Folks, I have met about 100 Ritalin victims in my life, and every last one of them were either misdiagnosed or had nothing wrong at all before getting doped up. They used to call it "hyperactivity" and "dyslexia". It's proper name is "Bullshit" and if you aren't assertive about it, you'll be gambling with your children's lives.
I agree that Ritalin is hugely overprescribed, and I think that anybody who prescribes it without proper testing and a suite of supportive therapy should have their license revoked.
However, I personally found it useful at one point in my life, and would definitely consider it (or one of the other ADD meds) if I were to, say, go back to school. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
all i have to say is no, the 'drugs' they offer are little more then sedatives. treating them like they're a 'cure' is not looking at the problem, or the cause of the difficulty. so just passing out these drugs to 35% of US schoolaged children is NOT the answer to the problem (parents who aren't taking an active role in their child's progress, etc)
I agree that drugs should not be the first attempt at a solution, and agree completely that any approach must include parental involvement and non-medication support and training. I'm also glad that you found something that works for you.
But one drug not working for you in the three weeks you tried it means very little about what one of the half-dozen drugs prescribed for ADD might do for somebody else. I found them interesting and useful, and if I had to lead a "normal" life, I might be taking one of them still. Instead I picked a life that suits my unusual attention span, but I don't know that everybody can or should do that.
It's a opensource DIY modular EEG machine that costs around $200 to build (there is also a partialy build version available).
Note to entrepreneurs:
I'm very willing to pay for a complete OpenEEG kit. Sure, I could build one myself, but if I'm trying to treat ADD symptoms with it, how likely is that? I already have a bunch of unfinished projects cluttering up the place. What I want is a solution.
there is a phenomenon observed in ADHD sufferers that shows while playing video games (and some other activities) they focus to the exclusion of all other stimuli, often for extended periods of time. I'm not sure if this is the same thing or a seperate symptom than "zoning out" but it might be worth looking into a bit more.
For me, one of the many Slashdotters with adult ADD, they're pretty different. Zoning out is what I do in a dull meeting. Hyperfocus happens when I'm hot on the trail of some coding victory.
I also zone out in a lot of video games; they're too repetitious to be interesting. I go on playing, but most of my attention wanders elsewhere. Sometimes this is useful. In college I would play the now-ancient stand-up Star Wars whenever some topic was bugging me; with part of my brain engaged in the game, I could think about things that stressed me out more easily.
The games where this doesn't happen are either the most intense or the most open-ended ones. Sim City and on-line FPS games both push me into hyperfocus, not zoning out.
How about encouraging the "patient" to go outside or do something constructive, instead of coercing him into repeating a mindless task for no real reward. [...] I have no objection to psychotropic drugs and behavioral treatments when used judiciously to relieve real suffering or addiction. But using these tools to homogenize children to the societal norm is absolutely repugnant. How we can get through to these deranged teachers, parents, and psychiatrists?
As somebody with ADD who has tried the meds and benefited from them, I can't bring myself to be quite as outraged as you.
I agree that what is probably going on is using drugs to adapt a minority to the modern society we've built for ourselves. But most people do that, albeit to a lesser extent. Try to find an office without a coffeepot. And look at the number of people who regularly have a drink after work.
I think the real culprit here is our evolutionary history: for a long time we were hunter-gatherer nomads, but we went through a farming period where staying in one place and leading a rote-filled, obedient, crappy life was the ticket to success. And we can't complain too much, as it gave us the infrastructure necessary to build up the industry that has freed 99% of the population from farm work.
Now things are changing again. Taylorism is dying out. Now we can stop being machines or computers. Indeed, given how different creative work is, we have to drop the old habits. I think part of that will be an educational system that is much better suited to people with ADD, and more difficult for people genetically inclined to be obedient sheep. It will take decades, and a lot of work, but I think we'll get there.
In the meantime, the notion that you would have to be on drugs to put up with traditional schools or cube-farm jobs is a nice bit of ironic truth.
