I don't know what gets into designers that makes them think stuff like this is a good idea. I spent about a year and a half working for a 14 year old web company that had a huge, loyal user base and a system that everybody in the community was very happy with. It was the system that had grown the entire community from nothing and fended off all competitors.
Then they brought in a consultant and a new design. They broke the site, broke the design and generally caused a complete and total uproar. Nearly sank the company and created a major hornets nest of competitors actively stealing traffic. Everybody thought it was going to be the next major "Digg" failure. I helped them survive and the only reason I even came on to help is because that company had a massive network effect of buyers and sellers. It would take a coordinated effort or a clear competitor (a Facebook to your MySpace) to get all of those people to leave...so they had some time.
Digg had no network effect. I could just start looking somewhere else for my general news around the internet.
Slashdot doesn't have a network effect either. Keep that in mind before you completely trash the site by converting into a web stereotype. Seriously, know you're audience. "News for Nerds". We care about data. We care about information. We care about functional systems and we don't give a crap about whitespace. The current design caters to ALL of that. The new design caters to NONE of that except what some designer probably told you was a really good idea/trendy/web2.0/upgrade.
You're putting the entire site at risk if you flip the switch on that thing.
Agnostics are smart enough to know how much they do not know. Atheists choose to believe that millions of educated people around the world believe in a fairy tale, commit their money and their lives voluntarily, simply because all of those people didn't ask enough questions? Based on your above comment, there should likewise be huge numbers of people around the world that believe in vampires, fairies, or Zeus...yet there are not.
Something I learned a long time ago - if a lot of people feel a particular way something, whether I like it or not there is probably a reason. Very seldom does anybody hold a belief without believing they have a just cause for doing so. Millions of people around the world have differing views on how governments should operate. Oddly, they are all valid in different situations even if they may not be my ideal.
A lot of people support gun control and a lot of people support the opposite. Both views are valid and there are strong arguments for both.
A lot of people believe abortion is the most horrible thing they can imagine. A lot of people believe it is a necessity of modern society. Both views are valid.
I respect people who are wise enough to respect other people's view points. I've been an atheist. I've made the arguments and I've walked in those shoes. I've talked to a number of other people with the same views enough to fully understand it. Atheism tends to result from anger towards religion and naturally leads to becoming an intellectual security blanket.
I'll tell you when I realized just how screwed up my views were. My father is a surgeon. One of the smartest, wisest and most generous people I've ever known and I'm extremely proud to be able to claim him. We sat down to watch TV one night when I was in town and I wanted to show him one of my favorite TV shows, "The Big Bang Theory". That led to him making a comment that he wasn't complete convinced of it before we watched the show. My immediate reaction was to think how stupid he was.
Do you have any idea how screwed up your views have to be to take somebody whom you have every ounce of admiration for and immediately think them foolish for not sharing a view point? That's messed up but people do it every day. Shortly after that I started to think like an agnostic. I was a lot less angry and I stopped thinking anybody foolish for having a different point of view. Eventually out of curiosity I finally sat down and read the Bible. After reading it, seeing the sheer degree to which it is manipulated, misrepresented, and butchered on a daily basis in public was shocking. Most people just don't realize it because they haven't read it. Just taking a line out of context here or there or a blurb here or a blurb there, without understanding the context with which is was written is an injustice. When you read it, you gain a completely different perspective on it. You understand who wrote what, when, writing styles of the different authors, variances in the old and new testaments.
There is a reason that many people used to just hand out copies of the New Testament. As a Christian, that's really the only part you should care about. The entire old testament is basically Jewish history. That's how I read it at least, but I'm not a biblical scholar. There is some excellent and time tested wisdom in Psalms and Proverbs that anyone can take to heart, but they aren't commands or beliefs you're intended to hold. Merely a lot of sound advice.
Christianity, when you really break it down is pretty simple: love.
When you realize that, you start to realize just how grossly misrepresented Christianity has to be for people to react so negatively to it.
