talk to me ever". I could see it being difficult for a non-tech person to get setup.

One other thing. I work on an Imac and use TunnelBlick to manage the VPN connections. I've had zero issues on a wired connection but sometimes have issues using wifi, the vpn connections will drop and then re-connect after a minute or two. There must be something weird in the office because when I take my mac home i have zero issues on wifi.

I'll answer as best as I can

> Please tell us more about your setup.
We're a Java office in TX with a remote call center in OR and a handful of remote employees ( Chicago ).

> What type of work does the company and you do?
I'm the director of development, we're a j2ee web application development shop with special expertise in Oracle

> Approximately how many users work like this?
All of us ~30

> Does this company operate primarily as a standard physical office environment, or is this a distributed(work from home) startup?
A couple of my developers work from home 3 days a week and most of ops ( the network guys ) work from wherever and, apparently, whenever they want. They're pretty hot shit, published authors, speakers at LISA, etc so they're left alone most of the time.

> Where are the servers, on-site, datacenter, cloud?
We keep our staging and UAT servers on site and colo for production + another colo for failover

> Approximately how many servers?
I have no idea, I know we have some serious SAN gear for the databases. We probably have around 50 virtual servers in our testing setup and maybe 20-25 production server clusters with an average of 3 nodes each. Some physical some virtual.

> What type of applications are used, web, small applications like QB, MS Exchange or SQL systems?
Web applications, we develop/maintain some very large rewards and loyalty programs for the big banks. RDBMS is Oracle, email and IM is handled through Zimbra, project management is handled with Atlassen Jira self hosted.

> What are the negative aspects of this system?
The only problem i've ever faced is the VPN endpoints not staying connected. VPN connectivity becomes mission critical because without it no work can get done. I don't know what they're using for the VPN server, I know ops is a big fan of OpenBSD so it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they are using.

The rj45 jacks in the office are just plain old dirty connections to the Inet. We each have multiple OpenVPN connections on our localhost giving us access to different parts of the network depending on our roles. It's convenient because our workstations work identically wherever we are ( home, work, coffee shop ) and it's convenient when someone leaves because operations just invalidates the VPN certs and the former employee is cut off no matter where they physically are. A side effect is whenever your VPN credentials don't work you're left wondering is you're about to get fired and ops just jumped the gun haha.

I wonder what impact this engine could have on the mobile frameworks out there ( JQM, PhoneJs etc ). The article states that they got the head mobile guy from Facebook. The next few months could get very interesting in that world.

"First of all, you don't need to meet their API spec, they need to meet yours." You're assuming so much in that sentence though. I've had conversations with health insurance companies where when I explain their systems are completely out of compliance with the protocol specification ( NCPDP 5.1 in this case) and talking to their system requires a whole other layer of abstraction just to transform a proper NCPDP 5.1 transmission into their broken implementation their response is literally "so?". When I ask "well what am i suppose to do with the thousands of patients that have your insurance?" they're response, "turn them away".

My team has been talking about healthcare.gov and all the related woes for a while. Pretty much we're all in agreement that we should thank the baby jeebus every day it's not our project haha. Seriously though, for something this complex, if the team grows to over about 15 people it's doomed. And that's just YOUR side, I have a lot of experience interfacing to insurance providers' systems. Half the time the provider you're trying to connect to is broken and doesn't work per their API docs at a basic level let alone have proper capacity let alone have any sense of normal connectivity. I can't even imagine trying to talk to something as huge as the IRS. I bet it's 6 months before you can get a simple spelling fix on an API method pushed out to production.

I find the technology behind HFT pretty fascinating, the level of optimization is impressive and right out there on the bleeding edge. IIRC there are switches being developed with trading algorithms right in the silicon. I just wished they had something to show for all that work. I'm perfectly ok with the levels of profit and gain but show me a widget or something of value that was produced from the labor. The usual answer you get from this question is liquidity and allocation of capital but if the inventors would be honest with themselves they would realize that's not the case. Trades happening at minute resolution by a human would provide the same level of capital allocation and liquidity as trades happening at the microsecond resolution by machines.

Found this in Wikipedia

"On July 3, 1992, a 27 mile long Rogue wave hit the Volusia County beaches. The wave's range was from Ormond Beach in the north, to New Smyrna Beach on the south. The crest was 18 feet high and centered at Daytona Beach. Sailboats crashed ashore onto cars and many people suffered cuts and bruises from glass and debris. Two people required hospitalization and 200 vehicles were damaged. 75 injuries were reported. The prevailing theory is that an underwater landslide caused the rogue wave, making this wave into a type of tsunami, although others have theorized that it was the result of a squall line."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rogue_waves

I guess it was a rogue wave..

When I was around 14 I was visiting family in Daytona Beach, we were walking on the beach at night after eating dinner listening to the waves for an hour or so then went home. Some time that night a very large wave came ashore and reached all the way up the beach past where the cars drive and where everyone sets up (umbrellas, towels, etc ). The next day, you could see how far it reached by the stains from the water in the otherwise white sand. I distinctly remember the weather man on the news saying it was possibly a "rogue" wave which was the first time I had ever heard the phrase. IIRC there were no storms that night.

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.

If you're going to make the comparison between the two download counts they need to be the same as in unique vs unique or total vs total but not total vs unique.

I'm 37 and was recently promoted from senior dev to director of our development department at my company which means I do the hiring/firing now. I think ageism is real in this industry but, at the end of the day, what matters is results. If you can write good, maintainable, best practice code and deliver on time you will always be employable. Another thing that is key is you have to be willing to learn new things and re-invent yourself as technology evolves. Don't you dare get entrenched in one language, platform, or way of doing things always try new things and approaches. When you tell yourself or someone else "well this is just the way i've always done it" that should set off an alarm.

More tactically, my advice is to read good code and talk to good developers. You can gain a lot of wisdom by just having the guts to ask, expect some odd looks given you're older but all good developers appreciate good code and will help you produce good code. If anyone gives you sh*t about your age write them off as a waste of space and go talk to someone else.