Here is a test to see if there is really adhd. Put one of these kids in front of their favorite video game. (I have never seen a kid in front of their favorite video game zone out, they are completely engrossed in the game) If they can play it for more the 30 minutes at a time without a break, then they have no problem concentrating.
Hi. Might I suggest you do something crazy like, say, reading a book about ADHD? Hallowell and Ratey's book Driven to Distraction is a great start. It's written by two licensed psychiatrists who both have ADD.
In there you will learn that "Attention Deficit Disorder" is an unfortunate misnomer, and that part of the disorder is very strong focus on things that are sufficiently stimulating. They mention that a better name would be something like "Attention Inconsistency Disorder".
As somebody diagnosed with ADD in college, I believe it's a real thing. My attentional mechanisms are definitely different than most people. I am very distractable, and can also be very focused in certain rare circumstancess. I have learned to act like normal people do, but it has taken me years of practice, and I have a host of special tricks to pass.
I agree with you that sugar, caffeine, and television can aggravate things. I don't own a TV, but do own a TV-B-Gone, the universal TV off button, so that I can keep up a conversation in places where nobody is watching the TV but it still blares away. And my personal guess is that it's not a disorder in the traditional sense, but rather a genetic difference that was adaptive in certain environments, even if it is not adaptive in certain particular modern circumstances.
But I still think that difference exists, and modern society treating it as a "disability" is better than sweeping it under the rug like they used to. The various medications they have are interesting and I found them helpful in understanding exploring ways to think and be. I don't take them anymore, but if a kid diagnosed with ADD is still having trouble in school after eliminating environmental aggravators and working on organization and study skills, I think it's negligent not to offer them the opportunity to try the various meds to see if something helps. I sure would have benefitted by trying them earlier than college.
Flashy spoilers and wheel rims were not rapidly adopted by a wide number of people, rather they continue to be purchased by a small and select market. These parts were an incremental improvement over the value of a standard automobile.
Yes, but that doesn't matter, because the people who sell automobiles are not part of the market for aftermarket automotive extras. They are the platform. I don't know that market well enough to say, but I'm sure certain things were disruptive innovations, redefining the shape of that market.
Flickr, for example, has been very disruptive in the (relatively small) online photo hosting market. This is built on top of the broadband, home computer, and digital camera markets, but isn't disruptive in any of those. Now anybody doing an internet-related photo management or sharing tool needs to have a response to Flickr.
Not every entrepreneur wants or needs VC money. It's entirely possible to find funding for businesses without going to a VC.
I agree completely. Indeed, I hope you can't fund a business just by going to a VC; unless we're in another crazed bubble, the way you do it is to self-fund and then get money from angel investors if that's not enough.
But his advice is still reasonable advice for novice entrepreneurs, even for self-funders. Why? Because disruptive innovation has better returns than incremental innovation. That's why VCs go after it. It also can be easier: instead of competing on the turf of established companies, you're creating new turf.
By the way, there are companies that profitably offer incremental improvements to products from established companies. Take aftermarket car parts for example. You can buy all kinds of stuff to trick out your Honda Civic, but none of the companies involved have anything to do with Honda. These aren't disruptive products, but they're definitely profitable for whoever makes them.
You misunderstand what is meant by disruptive innovation. The first business to come out with the neon undercarriage was disruptive: they were creating a product that didn't exist, forcing other companies to play catch-up. If I were to come out with a neon undercarriage kit right now, one that was 10% cheaper or 25% brighter or in three new colors, that's incremental innovation. The disruptiveness is related to the particular market and your effect on competitors.
There must be a dozen people here posting half-considered arguments about how the internet just enables mediocre people to blather, and doesn't do anything for the gods who walk among us. I'm hoping these are very cleverly ironic, rather than self-defeating.
I don't buy his argument. Very few people actually create change in the world. The rest just ride their coat-tails. [...] All the web brings is a lot of slack-jawed wanna-be gawkers and mediocrity.
