PythonDeveloper on Hacker News
>> Kudos, you also worry about hardware all of the time
Patently untrue.
I haven't thought about hardware once in three years because I have an admin whom I've personally trained that worries for me. He knows how to scale hardware and software because I've showed him how to do it properly, and he has earned my trust.
I get to spend every minute of every work hour coding solutions. If you're a business owner and YOU still worry about hardware, then you need to fire your admins and hire rockstar-level admins. My admin spends no more than 2 hours a day on colo management because he does it the right way.
>> Congrats. Inevitably, a UPS will overload, a switch will die & you'll eat some downtime too. It happens -- build redundancy into your application / service to ensure that thy facility is irrelevant when the time comes.
I use external DNS to handle dynamic re-routing to an alternate colo should connectivity or power to this one fail. Even with this setup, it would cost more than 2 times as much to do what I do on the cloud, even if I used EC2 committed instances.
What's important is NOT to have NO downtime. What's important is to be PERCEIVED to have no downtime.
Customers should never see downtime from you. It should be transparent to them, giving you a 100% uptime public personna.
For example, in PHP, you could use gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s') to get the current time/date in UTC.
In Python, you could use datetime.datetime.utcnow().
In fact, Heroku and AWS have a boatload of micro-businesses, one of which you run.If you're serious about your business, you'll host your own servers at a colo (TWO colos if you're really serious) on different network segments/providers, and use Heroku/AWS as a scaling mechanism and NOT a primary computing platform.They don't care if you lose customers, as long as you don't cancel YOUR account....
You'd also want to augment the quads so that when they reach a low battery threshold, they return to the rooftop automatically for new batteries or a new ad.
To ensure they don't collide, you could use simple IR transceivers on the sides of the quads to allow them to maintain optimal distance at all times.
Finally, if you want to get REALLY creative, you could adapt gyros to the quads to allow them to stay perfectly still, even in high winds.
Rain would now be your biggest foe.
Make sure you print on BOTH sides of the ad so the people in the buildings above can see it too.
My recommendation is (a) CLEP out of the course if it's required, or (b) ignore the unsubstantiated bias (that's found in many schools these days) and try to find some nugget of truth in the drivel he's shovelling.
When you find a professor who has experience in their field, is open minded, and actually keeps up with the current thinking on their subject matter, it's a "fantasticalicious" experience to learn from them. Sadly, they are few and very far between.
If you're going to school to become an entrepreneur, I can say with substantial experience that you are wasting your time and money.
Entrepreneurialism is NOT something that can be learned in school. It must be learned in the trenches. In fact, I believe that post-secondary education is the antithesis of entrepreneurialism.
If you're going to school to learn Business Admin, goodonya. Stay on task.
I mean,seriously, if speed is what you want, you'd write it in C. These days, with virtually unlimited CPU, we choose our languages based on suitability for the task, readability and community support (at least I do).
Other than assembler for games, I have never chosen a language based on speed of execution. Anyone else?
Can't we also just compile Ruby (or PHP or Python) to C and then let the C compiler optimize it these days? I think we can.
Additionally, the fact that Javascript kicks the crap out of the vast majority of languages is surprising to me.
:) Looks nice.
Not all of us are make-aware...
<soapbox> Most who read this will likely not "get" the gist of this post. That is, until three (3) OS versions from now when Apple decides your meager 64-bit hardware unworthy of their latest 128-bit feline-named release.Trying to update my wife's circa 2005 aluminum 15" MacBook Pro, it appears that the App Store does not know that there are Core Duo (not Core2Duo) machines that can STILL...
IMHO, it's a real douchebag business decision, and anyone with a popular unique app should always expect Apple to screw you over with no notice and have a contingency plan in the works.