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're probably not old enough, but there used to be something called the 80 column mind. This was something that affected programmers who had learned how to use computers back in the days when the punched card was king, and were still writing programs that expected all input and output to fit into that medium's 80 character restrictions. I worked for JPL for a few years in the mid-80's, and even then many of their newer programs used what were called "cardimages:" computer records that were designed to mimic a punched card either because they received input from a program that was a legacy from the old punched card days or who's output would be fed to one. And, of course, sometimes both were that way. I'm sure that they've moved past that by now, for the most part, but I know that their main space probe navigation system was written with cardimages in mind and I doubt that they've ever gone to the expense of having something that works so well re-written.

hey, it reduces end-of-life welfare costs by killing off the population more quickly. The "food pyramid" is good policy if you're a sociopathic bankrupt program.

I got a full blood panel before and after doing a ketosis diet for four months. All my numbers were much better, but to be succinct my total relative risk metric for coronary heart disease (1.0 is average) fell from 0.8 to 0.3. I was using a half gallon of heavy cream and several cups of coconut oil every week. Some bacon and steaks too. Plenty of nuts and cheese.

Most people see similar results. None of these blood tests are new science. All of these studies could have been done in 1980. I wonder if they were.

No, you can run full blown linux on the Amiga if you have a model with an MMU (which an A1200 with accelerator typically does), see https://www.debian.org/ports/m... for instance.
I used to run linux on an A1200 with a 68040, and i still have an A4000 with linux installed on one of the drives.

The 68030 has an MMU providing you don't have the cut down 68EC030 model...
Motorola made an external MMU for the 68020, known as the 68851 i believe.
Some 68000 based machines also used an external MMU, but typically not a Motorola design, eg the early sun workstations.

Isn't the most common scenario for these enterprises where the programmer's customers grow beyond his ability to support just by himself?

So he starts adding people to handle the portions that he cannot, efficiently, handle himself.

If you're going into this wondering what the "ratio of senior programmers to intermediate and junior programmers" should be then I think you've skipped too many steps.

The same with "different tools and/or languages". The 2nd programmer uses exactly what the 1st programmer uses. The idea is to provide support for the founder so he can focus on what he is good at.

OK, a square monitor. Now maybe Apple will announce a round monitor. They already make a round PC, after all. All the Apple fanboys will then insist that round monitors are great.

I see some mod's sarcasm detector was out of order...

Is that an American, Canadian, or Aussie Rules football field?

There's this thing called history, which you're apparently doomed to repeat.

If they were firing at each other, how could they have been fighting on the same side?

And in a response to a post about friendly fire, no less... Fish, barrel--meet gun.

Meanwhile, I humbly suggest that you try a bit harder not to contradict yourself 3 or 4 times in the same post.

I have the world's best manager. Typically, I go to him and say, "Please tell me I'm not allowed to do X." His response, "You are not allowed to do X! (Now tell me who actually needs to hear that you're not allowed to do this, and why.)"

French press, hand grinder, beans, and boiling water, baby. Unadulterated and cheap.

You will never want to touch drip or machine coffee again.

Absolutely. Wasn't it the Bard who said, The first thing we do, let's kill all the process junkies!?

Or, in this more enlightened era, maybe we can send them out to work on a farm for awhile--the fresh air, sunshine, and exercise would do them a world of good, and they'd at long last get the chance to learn a useful trade. Not to mention the most excellent poetic justice factor when they're the ones shovelling the horseshit...

Yes, and there's a Cray I at the Computer Museum here in Silicon Valley, upholstered base and all. You can sit on it if you like. It's not useful for much else.

All modern supercomputers are composed of a large number of microprocessors. The interconnects are faster than with ordinary hosting/cloud operations, but the CPUs are the same. The biggest supercomputer in the world, in China, is 3,120,000 cores of Intel Xeons, running at 2.2GHz each.

The question is whether the problem you're solving needs tight interconnection. If not, you can run it on a large number of ordinary computers. Weather may not be that tightly coupled; propagation time in air is kind of slow.