I disagree, on three grounds. First, what the web brings is more of everything, makers and gawkers alike.
Second, innovation is synergistic. The first internet wave was much harder than the current one because we can now share so much more of the boring infrastructure stuff, letting us spend more time on the interesting parts. The software mashup culture is clear proof of that.
And third, creation inspires more creation. A lot of people have blogs because they look at existing blogs and suddenly have something to say. Sure, that means more crap. But it also means that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't write much are now writing regularly. Some of those people will end up being excellent writers.
That same process happens with software. Go to something like Super Happy Dev House and you'll see what I mean. Seeing 30 people hacking away makes you say, "Wait, why am I not hacking on something?" Before that effect was limited to physical events and places like Boston and the Bay Area, where you have a critical mass. But now the web is its own critical mass. It doesn't make idiots into geniuses, but it does make potential geniuses into actual ones.
By the way, looking for disruptive vs. incremental technology changes is complete and utter nonsense.
The question there was about attracting funding. In that context, you're completely wrong.
Getting startup funding is about offering 10:1 odds on 100:1 money. Minor, incremental innovations generally don't get you 100:1 money because established players are better placed to take advantage of incremental change than you are. But you can get the advantage with disruptive change because you can be more nimble than a company with a lot of existing procedures and an instinct to defend existing revenue.
Take digital photography as an example. For camera companies it was enough of an incremental change that the big camera companies handled it well enough. But for photo supplies and processing, it was a huge change, allowing the printer companies and all sorts of new players to nab a big chunk of that while Kodak, et al, stood around looking confused. That's why people like Ofoto and Flickr got VC money: they were involved in disruptive innovation.
The graveyards are also full of dispensible people. I'm sure you're friend had a point, but I can't think of what it might be.
<sigh/>
The point is that no matter how much you think you couldn't possibly leave your job, one day you will, if only on a stretcher. And the world somehow goes on. Nobody is indispensable, and if you're working 70 hour weeks "because they need you" then it's really because you want to be needed, or because you can't say no to people, or because you like the stress and chaos, or for some other equally lame reason.
The only reason you want your clients to make money is so that they will then have to give some of that money to you in the form of your fees. Beyond that they can go fly a kite.
Perhaps you should choose your clients more carefully. I make sure all of mine are doing things that I think are worth doing. Why would you spend a lot of time on something that you don't care about?
Cheers to this guy for surving cancer, but the article states in the footnote that the author is the owner of this business. He also continues to drone on about the employees obligation to his/her employer explains itself if you start from the bottom of the article.
I know it's out of fashion, but this is known as "professionalism". I own my own business, and I feel the same way. Not because I have employees (I don't), but because I want to do a good job. I only take on projects that I want to see succeed after I'm gone. Whether that happens because I take a different project or because I'm pushing up daisies doesn't matter for that.
If you think he's a jackass, I'm sure you think I'm crazy, too. But I think it's part of living in what some call the Long Now. When I die, it's not like they're going to turn out the lights and pack it all up. The world will go on. I try to think of the choices I make in that bigger context.
I'm a recovering sysadmin. One of the things that got me to quit my last sysadmin job was a friend who said, "The graveyards are full of indispensable people."
Hm. What type of an application would max out an optimized and tuned postgres running on a 32 core machine with, say, 16 gigs of memory?
At a guess, any of the top 1000 websites, plus a lot of specialized applications. I have personal knowledge of the setups of 5 in the top 100, and none of them are putting all their eggs in one basket.
Moreover, the cost of hardware like that goes up exponentially with capacity, meaning your profit margins get worse and worse as you grow, rather than better and better. Plus it's hard for every developer to have one of those on their desktop, meaning that doing performance tuning becomes much more complicated.
Remember that the world's best scalers, Google, use (and have always used) racks of commodity hardware. In their lobby they have some of their first-gen hardware, and it's all dirt-cheap commodity stuff.