Actually, Christianity in particular teaches that our degree of moral relativism is to compare ourselves to Jesus and that basically, we all suck. So be humble, patient, kind, loving, charitable and exhibit self-control in an effort to try to be more like Jesus.
The funny thing is that I was an atheist, then an agnostic for the better part of 6 years so I understand the view points very well. Since then, God literally and unequivocally changed my life in a manner that left no doubt. It shook every thing that I thought I knew or didn't know in a manner that I'm still coming to grips with today, but I understand faith in a completely different way now. I KNOW God exists and because of that, it causes me to think more critically about everything that tries to indicate otherwise. It's really easy to jump on a train of thought that appears to provide an explanation as a best probable case in the absence of God but when you start thinking as critically about the holes in those explanations as you do about the validity of faith, you'll realize there are A LOT holes on both sides.
But in the end it boils down to this: 1. An atheist chooses to believe that God does not exist and by extension of the belief has a strong and overwhelming tendency to view all people of faith as ignorant fools. This has a natural effect of making that person feel relatively smarter than all of "those people" providing a huge self-esteem crutch. 2. An agnostic is generally humble enough to understand how much he does not know. 3. A Christian either believes God exists or has experienced the grace of God directly, thus either believing or knowing respectively. God's existence can be proven to a person, but in the same way that if I walk down the street and talk to a guy in a blue shirt and then tell you, "yesterday I talked to a guy in a blue shirt" I cannot prove it to you. I know it to be true and I can tell you the story but you're acceptance that I'm telling you the truth depends largely on whether or not you view me as credible or insane.
After having doubted for so long I feel absolutely obligated to tell people about the changes that God has made in my life. It's difficult to get into on here, but just imagine struggling with something for 2 years to the point that you understand you are helpless to overcome it, then finally praying about it and having the struggle immediately end...permanently. There's much more to it than that and many things in my life since, but everything in my life I've chosen to trust God with has been blessed. My marriage was really tough for a little while (for both of us), and I trusted God with it and it's wonderful now. My finances and career were struggling (and I'm very experienced at what I do) and I trusted God with them and both have never been brighter. Each time I made a decision to trust God in this way, he answered in a manner that left no doubt (which is a much longer story).
And ask yourself that for a minute: as an agnostic just how convinced would you have to be? That's exactly how convinced I am and I tell everybody about it because I want for them exactly what I've been blessed with and more.
Agnostics deal in facts. Atheists deal in beliefs. Christians deal in beliefs. It's one of the cruel irony's of the world. An agnostic takes no issue with faith by his very nature. An atheist despises it and depicts Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc as ignorant, foolish, etc while simultaneously feeling good about how much smarter they are than all of those people.
I have every ounce of respect for Agnostics. Atheists in most cases are people with self-esteem issues.
.. then they could advertise much cheaper prices, get people in the door, and sell multiple range options based on the batteries they could afford/lease.
I've been preaching that for years. I'm leasing a Volt because I was scared to have to resell it the closer I got to the 8 year mark on the battery guarantee. Knock $8000 off the price of the car and let me pay $50 / month to never have to worry about that? Yes please. I'd buy this car in a heartbeat. It's the best car I've ever owned.
Exactly. I love the idea that "government" can just swoop in and fix things it has no expertise on. Government's channel money. Government's don't even do their own jobs effectively...why in the world would you want the government to "take over" a mess like this.
You want the government to throw more money at the problem...fine. If this reflects the opinions of...anybody I sincerely fear for the future of the US.
I was a former Slicehost user in the St. Louis data center and then was moved to Chicago after the Rackspace acquisition. Even so, there's never been so much as a blip from there in the last 5 years. Probably is data center dependent, I just never remember hearing about anything.
Friend of mine here in town owns a web business using about 9 Rackspace servers to host 700 websites and he said they hadn't had an outage in the last 8 years.
I've run servers on both Amazon and Rackspace for several years now and I can't recall a single instance of Rackspace having an outage. On the other hand, Amazon seems to have major issues at least 2 or 3 times a year. Is this stuff tracked anywhere?
