It's weird. I was born in '75 and have enjoyed both. But now, aside from a few iconic scenes and episodes ("I am NOT a merry man"), it's TNG that's nearly unwatchable for me but I'm almost always up for a classic Trek episode if I haven't seen it recently. I'm also perfectly interested in the newer Trek series. The plots were typically very clumsy and hamfisted IMO. Far too many blatant pat civics lessons. Way too much conflict resolution with the emitting of science fantasy particles at things. And FFS, how many transporter accidents can you have before you finally just say !@#$ it, I'm using the shuttle from now on?
On the flip-side, the TOS often revolved around super-science failing, requiring Kirk-levels of chutzpa to remedy a problem. Hell, Kirk's bravado often both started and ended the conflicts.
That said, TNG did set the stage for more to come and oddly enough, Data may be my favorite character in all of Star Trek. In fact I think the data-centric episodes are the only ones I can really go back and enjoy now. Okay, and the Klingons. They did good on taking what the original series movies did with Klingons and running with it. Maybe it's just that I wish they'd gone with hardwood floors rather than carpeting.
Which isn't to say I don't try to police it. As far as programming coworkers... pff... I hate you for being human. I'm probably not even that good at it myself but I'm certain you suck regardless of whatever the hell you crawled out from under from and what flavor of gonads ached as you did it. And really all you have to do to shock me is give just one hair off your ass. The most delicate out of place gray perhaps albino or blonde-ish one... it doesn't matter. Just an ounce of effort. And every lady programmer I've encountered has done that.
And that shouldn't be surprising. Any minority new to a sector is going to face challenges that have nothing to do with the only obstacles should matter in a given sector. The minority representative would have to like what they do to put up with those pointless challenges, obnoxious/offensive as they are. I think that's where a lot of smart people in the past have been awarded for open-mindedness. Pay close attention to that guy who is weird/doesn't fit in/isn't the right "type" (even among anglo-honkey nerds there are nerds) but does awesome things, find the right team for him or her, that one that doesn't care that he's not a "cultural fit" and holy cow the things you won't get done.
My father immigrated from Norway in the late '60s and is an electrical engineer. Among the other things he was very good at, he was particularly adept at finding ways to help failing engineers from other countries become absolute powerhouses for the company he worked for. So yeah... fuck "culture." If somebody is a genius or at the least valuable, is not the antichrist, but rubs you the wrong way occasionally, it's probably you or the guys complaining to you about "the problem," not the guy/gal whose naturally going to make the occasional mis-step because DUH, we're nerds an DOUBLE-DUH, s/he has a whole bunch of other cultural barriers to cope with.
That said, the spot where I catch myself being unreasonable is on the lady bosses that suck. The ones that are good don't surprise me at all (Molly Corwin, Chicago DDB, no idea what you're up to today - hope you're still around/happy-healthy - but Holy Cats were you the best damn boss I ever had and no I stole "holy cats" from Olsen who no doubt stole it from Batman or something) but I do have ugly prejudice in how I sometimes react more strongly to women that suck as compared to the men who suck... I don't know what it is... Higher expectations?
Nah. That's a copout. Sorry about that ladies. It's probably IS the "bitch" thing. I hope I've never acted on it but it's there a little bit down under the surface and I don't like that about me. Hopefully fading every year with a bit of attention on it. As for my daughters if I have them, they will NOT take anybody's shit and they'll make me proud not doing so. So I guess my whole point is... I'm sorry that we sometimes blow it and lose perspective on the degree to which we are not being the fair humans we like to think of ourselves as. Perhaps if you allow for that with immediate attention drawn to it and give people the opportunity to correct the mistake with perhaps some tactful slaps upside the head/foots up the ass-equivalents, we'll recognize those neanderthalic attitudes for what they are and we'll see ourselves in light of our daughters who might want to walk the same path that we did without any of the obstacles we might sometimes be tempted to put in front of a woman with prejudice for no damn good reason. So... sorry. And maybe hope or something. It seems like we're finally getting there but I'm a honkey male programmer so it's not like I have a lot to complain about.
And gentlemen it's really not about whether we can tolerate or even appreciate women programming and bossing among us. Duh. We clearly can. That back-patting was best left back at the '80s perhaps even '70s. What it's really about is whether we can be tolerable as they do so.