It's fairly rare that you're going to need to scale the database beyond one machine. So, I'm not too worried about it.
Yes. If success is not a problem that keeps you awake at night, then Rails-style (or PHP-style) direct-to-database approaches are generally fine. When that turns out not to be the case, it's good to have a plan besides "give the DBAs and database vendors all of our money".
Rails is scalable, but not in an interesting fashion at all. You want more processing power, you run more instances. Where's the fun in that? I love it in Java land, where creating something scalable inevitably means exciting things like building a single JVM that runs on multiple machines, or wrapping things in five layers of EJB so that they can work across multiple machines.
To be fair, you can only stretch the PHP/Rails "run more instances" paradigm so far; it just shifts the burden to the database. Scaling then becomes a painful exercise in database magic. To me, that's the tail wagging the dog. Databases are supposed to make things easy, and when they stop doing that, it's time to rethink your architecture. I think it's no accident that Google, the world's best company at scaling, is not a big database user.
Of course, that's not to say that Sun's retarded enterprise approaches are any better. I have made great money ripping out inappropriately applied EJB cruft, although probably not quite as much money as the dolts who spent a lot of time putting them in. It appears that a lot of people would rather fail using the dominant paradigm than spend a little time thinking and experimenting.
Aren't computers supposed to do mundane work for us? Why make life difficult for yourself - I'm interested in results, not in worrying about whether I've escaped my SQL queries correctly using some function I had to write myself because PHP can't even do that properly.
A note for the job-seekers out there: When I'm hiring, this attitude is the number one thing I look for. Why? Because a developer who automates away the boring parts of the job has much more energy and brainpower to devote to the important work. There are a lot of people who know how to program, but it's a distressingly small percentage who understand that their job isn't programming, it's making things happen, and doing that better and better.
Glorious isn't it, that first recoil of horror when you see someone's C++/Java baby you've been called on to maintain/patch, and as the seconds pass you begin to realise just what you're in for.
Heh. After a couple of very unpleasant mop-and-bucket jobs on hideous code bases, I now just have two rates. Writing new code or maintaining good code costs X, and cleaning up shitty code is 1.5x to 2x depending on the level of horror. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no. Either way, I'm ok with it. A month off in Mexico restores my spirits wonderfully.
I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things.
For which, I salute you.
Personally, I'm a big OO guy; for anything beyond a thousand lines of code, I feel the object-oriented approach makes maintenance much, much easier.
But what makes me bat-shit crazy is people who feel like you do but aren't smart or independent enough to be honest that either a) they don't really get OO yet, or b) they get it but prefer to work otherwise. So they go and write a bunch of semi-procedural crap in an OO language, half-assedly using the various OO features wrongly. I've heard this called "procedural object oriented programming" or POOP, and it is so much worse than either good procedural code or good object-oriented code. And honestly, 75% of the Java code I get asked to review is POOP.
So I seriously and unironically salute you for knowing what works for you, and valuing good code over following the latest trends.
And a little P.S. to my fellow Java developers: If you have a lot of objects with data and no behavior (just getters and setters), or a bunch of objects with no data and lots of behavior, then that is not object-oriented programming. The first is a struct; the second is a function library. Object = data + behavior. If you aren't sure whether you're doing OO work, read Domain-Driven Design.
Imagine if your laptop computer started growing mold like an old loaf of bread. Now take a look around your house, office, or wherever and imagine if every single plastic item in existence did. Maybe it won't ever happen -- I certainly hope not -- but this is a worrying first step. Are we too confident in the permanence of our plastic items?
Given that wood, cloth, and leather are already biodegradable, I'm not so worried.
Slashdot Mirror
However, study after study after study after study has shown that no non-drug-therapy for ADHD is particularly effective.
Have any links for those studies? That's very different than the treatment recommendations I read last I looked at this closely.