Rewarded for random genetic gifts rather than for investing the skills to learn when to apply drugs, you mean?
I've got my arguments against allowing drugs in sports - primarily, that they tend to push the sport on so much that everybody in the sport would effectively be forced to use it, and they have side effects - but "reward for talent" (== won the genetic lottery) isn't one of them.
There are some aspects of sports that involve winning the "genetic lottery". Most, however, happen from putting in a lot of time, dedication, repetition and work into understanding how to get better at what you do. Lots of NBA greats have done it that way and so have guys like Tiger Woods. There are the occasional genetic freaks like Shaq but so much is just hard work.
I'm a big college football fan and half the fun of following the sport is the science and different ways that coaches figure out to mold their teams in a manner to take advantages of most opponents weaknesses. Right now offenses with almost no time between plays are the trend and operate by entire offseason conditioning regimes that allow you to ensure the other team wears down before yours does. In order to pull that off, the entire team follows specific nutrition protocols that largely influence what they eat and when they eat it. Certain weight training programs help to build speed, flexibility, endurance while others work for sheer power and muscle gain. It's really amazing sometimes.
While I have zero doubt that there are a lot of people in every sport who abuse steriods whether we know it or not, they should absolutely be banning anything that has even a SINGLE negative side effect and testing for it heavily. The argument you cited above is the only one you need: if they're not banned then everybody is simply forced to use them which isn't fair to anybody. That stuff trickles down to the high school level players that just want to show off or the parents who want to live through their kids.
I can't help myself, I've got to come back to this. Here are the use cases where Node makes sense:
1. Centralized Templating across multiple backends. Node has the unique ability to be easily portable for templating logic on both the server and client side as well as the ability to leverage that logic across multiple different languages. It's a GREAT tool for this and basically a replacement for what XML/XSLT was supposed to do.
2. Providing an API which needs to hit a lot of other API's behind the scenes and may create a lot of concurrent connections as a result. You can accomplish the same thing in other languages by using nginx http push module and threaded background workers, but Node is better fit if you don't already have an application with a queue or don't have enough control over the server configuration to ask that an nginx module be installed. The downside of doing it in node is that it requires you to duplicate application logic in the API layer unless your application was already written in Node.
3. You're stuck on Microsoft servers and it's easier to fire up a Node server than it is to get more Unix-centric scripting languages to work properly in their non-native environments. This is why Node is incredibly popular with the.NET crowd.
Outside of those 3 use cases though, the only remaining case for Node is "my developers only know Javascript and don't want to learn anything else" which generally means your developers are designers and Node becomes what people have complained about PHP being for all these years - an ecosystem infected by people with minimal coding experience.
Package management and fit for purpose tool chains don't exist in other languages? Is that a joke? Have you seen the Ruby gem ecosystem? Have you seen the Java ecosystem? You can do everything that you described in Ruby or Python without blinking and you won't incur the technical debt that Node's global insanity creates. Node came a long and people went "OMG! Non-blocking I/O!" and everybody else with a pulse looked at it and said...yea, that's what background workers are for but background workers encapsulate the logic instead of letting it all float around in one process. Eventually, node code grows to insanity.
Mongo is awesome...for write heavy applications. In most applications that means that one table could probably be better served with Mongo. For logging or cloud based data aggregators it's EXCELLENT. It's a fantastic session store too. Also a great query cache. That doesn't make it the optimal tool for your entire system where you might actually care about normalization, data compression, data integrity or the amount of hard drive space required to store all the data bloat that comes with it.
I can built a fully functional ecommerce system with an API, payment gateways, account system and analytics in 2 weeks (and most of that is just setting up the payment gateway and merchant account) with Ruby, Python, Groovy or Scala. With 1 person. Having it do $100k / month in sales is a product of what it's offering, how effectively it's marketed, how the supply chain side of the business can scale with demand and has absolutely zero to do with Node and/or Mongo.