I'm sorry but when his relatively simple content-page loaded like it did I looked at his HTML. Drew Crawford isn't anal enough to be taken seriously on performance and he's using something that spits some 40 odd script tags on the page for one purpose that puts some teeth in my straw man.
is that you can still write a phonegap app that works on damn near anything you want it to in the time it takes the average Java team to tie their shoes and 95% of the time it's not going to perform adequately, it's going to perform better than what they tried to do in the native language. We can talk benchmarks until we're blue in the face, but in six years of web dev I've seen a lot of Java code bases and not one was competent. Modern JS JITs kick ass. Modern Java (and I'd argue C# as well) devs at the median level are pattern-swilling, enterprise-blinded, kool-aid snorting jackasses who can't write clean, minimalist, maintainable, good old fashioned DRY-lovin' code to save their lives.
Sun engineers can talk perf if it makes them feel better but they're missing the point. Decent JS devs do it faster, better, stronger, with smaller teams and robustly across a lot more platforms than equivalent-skilled Java devs could hope to in their wildest dreams. The reason? JS gives you all the rope you need to hang the shit out of yourself. When that happens you have two options. You quit. Or you learn more and you get better. And that's when you start noticing all the useful things you can do with all that rope that languages built with mediocrity-support in mind will never be able to do as efficiently.
And I'll be fair. When performance is really seriously hyper-critically important... you're better off with C (binds very nicely to JS via V8 might I add). Fuck Java.
Or has he always been an asshole? I loved his books as a kid but post-9/11 was the first time I was exposed to his politics and they struck me as counter to a lot of his themes. Anyway, no. Don't want to see Tom Cruise out of disgust with Scientology and its posterboys, but when it comes down to running an abusive cult that you ultimately still have to sign up for vs. actively persecuting people who have done you no harm, I'm gonna say OSC and anything that earns him a profit can go to Hell where they belong.
I would think getting abused by Linus Torvalds would be a sign that you'd finally become a going concern in the Linux kernel community. I'd be excited personally. I'd probably frame a printed screenshot of the abuse.
They want precedent. As much flexibility as possible to tack on more charges whenever they feel like it. If they could call a backpack a WMD in this case, they would, just so the next time some league of legends of player makes a joke-threat while wearing a backpack they can hit him with WMD charges.
For instance, I don't even have an irrelevant degree and I just got interest from Facebook for a JavaScript developer position after honing my skills at JS and client-side development for the last 5-6 years or so. I would imagine Java and C# probably tend to have a bit more academic bias than most other popular web-languages since academia is in part greatly responsible for their popularity in the first place. The client-side/UI folks on the other hand tend to care the least because we can typically size each other up in a handful of questions.
But yeah, really badass web developers and I suspect higher end programmers in general really don't care. What they do care about though is whether you're a rookie professionally and in your situation it would likely take some work on personal projects and collaboration on open source or working very cheap to get your foot in the door. Oh, and I'm 39 btw. I think I got like one gray hair a while back but it's hard to tell because I'm blonde. I basically pissed away my 20s on alcohol, video game journalism, and just being a putz in general so no, it's not like I even had a lot to show for myself when I got my act together and focused on this career 6 years back. The first year wasn't easy.
For programming the best advice I can give is that you not worry about the numbers so much where language is concerned. In fact it might pay to put more effort into the stuff that doesn't have the most jobs advertised. If something is somewhat popular and you get really good at it, your chances will be much better than if you jump into say Java and your sans-college resume is one in a pile of 10,000 that will go through a rigorous screening process by non-tech people long before it reaches an engineer.
And if you happen to be great at JavaScript, check to make sure you're not forgetting to wear pants at the interview because demand is high and nobody's waiting for colleges to pump out decent JS devs.
Thinking in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is the whole problem. Hiring is a matching process. You should be looking for the best fit, not the first reason not to hire somebody. It's all such a contemptibly Java-minded approach to things and the reason you guys can't find people to write decent JavaScript for you to save your lives. Tell the V8 guys thanks though. It really kicks ass.
I'm thinking it will look a lot like getting blamed when you don't have enough employees/resources to do it right, or ignored for doing it right in spite of that. Never understood how you guys put up with it. IT should've been the new "postal" by now.