Folks, I have met about 100 Ritalin victims in my life, and every last one of them were either misdiagnosed or had nothing wrong at all before getting doped up. They used to call it "hyperactivity" and "dyslexia". It's proper name is "Bullshit" and if you aren't assertive about it, you'll be gambling with your children's lives.
I agree that Ritalin is hugely overprescribed, and I think that anybody who prescribes it without proper testing and a suite of supportive therapy should have their license revoked.
However, I personally found it useful at one point in my life, and would definitely consider it (or one of the other ADD meds) if I were to, say, go back to school. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
all i have to say is no, the 'drugs' they offer are little more then sedatives. treating them like they're a 'cure' is not looking at the problem, or the cause of the difficulty. so just passing out these drugs to 35% of US schoolaged children is NOT the answer to the problem (parents who aren't taking an active role in their child's progress, etc)
I agree that drugs should not be the first attempt at a solution, and agree completely that any approach must include parental involvement and non-medication support and training. I'm also glad that you found something that works for you.
But one drug not working for you in the three weeks you tried it means very little about what one of the half-dozen drugs prescribed for ADD might do for somebody else. I found them interesting and useful, and if I had to lead a "normal" life, I might be taking one of them still. Instead I picked a life that suits my unusual attention span, but I don't know that everybody can or should do that.
It's a opensource DIY modular EEG machine that costs around $200 to build (there is also a partialy build version available).
Note to entrepreneurs:
I'm very willing to pay for a complete OpenEEG kit. Sure, I could build one myself, but if I'm trying to treat ADD symptoms with it, how likely is that? I already have a bunch of unfinished projects cluttering up the place. What I want is a solution.
there is a phenomenon observed in ADHD sufferers that shows while playing video games (and some other activities) they focus to the exclusion of all other stimuli, often for extended periods of time. I'm not sure if this is the same thing or a seperate symptom than "zoning out" but it might be worth looking into a bit more.
For me, one of the many Slashdotters with adult ADD, they're pretty different. Zoning out is what I do in a dull meeting. Hyperfocus happens when I'm hot on the trail of some coding victory.
I also zone out in a lot of video games; they're too repetitious to be interesting. I go on playing, but most of my attention wanders elsewhere. Sometimes this is useful. In college I would play the now-ancient stand-up Star Wars whenever some topic was bugging me; with part of my brain engaged in the game, I could think about things that stressed me out more easily.
The games where this doesn't happen are either the most intense or the most open-ended ones. Sim City and on-line FPS games both push me into hyperfocus, not zoning out.
How about encouraging the "patient" to go outside or do something constructive, instead of coercing him into repeating a mindless task for no real reward. [...]
I have no objection to psychotropic drugs and behavioral treatments when used judiciously to relieve real suffering or addiction. But using these tools to homogenize children to the societal norm is absolutely repugnant. How we can get through to these deranged teachers, parents, and psychiatrists?
As somebody with ADD who has tried the meds and benefited from them, I can't bring myself to be quite as outraged as you.
I agree that what is probably going on is using drugs to adapt a minority to the modern society we've built for ourselves. But most people do that, albeit to a lesser extent. Try to find an office without a coffeepot. And look at the number of people who regularly have a drink after work.
I think the real culprit here is our evolutionary history: for a long time we were hunter-gatherer nomads, but we went through a farming period where staying in one place and leading a rote-filled, obedient, crappy life was the ticket to success. And we can't complain too much, as it gave us the infrastructure necessary to build up the industry that has freed 99% of the population from farm work.
Now things are changing again. Taylorism is dying out. Now we can stop being machines or computers. Indeed, given how different creative work is, we have to drop the old habits. I think part of that will be an educational system that is much better suited to people with ADD, and more difficult for people genetically inclined to be obedient sheep. It will take decades, and a lot of work, but I think we'll get there.
In the meantime, the notion that you would have to be on drugs to put up with traditional schools or cube-farm jobs is a nice bit of ironic truth.