Look, the whole "tool belt" approach is short sighted. Yes, you can learn the basics of a lot of things but your are better off with a deep understanding of one thing. Every language runs into the same issues. The difference is basically syntax but once you have a deep understanding in one language it's applicable across them all. Performance tuning an application to death is a great driver for that type of exploration as you will learn about I/O limits, server configurations and optimizations, caching strategies, network latency, query optimization, different types of databases for different purposes, asset optimization and delivery via CDN and potentially even how to run your favorite language on the JVM (like jruby or jython) without having to deal with writing Java.
Just take a project and have a never ending goal to make it faster. Do that for long enough and you'll have such a deep understanding of how stuff works you won't care what language you are using. You will understand the limitations of frameworks and the strength of experience too. Anybody can say "look, I learned Node.js this summer" but experience will let somebody understand wear nodes value comes from enough to say, "Using the nginx http push module I can get the same advantages of node in any language you want."
"1. can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. I am told that a man in your church is living in sin with his stepmother.a 2. You are so proud of yourselves, but you should be mourning in sorrow and shame. And you should remove this man from your fellowship."
This is reiterated throughout the New Testament in Timothy and others but is never preached on that I've ever heard. I grew up in church, turned away from it for 6 years as an agnostic, and then came back after I finally sat down and started reading the Bible. When you actually read it, you'll be shocked at how heavily it's manipulated and abused on a daily basis for one purpose or another. If churches actually followed this rule of kicking out people who pretend to live one way and disgrace the entire congregation because of it you'd see dramatically less "duality" because the people who were there for show would no longer be there.
Churches should and do welcome people who are struggling with issues and seeking help. Everything from addictions to financial troubles. These people are not a problem. It's the people who try to visibly play the part with no intention of actually following through that continue to give the church a bad name.
You're talking employers and he's talking about contract work. Contract work is usually hourly so you are always compensated for your time and it's usually paid at a mark up specifically because its a contract and not full time position. As a contract job it's an existing expectation that it will not be long term so why should you handle it any way other that as professionally as possible? That will land you more contract work at the high rate and let you continue your lifestyle.
A full time employee being asked to train their replacement is a whole different ballgame. That's down right offensive to ask somebody to do in many cases.
Totally agree. I've always gone into projects with the goal of automating things (right down to outage buffering, failover, etc) to the point that they don't need me anymore. I take it as a point of pride and my work reflects it.
If you're taking any other approach, namely one that will force your client to remain attached to you I'd have to question your ethics, motive, and ability because what you're doing is creating a dependence on you that is borderline blackmail (if that's something you're doing).
So to the original question, help with a smile on your face, show him how the more complex pieces of the code work, document where possible and generally make sure that the tools are there for the project to continue to go on without you. They're either going to recommend you to other people because of how professionally you handled the transition and what a good job they did or they're going to be calling you back shortly when new guy isn't delivering at the rate you did. Drop off a copy of Mythical Man Month when you leave. Just leave it laying around the office somewhere.:-)
With that service you can VNC/Remote Desktop into machines running just about any combination of technology that you want to test again. You can also do screen shots, but being able to click on a screenshot to remote in was always the real perk.
There's an entire field dedicated to Data Warehousing who's entire focus is Big Data. Large companies with auditing requirements have to keep mountains of historical data. Business Intelligence is largely based on analyzing huge segments of data.
As storage gets cheaper and options for going through large amounts of data become more widely available, companies invariably store more data. The biggest difference is that while you previously would have simply chosen not to track certain types of data in your database...now you might.
You would think the fact that states taking more in than they put out yet constantly voting to stop funding the programs from which they are taking would hit home with somebody at some point.
That's what DMARC is for. It let's companies specify exactly how to handle their SPF (and DKIM) rules based on how thoroughly they have covered their bases. The company I work for deals with a ton of phishing against our user base and implemented SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with great success.
Google has excellent documentation on the protocol.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what gets into designers that makes them think stuff like this is a good idea. I spent about a year and a half working for a 14 year old web company that had a huge, loyal user base and a system that everybody in the community was very happy with. It was the system that had grown the entire community from nothing and fended off all competitors.