I lost faith in Obama at Telecom Immunity. So pretty much from the very start. And it hurt. I really "hoped" he'd be different. Look! A politician who actually makes a case and actually tries to convince the opposition! And then kow-tows to Monsanto, lets Goldman Sachs off the hook, actually enhances the Patriot Act, and does nothing to reform a Justice Department clearly compromised by the Bush Administration (probably started before that). Oh well, at least everybody sucks at security so at least we're guaranteed to hear about how screwed we are well before 2037.
If there's somebody who actually enjoys fart pianos, I think it's better that we keep them from doing anything that might have actual impact in the world. Fart piano devs create an invaluable service.
Object oriented programming IS great. People just never learn patterns and methodologies before they understand basic OOP. All I've ever seen in C# and Java codebases are chains of methods that happen to be wrapped in class syntax with a sort of crude parroting of design patterns (often unnecessary or redundant given language features) that the devs themselves clearly don't understand. Thinking in terms of the players in your app and what they need to do rather than simply running from point A to B to Z and branching willy-nilly just to get 'er done is hugely beneficial. And FFS what is with the interfaces on absolutely everything. Some people should have their IDEs slapped out of their hands until they learn to write code you can read, debug and modify without crutches.
I actually find agile at it's most useful when you strip all the BS out and get at the useful bits. Like sprint-planning and retro as a means of gauging/improving estimate accuracy and having those regular reminders of obstacles and roadblocks that keep getting in the team's way that would often get ignored/forgotten in a more waterfall-ish approach. The idea that you don't do any up-front planning/estimating for the whole project and that you don't set any kind of time-frame goal is 100% silly to me and I'm not even sure that comes from agile as-originally-established. I also think daily standup is a great idea although a daily skype-up would work just fine for me too. Just getting everybody in the same space to discuss progress and issues ultimately
The idea that you can just muck with design at will is easily abused and perhaps a more liberal interpretation than the original intention. As a primarily UI dev, I'm the guy who gets the ugly side of that stick usually. IMO, the important thing is to not focus on completeness until you've established the broader details. i.e. don't freaking tell me to nail down every last detail down to the pixel and then start changing stuff. My preference is to get a crude version of the thing up and running ASAP and decide how we actually want the UI to work and where we want services lumped together before nailing down every last detail of the appearance and finessing things. One useful side-effect of doing things this way is that you tend to modularize better such that you CAN quickly adapt to design tweaks which also helps maintainability/ease-of-modification in the long-term.
Where agile is at its worst, IMO is in Scrum implementations that have come about from the agile-training industry full of gimmicks and absurd attempts at mixing the "product owner" and as many other people who have nothing to do with the actual product development into the development process that inevitably twists the estimate-accuracy-improvement features of agile into an accountability mechanism and wastes dev time by requiring a concrete "deliverable" (I hate that word) be "shipped" in a complete form (i.e. a more difficult to modify form due to rushing and being tied down to details) and demoed at the end of every sprint. Sometimes you just need a week or two to clean up a mess or refactor something that only barely works as-is without distraction.
Also, it's a complete waste of time if you have a mediocre, not-especially-bright team, IMO.
A language design closer to a LISP-variant, which have traditionally been popular for AI work for glue and C/C++ bindings for the calculation-intensive and embedded system stuff under the hood with concurrency basically auto-handled by C threading routed to an event-loop and events driven by JS's blocking function calls? Give me that, what I know of JS and 5 kick-ass C/C++ guys and I would take on a 20-100 Java dev team in a rover contest any day.
jQuery btw is just a function that spits out decorator/adapter wrappers for DOM objects on the client-side web. It's in no way tied to core JavaScript and serves no purpose in Node. If it's all you see or all that you're using on the client-side, you're not doing anything very complicated on the client-side or you're doing it badly since it is in no way an aide to architecture beyond reducing DOM API cruft. It is, however, a very good example of how to write an adapter/decorator factory in JavaScript.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, in the US, the smartest of us don't tend to be attracted to journalism or teaching in a public school.
Wouldn't that kind of be like putting Monsanto execs on the FDA? Oh... right.