Here is a test to see if there is really adhd. Put one of these kids in front of their favorite video game. (I have never seen a kid in front of their favorite video game zone out, they are completely engrossed in the game) If they can play it for more the 30 minutes at a time without a break, then they have no problem concentrating.
Hi. Might I suggest you do something crazy like, say, reading a book about ADHD? Hallowell and Ratey's book Driven to Distraction is a great start. It's written by two licensed psychiatrists who both have ADD.
In there you will learn that "Attention Deficit Disorder" is an unfortunate misnomer, and that part of the disorder is very strong focus on things that are sufficiently stimulating. They mention that a better name would be something like "Attention Inconsistency Disorder".
As somebody diagnosed with ADD in college, I believe it's a real thing. My attentional mechanisms are definitely different than most people. I am very distractable, and can also be very focused in certain rare circumstancess. I have learned to act like normal people do, but it has taken me years of practice, and I have a host of special tricks to pass.
I agree with you that sugar, caffeine, and television can aggravate things. I don't own a TV, but do own a TV-B-Gone, the universal TV off button, so that I can keep up a conversation in places where nobody is watching the TV but it still blares away. And my personal guess is that it's not a disorder in the traditional sense, but rather a genetic difference that was adaptive in certain environments, even if it is not adaptive in certain particular modern circumstances.
But I still think that difference exists, and modern society treating it as a "disability" is better than sweeping it under the rug like they used to. The various medications they have are interesting and I found them helpful in understanding exploring ways to think and be. I don't take them anymore, but if a kid diagnosed with ADD is still having trouble in school after eliminating environmental aggravators and working on organization and study skills, I think it's negligent not to offer them the opportunity to try the various meds to see if something helps. I sure would have benefitted by trying them earlier than college.
Flashy spoilers and wheel rims were not rapidly adopted by a wide number of people, rather they continue to be purchased by a small and select market. These parts were an incremental improvement over the value of a standard automobile.
Yes, but that doesn't matter, because the people who sell automobiles are not part of the market for aftermarket automotive extras. They are the platform. I don't know that market well enough to say, but I'm sure certain things were disruptive innovations, redefining the shape of that market.
Flickr, for example, has been very disruptive in the (relatively small) online photo hosting market. This is built on top of the broadband, home computer, and digital camera markets, but isn't disruptive in any of those. Now anybody doing an internet-related photo management or sharing tool needs to have a response to Flickr.
Not every entrepreneur wants or needs VC money. It's entirely possible to find funding for businesses without going to a VC.
I agree completely. Indeed, I hope you can't fund a business just by going to a VC; unless we're in another crazed bubble, the way you do it is to self-fund and then get money from angel investors if that's not enough.
But his advice is still reasonable advice for novice entrepreneurs, even for self-funders. Why? Because disruptive innovation has better returns than incremental innovation. That's why VCs go after it. It also can be easier: instead of competing on the turf of established companies, you're creating new turf.
By the way, there are companies that profitably offer incremental improvements to products from established companies. Take aftermarket car parts for example. You can buy all kinds of stuff to trick out your Honda Civic, but none of the companies involved have anything to do with Honda. These aren't disruptive products, but they're definitely profitable for whoever makes them.
You misunderstand what is meant by disruptive innovation. The first business to come out with the neon undercarriage was disruptive: they were creating a product that didn't exist, forcing other companies to play catch-up. If I were to come out with a neon undercarriage kit right now, one that was 10% cheaper or 25% brighter or in three new colors, that's incremental innovation. The disruptiveness is related to the particular market and your effect on competitors.
There must be a dozen people here posting half-considered arguments about how the internet just enables mediocre people to blather, and doesn't do anything for the gods who walk among us. I'm hoping these are very cleverly ironic, rather than self-defeating.
I don't buy his argument. Very few people actually create change in the world. The rest just ride their coat-tails. [...] All the web brings is a lot of slack-jawed wanna-be gawkers and mediocrity.
I disagree, on three grounds. First, what the web brings is more of everything, makers and gawkers alike.
