aschepis

No worries. I didn't take it that way. I agree w/ you about the culture of over-parenting and needing to be your kids best friend.

don't worry! my daughter is getting a healthy dose of neglect from me during the 21 hours in the day i'm not with her.

I agree with many of your sentiments about rude kids, or kids with no manners and that's part of what drove my choice. I don't take the time with her so that I can be her best friend. I take the time so that i can be the best parent I can be. I love to play with her, but if she misbehaves or isn't listening to us then she is punished. Timeouts work pretty well with our daughter as a punishment so there's no need for the smacking.

I think I would have been a lot more of a helicopter parent if it weren't for my wife (who by trade is a special education teacher.) She is the one who can take most of the credit for the fact that my daughter is well mannered, well adjusted, and has lots of friends.

Also -- to be fair, i never said that i spend those hours alone in the house every night. Sometimes we go to the park with other dad's, and at least once a week I try to go out with her to do a class where she mostly interacts with other kids (my wife stays home with her and does a lot more of this with playgroups etc. She won't start school until next year.)

Thanks for your comment, its always nice to see the other side of the coin.

and honestly, you probably could have done the job better and faster if you had done 8-10 hours (or less) per day and had enough time to mow your lawn, pay your bills, unwind, etc.

If i could upvote this comment 100 times, i would. I've seen that comment before, but had forgotten about it. It sums things up much more eloquently than I can.

In many cases it is expected or at least the cultural norm. However, I think that there is a growing body of research that shows how unhealthy it can be.

LOL. I'm lucky, that's very true. She is a saint.

Software engineers aren't making widgets, and its hard to measure output quantitatively. I can assure you that your ability to make good decisions isn't as good after 18 hours of working as it is during the first 6. In engineering, good decision making can save you tons of time in the long run.

I get what you're saying. Though more is not necessarily better, I have no doubt that someone with abilities similar to myself without a family could put in more effective hours and outperform me.

Like so many things in engineering, I have analyzed the situation and made the tradeoffs that i think provide the best solution to my particular situation.

hey all, thanks for the positive discussion. Apologies that my blog is terribly slow. I didn't notice that it spiked because, well, it was between 4:30 and 7:30 ;)

I'm working in my spare time to get it all off of wordpress and onto Jekyll so i can just host it out of S3 and get rid of the EC2 instance its running on.

Love to hear your thoughts.. agree, disagree? What else can we detect at build time and prevent using build failures?

I have done that as well. That is one of the strategies we have used on my team @ work. One specific case was where we were basically being integrated into a much larger, older component and they had their own way of doing things. Dependency injection wasn't an option. So we did a default for that case and exposed the dependencies so that we could mock them out in our tests.

Apologies!!!! You guys killed my little ec2 instance! It's back up, but running slowly. I'm going to look for some new hosting. thanks for the comments. i'll take some time to respond later.