It's weird. I was born in '75 and have enjoyed both. But now, aside from a few iconic scenes and episodes ("I am NOT a merry man"), it's TNG that's nearly unwatchable for me but I'm almost always up for a classic Trek episode if I haven't seen it recently. I'm also perfectly interested in the newer Trek series. The plots were typically very clumsy and hamfisted IMO. Far too many blatant pat civics lessons. Way too much conflict resolution with the emitting of science fantasy particles at things. And FFS, how many transporter accidents can you have before you finally just say !@#$ it, I'm using the shuttle from now on?
On the flip-side, the TOS often revolved around super-science failing, requiring Kirk-levels of chutzpa to remedy a problem. Hell, Kirk's bravado often both started and ended the conflicts.
That said, TNG did set the stage for more to come and oddly enough, Data may be my favorite character in all of Star Trek. In fact I think the data-centric episodes are the only ones I can really go back and enjoy now. Okay, and the Klingons. They did good on taking what the original series movies did with Klingons and running with it. Maybe it's just that I wish they'd gone with hardwood floors rather than carpeting.
The feds sure are finding every reason but almost bankrupting the global economy to put people in prison nowadays.
Which isn't to say I don't try to police it. As far as programming coworkers... pff... I hate you for being human. I'm probably not even that good at it myself but I'm certain you suck regardless of whatever the hell you crawled out from under from and what flavor of gonads ached as you did it. And really all you have to do to shock me is give just one hair off your ass. The most delicate out of place gray perhaps albino or blonde-ish one... it doesn't matter. Just an ounce of effort. And every lady programmer I've encountered has done that.
And that shouldn't be surprising. Any minority new to a sector is going to face challenges that have nothing to do with the only obstacles should matter in a given sector. The minority representative would have to like what they do to put up with those pointless challenges, obnoxious/offensive as they are. I think that's where a lot of smart people in the past have been awarded for open-mindedness. Pay close attention to that guy who is weird/doesn't fit in/isn't the right "type" (even among anglo-honkey nerds there are nerds) but does awesome things, find the right team for him or her, that one that doesn't care that he's not a "cultural fit" and holy cow the things you won't get done.
My father immigrated from Norway in the late '60s and is an electrical engineer. Among the other things he was very good at, he was particularly adept at finding ways to help failing engineers from other countries become absolute powerhouses for the company he worked for. So yeah... fuck "culture." If somebody is a genius or at the least valuable, is not the antichrist, but rubs you the wrong way occasionally, it's probably you or the guys complaining to you about "the problem," not the guy/gal whose naturally going to make the occasional mis-step because DUH, we're nerds an DOUBLE-DUH, s/he has a whole bunch of other cultural barriers to cope with.
That said, the spot where I catch myself being unreasonable is on the lady bosses that suck. The ones that are good don't surprise me at all (Molly Corwin, Chicago DDB, no idea what you're up to today - hope you're still around/happy-healthy - but Holy Cats were you the best damn boss I ever had and no I stole "holy cats" from Olsen who no doubt stole it from Batman or something) but I do have ugly prejudice in how I sometimes react more strongly to women that suck as compared to the men who suck... I don't know what it is... Higher expectations?
Nah. That's a copout. Sorry about that ladies. It's probably IS the "bitch" thing. I hope I've never acted on it but it's there a little bit down under the surface and I don't like that about me. Hopefully fading every year with a bit of attention on it. As for my daughters if I have them, they will NOT take anybody's shit and they'll make me proud not doing so. So I guess my whole point is... I'm sorry that we sometimes blow it and lose perspective on the degree to which we are not being the fair humans we like to think of ourselves as. Perhaps if you allow for that with immediate attention drawn to it and give people the opportunity to correct the mistake with perhaps some tactful slaps upside the head/foots up the ass-equivalents, we'll recognize those neanderthalic attitudes for what they are and we'll see ourselves in light of our daughters who might want to walk the same path that we did without any of the obstacles we might sometimes be tempted to put in front of a woman with prejudice for no damn good reason. So... sorry. And maybe hope or something. It seems like we're finally getting there but I'm a honkey male programmer so it's not like I have a lot to complain about.
And gentlemen it's really not about whether we can tolerate or even appreciate women programming and bossing among us. Duh. We clearly can. That back-patting was best left back at the '80s perhaps even '70s. What it's really about is whether we can be tolerable as they do so.
... is just how funny of ad can Toughbook advertisers put together based on this event?