Second, innovation is synergistic. The first internet wave was much harder than the current one because we can now share so much more of the boring infrastructure stuff, letting us spend more time on the interesting parts. The software mashup culture is clear proof of that.
And third, creation inspires more creation. A lot of people have blogs because they look at existing blogs and suddenly have something to say. Sure, that means more crap. But it also means that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't write much are now writing regularly. Some of those people will end up being excellent writers.
That same process happens with software. Go to something like Super Happy Dev House and you'll see what I mean. Seeing 30 people hacking away makes you say, "Wait, why am I not hacking on something?" Before that effect was limited to physical events and places like Boston and the Bay Area, where you have a critical mass. But now the web is its own critical mass. It doesn't make idiots into geniuses, but it does make potential geniuses into actual ones.
By the way, looking for disruptive vs. incremental technology changes is complete and utter nonsense.
The question there was about attracting funding. In that context, you're completely wrong.
Getting startup funding is about offering 10:1 odds on 100:1 money. Minor, incremental innovations generally don't get you 100:1 money because established players are better placed to take advantage of incremental change than you are. But you can get the advantage with disruptive change because you can be more nimble than a company with a lot of existing procedures and an instinct to defend existing revenue.
Take digital photography as an example. For camera companies it was enough of an incremental change that the big camera companies handled it well enough. But for photo supplies and processing, it was a huge change, allowing the printer companies and all sorts of new players to nab a big chunk of that while Kodak, et al, stood around looking confused. That's why people like Ofoto and Flickr got VC money: they were involved in disruptive innovation.
The graveyards are also full of dispensible people. I'm sure you're friend had a point, but I can't think of what it might be.
/>
<sigh
The point is that no matter how much you think you couldn't possibly leave your job, one day you will, if only on a stretcher. And the world somehow goes on. Nobody is indispensable, and if you're working 70 hour weeks "because they need you" then it's really because you want to be needed, or because you can't say no to people, or because you like the stress and chaos, or for some other equally lame reason.
The only reason you want your clients to make money is so that they will then have to give some of that money to you in the form of your fees. Beyond that they can go fly a kite.
Perhaps you should choose your clients more carefully. I make sure all of mine are doing things that I think are worth doing. Why would you spend a lot of time on something that you don't care about?
Cheers to this guy for surving cancer, but the article states in the footnote that the author is the owner of this business. He also continues to drone on about the employees obligation to his/her employer explains itself if you start from the bottom of the article.
I know it's out of fashion, but this is known as "professionalism". I own my own business, and I feel the same way. Not because I have employees (I don't), but because I want to do a good job. I only take on projects that I want to see succeed after I'm gone. Whether that happens because I take a different project or because I'm pushing up daisies doesn't matter for that.
If you think he's a jackass, I'm sure you think I'm crazy, too. But I think it's part of living in what some call the Long Now. When I die, it's not like they're going to turn out the lights and pack it all up. The world will go on. I try to think of the choices I make in that bigger context.
If I'm going to die of cancer I could give a shit less how my employer makes out when I'm dead.
And I'd bet your code looks like it, too. Why waste your life doing something you don't really care about?
For all you know, you are going to die of cancer; you're certain to die of something. Might as well sort out your priorities now.
If I found myself with terminal cancer, my family and myself would be on the top of the list.
A quick reminder for the crowd: None of us knows the day and hour, but we can be sure that it will come. Live now! You may not get the chance later.
I'm a recovering sysadmin. One of the things that got me to quit my last sysadmin job was a friend who said, "The graveyards are full of indispensable people."
Hm. What type of an application would max out an optimized and tuned postgres running on a 32 core machine with, say, 16 gigs of memory?
At a guess, any of the top 1000 websites, plus a lot of specialized applications. I have personal knowledge of the setups of 5 in the top 100, and none of them are putting all their eggs in one basket.