Then they brought in a consultant and a new design. They broke the site, broke the design and generally caused a complete and total uproar. Nearly sank the company and created a major hornets nest of competitors actively stealing traffic. Everybody thought it was going to be the next major "Digg" failure. I helped them survive and the only reason I even came on to help is because that company had a massive network effect of buyers and sellers. It would take a coordinated effort or a clear competitor (a Facebook to your MySpace) to get all of those people to leave...so they had some time.
Digg had no network effect. I could just start looking somewhere else for my general news around the internet.
Slashdot doesn't have a network effect either. Keep that in mind before you completely trash the site by converting into a web stereotype. Seriously, know you're audience. "News for Nerds". We care about data. We care about information. We care about functional systems and we don't give a crap about whitespace. The current design caters to ALL of that. The new design caters to NONE of that except what some designer probably told you was a really good idea/trendy/web2.0/upgrade.
You're putting the entire site at risk if you flip the switch on that thing.
Agnostics are smart enough to know how much they do not know. Atheists choose to believe that millions of educated people around the world believe in a fairy tale, commit their money and their lives voluntarily, simply because all of those people didn't ask enough questions? Based on your above comment, there should likewise be huge numbers of people around the world that believe in vampires, fairies, or Zeus...yet there are not.
Something I learned a long time ago - if a lot of people feel a particular way something, whether I like it or not there is probably a reason. Very seldom does anybody hold a belief without believing they have a just cause for doing so. Millions of people around the world have differing views on how governments should operate. Oddly, they are all valid in different situations even if they may not be my ideal.
A lot of people support gun control and a lot of people support the opposite. Both views are valid and there are strong arguments for both.
A lot of people believe abortion is the most horrible thing they can imagine. A lot of people believe it is a necessity of modern society. Both views are valid.
I respect people who are wise enough to respect other people's view points. I've been an atheist. I've made the arguments and I've walked in those shoes. I've talked to a number of other people with the same views enough to fully understand it. Atheism tends to result from anger towards religion and naturally leads to becoming an intellectual security blanket.
I'll tell you when I realized just how screwed up my views were. My father is a surgeon. One of the smartest, wisest and most generous people I've ever known and I'm extremely proud to be able to claim him. We sat down to watch TV one night when I was in town and I wanted to show him one of my favorite TV shows, "The Big Bang Theory". That led to him making a comment that he wasn't complete convinced of it before we watched the show. My immediate reaction was to think how stupid he was.
Do you have any idea how screwed up your views have to be to take somebody whom you have every ounce of admiration for and immediately think them foolish for not sharing a view point? That's messed up but people do it every day. Shortly after that I started to think like an agnostic. I was a lot less angry and I stopped thinking anybody foolish for having a different point of view. Eventually out of curiosity I finally sat down and read the Bible. After reading it, seeing the sheer degree to which it is manipulated, misrepresented, and butchered on a daily basis in public was shocking. Most people just don't realize it because they haven't read it. Just taking a line out of context here or there or a blurb here or a blurb there, without understanding the context with which is was written is an injustice. When you read it, you gain a completely different perspective on it. You understand who wrote what, when, writing styles of the different authors, variances in the old and new testaments.
There is a reason that many people used to just hand out copies of the New Testament. As a Christian, that's really the only part you should care about. The entire old testament is basically Jewish history. That's how I read it at least, but I'm not a biblical scholar. There is some excellent and time tested wisdom in Psalms and Proverbs that anyone can take to heart, but they aren't commands or beliefs you're intended to hold. Merely a lot of sound advice.
Christianity, when you really break it down is pretty simple: love.
When you realize that, you start to realize just how grossly misrepresented Christianity has to be for people to react so negatively to it.
Actually, Christianity in particular teaches that our degree of moral relativism is to compare ourselves to Jesus and that basically, we all suck. So be humble, patient, kind, loving, charitable and exhibit self-control in an effort to try to be more like Jesus.