Let's not forget that they crashed one in Russia.
I'm sorry but when his relatively simple content-page loaded like it did I looked at his HTML. Drew Crawford isn't anal enough to be taken seriously on performance and he's using something that spits some 40 odd script tags on the page for one purpose that puts some teeth in my straw man.
is that you can still write a phonegap app that works on damn near anything you want it to in the time it takes the average Java team to tie their shoes and 95% of the time it's not going to perform adequately, it's going to perform better than what they tried to do in the native language. We can talk benchmarks until we're blue in the face, but in six years of web dev I've seen a lot of Java code bases and not one was competent. Modern JS JITs kick ass. Modern Java (and I'd argue C# as well) devs at the median level are pattern-swilling, enterprise-blinded, kool-aid snorting jackasses who can't write clean, minimalist, maintainable, good old fashioned DRY-lovin' code to save their lives.
Sun engineers can talk perf if it makes them feel better but they're missing the point. Decent JS devs do it faster, better, stronger, with smaller teams and robustly across a lot more platforms than equivalent-skilled Java devs could hope to in their wildest dreams. The reason? JS gives you all the rope you need to hang the shit out of yourself. When that happens you have two options. You quit. Or you learn more and you get better. And that's when you start noticing all the useful things you can do with all that rope that languages built with mediocrity-support in mind will never be able to do as efficiently.
And I'll be fair. When performance is really seriously hyper-critically important... you're better off with C (binds very nicely to JS via V8 might I add). Fuck Java.
Or has he always been an asshole? I loved his books as a kid but post-9/11 was the first time I was exposed to his politics and they struck me as counter to a lot of his themes. Anyway, no. Don't want to see Tom Cruise out of disgust with Scientology and its posterboys, but when it comes down to running an abusive cult that you ultimately still have to sign up for vs. actively persecuting people who have done you no harm, I'm gonna say OSC and anything that earns him a profit can go to Hell where they belong.
What are these history "books" you speak of?
I think it stopped having a point at Reagan and Gorbachev.
I would think getting abused by Linus Torvalds would be a sign that you'd finally become a going concern in the Linux kernel community. I'd be excited personally. I'd probably frame a printed screenshot of the abuse.
Or perhaps the butthole to stop stinking.
They want precedent. As much flexibility as possible to tack on more charges whenever they feel like it. If they could call a backpack a WMD in this case, they would, just so the next time some league of legends of player makes a joke-threat while wearing a backpack they can hit him with WMD charges.
For instance, I don't even have an irrelevant degree and I just got interest from Facebook for a JavaScript developer position after honing my skills at JS and client-side development for the last 5-6 years or so. I would imagine Java and C# probably tend to have a bit more academic bias than most other popular web-languages since academia is in part greatly responsible for their popularity in the first place. The client-side/UI folks on the other hand tend to care the least because we can typically size each other up in a handful of questions.
But yeah, really badass web developers and I suspect higher end programmers in general really don't care. What they do care about though is whether you're a rookie professionally and in your situation it would likely take some work on personal projects and collaboration on open source or working very cheap to get your foot in the door. Oh, and I'm 39 btw. I think I got like one gray hair a while back but it's hard to tell because I'm blonde. I basically pissed away my 20s on alcohol, video game journalism, and just being a putz in general so no, it's not like I even had a lot to show for myself when I got my act together and focused on this career 6 years back. The first year wasn't easy.
For programming the best advice I can give is that you not worry about the numbers so much where language is concerned. In fact it might pay to put more effort into the stuff that doesn't have the most jobs advertised. If something is somewhat popular and you get really good at it, your chances will be much better than if you jump into say Java and your sans-college resume is one in a pile of 10,000 that will go through a rigorous screening process by non-tech people long before it reaches an engineer.
And if you happen to be great at JavaScript, check to make sure you're not forgetting to wear pants at the interview because demand is high and nobody's waiting for colleges to pump out decent JS devs.
Thinking in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is the whole problem. Hiring is a matching process. You should be looking for the best fit, not the first reason not to hire somebody. It's all such a contemptibly Java-minded approach to things and the reason you guys can't find people to write decent JavaScript for you to save your lives. Tell the V8 guys thanks though. It really kicks ass.