Moreover, the cost of hardware like that goes up exponentially with capacity, meaning your profit margins get worse and worse as you grow, rather than better and better. Plus it's hard for every developer to have one of those on their desktop, meaning that doing performance tuning becomes much more complicated.
Remember that the world's best scalers, Google, use (and have always used) racks of commodity hardware. In their lobby they have some of their first-gen hardware, and it's all dirt-cheap commodity stuff.
It's fairly rare that you're going to need to scale the database beyond one machine. So, I'm not too worried about it.
Yes. If success is not a problem that keeps you awake at night, then Rails-style (or PHP-style) direct-to-database approaches are generally fine. When that turns out not to be the case, it's good to have a plan besides "give the DBAs and database vendors all of our money".
Rails is scalable, but not in an interesting fashion at all. You want more processing power, you run more instances. Where's the fun in that? I love it in Java land, where creating something scalable inevitably means exciting things like building a single JVM that runs on multiple machines, or wrapping things in five layers of EJB so that they can work across multiple machines.
To be fair, you can only stretch the PHP/Rails "run more instances" paradigm so far; it just shifts the burden to the database. Scaling then becomes a painful exercise in database magic. To me, that's the tail wagging the dog. Databases are supposed to make things easy, and when they stop doing that, it's time to rethink your architecture. I think it's no accident that Google, the world's best company at scaling, is not a big database user.
Of course, that's not to say that Sun's retarded enterprise approaches are any better. I have made great money ripping out inappropriately applied EJB cruft, although probably not quite as much money as the dolts who spent a lot of time putting them in. It appears that a lot of people would rather fail using the dominant paradigm than spend a little time thinking and experimenting.
Aren't computers supposed to do mundane work for us? Why make life difficult for yourself - I'm interested in results, not in worrying about whether I've escaped my SQL queries correctly using some function I had to write myself because PHP can't even do that properly.
A note for the job-seekers out there: When I'm hiring, this attitude is the number one thing I look for. Why? Because a developer who automates away the boring parts of the job has much more energy and brainpower to devote to the important work. There are a lot of people who know how to program, but it's a distressingly small percentage who understand that their job isn't programming, it's making things happen, and doing that better and better.
Glorious isn't it, that first recoil of horror when you see someone's C++/Java baby you've been called on to maintain/patch, and as the seconds pass you begin to realise just what you're in for.
Heh. After a couple of very unpleasant mop-and-bucket jobs on hideous code bases, I now just have two rates. Writing new code or maintaining good code costs X, and cleaning up shitty code is 1.5x to 2x depending on the level of horror. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no. Either way, I'm ok with it. A month off in Mexico restores my spirits wonderfully.
I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things.
For which, I salute you.
Personally, I'm a big OO guy; for anything beyond a thousand lines of code, I feel the object-oriented approach makes maintenance much, much easier.
But what makes me bat-shit crazy is people who feel like you do but aren't smart or independent enough to be honest that either a) they don't really get OO yet, or b) they get it but prefer to work otherwise. So they go and write a bunch of semi-procedural crap in an OO language, half-assedly using the various OO features wrongly. I've heard this called "procedural object oriented programming" or POOP, and it is so much worse than either good procedural code or good object-oriented code. And honestly, 75% of the Java code I get asked to review is POOP.
So I seriously and unironically salute you for knowing what works for you, and valuing good code over following the latest trends.
And a little P.S. to my fellow Java developers: If you have a lot of objects with data and no behavior (just getters and setters), or a bunch of objects with no data and lots of behavior, then that is not object-oriented programming. The first is a struct; the second is a function library. Object = data + behavior. If you aren't sure whether you're doing OO work, read Domain-Driven Design.
Imagine if your laptop computer started growing mold like an old loaf of bread. Now take a look around your house, office, or wherever and imagine if every single plastic item in existence did. Maybe it won't ever happen -- I certainly hope not -- but this is a worrying first step. Are we too confident in the permanence of our plastic items?
Given that wood, cloth, and leather are already biodegradable, I'm not so worried.