The funny thing is that I was an atheist, then an agnostic for the better part of 6 years so I understand the view points very well. Since then, God literally and unequivocally changed my life in a manner that left no doubt. It shook every thing that I thought I knew or didn't know in a manner that I'm still coming to grips with today, but I understand faith in a completely different way now. I KNOW God exists and because of that, it causes me to think more critically about everything that tries to indicate otherwise. It's really easy to jump on a train of thought that appears to provide an explanation as a best probable case in the absence of God but when you start thinking as critically about the holes in those explanations as you do about the validity of faith, you'll realize there are A LOT holes on both sides.
But in the end it boils down to this:
1. An atheist chooses to believe that God does not exist and by extension of the belief has a strong and overwhelming tendency to view all people of faith as ignorant fools. This has a natural effect of making that person feel relatively smarter than all of "those people" providing a huge self-esteem crutch.
2. An agnostic is generally humble enough to understand how much he does not know.
3. A Christian either believes God exists or has experienced the grace of God directly, thus either believing or knowing respectively. God's existence can be proven to a person, but in the same way that if I walk down the street and talk to a guy in a blue shirt and then tell you, "yesterday I talked to a guy in a blue shirt" I cannot prove it to you. I know it to be true and I can tell you the story but you're acceptance that I'm telling you the truth depends largely on whether or not you view me as credible or insane.
After having doubted for so long I feel absolutely obligated to tell people about the changes that God has made in my life. It's difficult to get into on here, but just imagine struggling with something for 2 years to the point that you understand you are helpless to overcome it, then finally praying about it and having the struggle immediately end...permanently. There's much more to it than that and many things in my life since, but everything in my life I've chosen to trust God with has been blessed. My marriage was really tough for a little while (for both of us), and I trusted God with it and it's wonderful now. My finances and career were struggling (and I'm very experienced at what I do) and I trusted God with them and both have never been brighter. Each time I made a decision to trust God in this way, he answered in a manner that left no doubt (which is a much longer story).
And ask yourself that for a minute: as an agnostic just how convinced would you have to be? That's exactly how convinced I am and I tell everybody about it because I want for them exactly what I've been blessed with and more.
Was an atheist for 3 years of my life. I know what atheism is very well. The only people who truly deal in facts are agnostics.
Agnostics deal in facts. Atheists deal in beliefs. Christians deal in beliefs. It's one of the cruel irony's of the world. An agnostic takes no issue with faith by his very nature. An atheist despises it and depicts Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc as ignorant, foolish, etc while simultaneously feeling good about how much smarter they are than all of those people.
I have every ounce of respect for Agnostics. Atheists in most cases are people with self-esteem issues.
I don't know anything about them, but I have to ask why anything is too heavy in space? Is it too heavy when assembled on earth?
.. then they could advertise much cheaper prices, get people in the door, and sell multiple range options based on the batteries they could afford/lease.
I've been preaching that for years. I'm leasing a Volt because I was scared to have to resell it the closer I got to the 8 year mark on the battery guarantee. Knock $8000 off the price of the car and let me pay $50 / month to never have to worry about that? Yes please. I'd buy this car in a heartbeat. It's the best car I've ever owned.
Exactly. I love the idea that "government" can just swoop in and fix things it has no expertise on. Government's channel money. Government's don't even do their own jobs effectively...why in the world would you want the government to "take over" a mess like this.
You want the government to throw more money at the problem...fine. If this reflects the opinions of...anybody I sincerely fear for the future of the US.
I was a former Slicehost user in the St. Louis data center and then was moved to Chicago after the Rackspace acquisition. Even so, there's never been so much as a blip from there in the last 5 years. Probably is data center dependent, I just never remember hearing about anything.
Friend of mine here in town owns a web business using about 9 Rackspace servers to host 700 websites and he said they hadn't had an outage in the last 8 years.
I've run servers on both Amazon and Rackspace for several years now and I can't recall a single instance of Rackspace having an outage. On the other hand, Amazon seems to have major issues at least 2 or 3 times a year. Is this stuff tracked anywhere?