I'm thinking it will look a lot like getting blamed when you don't have enough employees/resources to do it right, or ignored for doing it right in spite of that. Never understood how you guys put up with it. IT should've been the new "postal" by now.
I lost faith in Obama at Telecom Immunity. So pretty much from the very start. And it hurt. I really "hoped" he'd be different. Look! A politician who actually makes a case and actually tries to convince the opposition! And then kow-tows to Monsanto, lets Goldman Sachs off the hook, actually enhances the Patriot Act, and does nothing to reform a Justice Department clearly compromised by the Bush Administration (probably started before that). Oh well, at least everybody sucks at security so at least we're guaranteed to hear about how screwed we are well before 2037.
If there's somebody who actually enjoys fart pianos, I think it's better that we keep them from doing anything that might have actual impact in the world. Fart piano devs create an invaluable service.
Object oriented programming IS great. People just never learn patterns and methodologies before they understand basic OOP. All I've ever seen in C# and Java codebases are chains of methods that happen to be wrapped in class syntax with a sort of crude parroting of design patterns (often unnecessary or redundant given language features) that the devs themselves clearly don't understand. Thinking in terms of the players in your app and what they need to do rather than simply running from point A to B to Z and branching willy-nilly just to get 'er done is hugely beneficial. And FFS what is with the interfaces on absolutely everything. Some people should have their IDEs slapped out of their hands until they learn to write code you can read, debug and modify without crutches.
Stop, you're giving me Sears flashbacks.
Forgot to complete a thought. "...ultimately can save a lot of time by eliminating duplicated effort and sharing knowledge." in the first paragraph.
I actually find agile at it's most useful when you strip all the BS out and get at the useful bits. Like sprint-planning and retro as a means of gauging/improving estimate accuracy and having those regular reminders of obstacles and roadblocks that keep getting in the team's way that would often get ignored/forgotten in a more waterfall-ish approach. The idea that you don't do any up-front planning/estimating for the whole project and that you don't set any kind of time-frame goal is 100% silly to me and I'm not even sure that comes from agile as-originally-established. I also think daily standup is a great idea although a daily skype-up would work just fine for me too. Just getting everybody in the same space to discuss progress and issues ultimately
The idea that you can just muck with design at will is easily abused and perhaps a more liberal interpretation than the original intention. As a primarily UI dev, I'm the guy who gets the ugly side of that stick usually. IMO, the important thing is to not focus on completeness until you've established the broader details. i.e. don't freaking tell me to nail down every last detail down to the pixel and then start changing stuff. My preference is to get a crude version of the thing up and running ASAP and decide how we actually want the UI to work and where we want services lumped together before nailing down every last detail of the appearance and finessing things. One useful side-effect of doing things this way is that you tend to modularize better such that you CAN quickly adapt to design tweaks which also helps maintainability/ease-of-modification in the long-term.
Where agile is at its worst, IMO is in Scrum implementations that have come about from the agile-training industry full of gimmicks and absurd attempts at mixing the "product owner" and as many other people who have nothing to do with the actual product development into the development process that inevitably twists the estimate-accuracy-improvement features of agile into an accountability mechanism and wastes dev time by requiring a concrete "deliverable" (I hate that word) be "shipped" in a complete form (i.e. a more difficult to modify form due to rushing and being tied down to details) and demoed at the end of every sprint. Sometimes you just need a week or two to clean up a mess or refactor something that only barely works as-is without distraction.
Also, it's a complete waste of time if you have a mediocre, not-especially-bright team, IMO.
A language design closer to a LISP-variant, which have traditionally been popular for AI work for glue and C/C++ bindings for the calculation-intensive and embedded system stuff under the hood with concurrency basically auto-handled by C threading routed to an event-loop and events driven by JS's blocking function calls? Give me that, what I know of JS and 5 kick-ass C/C++ guys and I would take on a 20-100 Java dev team in a rover contest any day.
jQuery btw is just a function that spits out decorator/adapter wrappers for DOM objects on the client-side web. It's in no way tied to core JavaScript and serves no purpose in Node. If it's all you see or all that you're using on the client-side, you're not doing anything very complicated on the client-side or you're doing it badly since it is in no way an aide to architecture beyond reducing DOM API cruft. It is, however, a very good example of how to write an adapter/decorator factory in JavaScript.