Rewarded for random genetic gifts rather than for investing the skills to learn when to apply drugs, you mean?
I've got my arguments against allowing drugs in sports - primarily, that they tend to push the sport on so much that everybody in the sport would effectively be forced to use it, and they have side effects - but "reward for talent" (== won the genetic lottery) isn't one of them.
There are some aspects of sports that involve winning the "genetic lottery". Most, however, happen from putting in a lot of time, dedication, repetition and work into understanding how to get better at what you do. Lots of NBA greats have done it that way and so have guys like Tiger Woods. There are the occasional genetic freaks like Shaq but so much is just hard work.
I'm a big college football fan and half the fun of following the sport is the science and different ways that coaches figure out to mold their teams in a manner to take advantages of most opponents weaknesses. Right now offenses with almost no time between plays are the trend and operate by entire offseason conditioning regimes that allow you to ensure the other team wears down before yours does. In order to pull that off, the entire team follows specific nutrition protocols that largely influence what they eat and when they eat it. Certain weight training programs help to build speed, flexibility, endurance while others work for sheer power and muscle gain. It's really amazing sometimes.
While I have zero doubt that there are a lot of people in every sport who abuse steriods whether we know it or not, they should absolutely be banning anything that has even a SINGLE negative side effect and testing for it heavily. The argument you cited above is the only one you need: if they're not banned then everybody is simply forced to use them which isn't fair to anybody. That stuff trickles down to the high school level players that just want to show off or the parents who want to live through their kids.
I can't help myself, I've got to come back to this. Here are the use cases where Node makes sense:
1. Centralized Templating across multiple backends. Node has the unique ability to be easily portable for templating logic on both the server and client side as well as the ability to leverage that logic across multiple different languages. It's a GREAT tool for this and basically a replacement for what XML/XSLT was supposed to do.
2. Providing an API which needs to hit a lot of other API's behind the scenes and may create a lot of concurrent connections as a result. You can accomplish the same thing in other languages by using nginx http push module and threaded background workers, but Node is better fit if you don't already have an application with a queue or don't have enough control over the server configuration to ask that an nginx module be installed. The downside of doing it in node is that it requires you to duplicate application logic in the API layer unless your application was already written in Node.
3. You're stuck on Microsoft servers and it's easier to fire up a Node server than it is to get more Unix-centric scripting languages to work properly in their non-native environments. This is why Node is incredibly popular with the .NET crowd.
Outside of those 3 use cases though, the only remaining case for Node is "my developers only know Javascript and don't want to learn anything else" which generally means your developers are designers and Node becomes what people have complained about PHP being for all these years - an ecosystem infected by people with minimal coding experience.
Package management and fit for purpose tool chains don't exist in other languages? Is that a joke? Have you seen the Ruby gem ecosystem? Have you seen the Java ecosystem? You can do everything that you described in Ruby or Python without blinking and you won't incur the technical debt that Node's global insanity creates. Node came a long and people went "OMG! Non-blocking I/O!" and everybody else with a pulse looked at it and said...yea, that's what background workers are for but background workers encapsulate the logic instead of letting it all float around in one process. Eventually, node code grows to insanity.
Mongo is awesome...for write heavy applications. In most applications that means that one table could probably be better served with Mongo. For logging or cloud based data aggregators it's EXCELLENT. It's a fantastic session store too. Also a great query cache. That doesn't make it the optimal tool for your entire system where you might actually care about normalization, data compression, data integrity or the amount of hard drive space required to store all the data bloat that comes with it.
I can built a fully functional ecommerce system with an API, payment gateways, account system and analytics in 2 weeks (and most of that is just setting up the payment gateway and merchant account) with Ruby, Python, Groovy or Scala. With 1 person. Having it do $100k / month in sales is a product of what it's offering, how effectively it's marketed, how the supply chain side of the business can scale with demand and has absolutely zero to do with Node and/or Mongo.
Are you actually serious with such an example?
Agree totally.
That will answer the question.
Look, the whole "tool belt" approach is short sighted. Yes, you can learn the basics of a lot of things but your are better off with a deep understanding of one thing. Every language runs into the same issues. The difference is basically syntax but once you have a deep understanding in one language it's applicable across them all. Performance tuning an application to death is a great driver for that type of exploration as you will learn about I/O limits, server configurations and optimizations, caching strategies, network latency, query optimization, different types of databases for different purposes, asset optimization and delivery via CDN and potentially even how to run your favorite language on the JVM (like jruby or jython) without having to deal with writing Java.
Just take a project and have a never ending goal to make it faster. Do that for long enough and you'll have such a deep understanding of how stuff works you won't care what language you are using. You will understand the limitations of frameworks and the strength of experience too. Anybody can say "look, I learned Node.js this summer" but experience will let somebody understand wear nodes value comes from enough to say, "Using the nginx http push module I can get the same advantages of node in any language you want."
"1. can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. I am told that a man in your church is living in sin with his stepmother.a 2. You are so proud of yourselves, but you should be mourning in sorrow and shame. And you should remove this man from your fellowship."
This is reiterated throughout the New Testament in Timothy and others but is never preached on that I've ever heard. I grew up in church, turned away from it for 6 years as an agnostic, and then came back after I finally sat down and started reading the Bible. When you actually read it, you'll be shocked at how heavily it's manipulated and abused on a daily basis for one purpose or another. If churches actually followed this rule of kicking out people who pretend to live one way and disgrace the entire congregation because of it you'd see dramatically less "duality" because the people who were there for show would no longer be there.
Churches should and do welcome people who are struggling with issues and seeking help. Everything from addictions to financial troubles. These people are not a problem. It's the people who try to visibly play the part with no intention of actually following through that continue to give the church a bad name.
You're talking employers and he's talking about contract work. Contract work is usually hourly so you are always compensated for your time and it's usually paid at a mark up specifically because its a contract and not full time position. As a contract job it's an existing expectation that it will not be long term so why should you handle it any way other that as professionally as possible? That will land you more contract work at the high rate and let you continue your lifestyle.
A full time employee being asked to train their replacement is a whole different ballgame. That's down right offensive to ask somebody to do in many cases.
Totally agree. I've always gone into projects with the goal of automating things (right down to outage buffering, failover, etc) to the point that they don't need me anymore. I take it as a point of pride and my work reflects it.
If you're taking any other approach, namely one that will force your client to remain attached to you I'd have to question your ethics, motive, and ability because what you're doing is creating a dependence on you that is borderline blackmail (if that's something you're doing).
So to the original question, help with a smile on your face, show him how the more complex pieces of the code work, document where possible and generally make sure that the tools are there for the project to continue to go on without you. They're either going to recommend you to other people because of how professionally you handled the transition and what a good job they did or they're going to be calling you back shortly when new guy isn't delivering at the rate you did. Drop off a copy of Mythical Man Month when you leave. Just leave it laying around the office somewhere. :-)
With that service you can VNC/Remote Desktop into machines running just about any combination of technology that you want to test again. You can also do screen shots, but being able to click on a screenshot to remote in was always the real perk.
Used to play so much Duke Nukem over Kali on my 56k modem back in the day.
There's an entire field dedicated to Data Warehousing who's entire focus is Big Data. Large companies with auditing requirements have to keep mountains of historical data. Business Intelligence is largely based on analyzing huge segments of data.
As storage gets cheaper and options for going through large amounts of data become more widely available, companies invariably store more data. The biggest difference is that while you previously would have simply chosen not to track certain types of data in your database...now you might.
You would think the fact that states taking more in than they put out yet constantly voting to stop funding the programs from which they are taking would hit home with somebody at some point.
That's what DMARC is for. It let's companies specify exactly how to handle their SPF (and DKIM) rules based on how thoroughly they have covered their bases. The company I work for deals with a ton of phishing against our user base and implemented SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with great success.
Google has excellent documentation on the protocol.
Welding pays extremely well and there is a huge need for it. I'm honestly shocked that more people don't do it.