pudakai

1) I really don't know. Maybe he had a stockpile? Maybe it really was color, but the room was somewhat dark/shaded, and I'm only remembering/assuming it as B&W?

2) We used to do a lot, lot, lot worse than that in the USMC in those pre-MADD days. Different era.

Fun fact - same motorcycle, I was struck by lightning on it several months later, riding home from California (to Ga) on I-70 in Missouri. This was following my discharge (actually, end of active service) in late August.

Yeah, I thought what I titled it was clear and informative and as author of the article, the Orange Coast title was literary rather than descriptive.

FWIW, I originally titled this "The Crack Of A Twig" and we were rolling w/that title, but at the last minute, the editors at OC Mag asked if they could change it.

I'm not a pro writer by any means, and going through the process of editing a feature article w/a print mag was pretty interesting.

When you dig into it, nobody really knows how many victims there were. His cryptic tally sheet seemed to indicate 67 or so, but some investigators believe he may have killed 100 or more.

For instance, when they caught him, the front passenger seat of his car was apparently bloodsoaked, but was never matched to any known/suspected victim. A fair amount of evidence suggests that he had at least a part-time accomplice as well. All sorts of unknowns, as he still maintains complete innocence to this day.

He had been killing people in Oregon, on business trips up there and the folks up there theorized that something like this was happening and had been working credit card gas purchase, car rental, and airline ticket info and from what I read, right around the time he got arrested in Ca. his name was coming to the top in Oregon.

In retrospect, I'm pretty convinced he was going to try to get me to undress myself at his escalating suggestion w/out him ever touching me. He was extremely careful about not touching, "accidentally" brushing, etc, and keeping out of my personal space. I realize now that this was a survival mechanism for him, as if the spell were broken by some wrong move, he really could have gotten hurt badly in this sort of situation.

Hi Rob, hope all is well. I don't think any of us will ever forget those Adrenaline days.

I spent a year in Idaho years ago. I was really surprised at how smoggy/dirty the winter air gets in some of these Mountain west places that are prone to inversions.

On top of that, woodburning in fireplaces/stoves is also really popular in some of these areas. I remember a few days in Pocatello where you could barely see to the end of the block.

I thought the first chart, the number of commits per language, was interesting.

I don't think that 1 person in 1000 could do what i do no matter how many ruby/clojure classes they took.

Sorry if that sounds cocky, but whatever.

Programming is incidental to what I do, which is figure out how to use the deterministic execution of computers combined with the availability of data to solve some problem for somebody. Programming language/architecture considerations are an afterthought for optimizing operations.

This is like suggesting that because one learns how to type/write/spell, all of a sudden one is in competition w/Herman Melville.

Don't leave until you close on other job. As others have noted, your value plunges in the eyes of other hiring folks even though you feel you are the same person.

You also are perceived to be less in a position of strength on compensation negotiations.

And finally, since you don't have a job, there will be a little bit of a question about why you left your last job, a little bit of a non-positive aura about that.

This is just the way the interview/hiring dynamics go, whether we think it is fair or not.

I turned down a job w/Microsoft in the early 90's with great options. Interestingly enough, they kept calling me back - I really got the impression it wasn't that they really wanted me, it was just that they were curious about someone turning down their job offer.

Anyhow, I gnawed on this for some years, calculating what the options would have been worth, but I finally let it go when it go to be around 5m.

Anyhow, cry in your beer a little bit and move on.

Maybe he just thinks it would be fun, wants to feel the joy of that first "Hello Gotham"? He certainly wouldn't be the first person coding for avocational reasons.

We're doing the platform approach. I don't think this was part of any grand calculation of where the technology wave is, just that it is the idea we have and it meshes w/our skillset.

The field does seem awfully crowded with social/mobile lightweight apps.

People prosper all over different parts of economic/tech cycles. My father was a developer (real estate kind, a regular "A Man In Full") in Atlanta, he used to always make all his bank during recessions when all the other developers were going broke. Conversely, during the fat times, he never did very well.

We (including Dad) were all aware of this pattern, but never could really figure out why things worked out that way.

May not be to everyone's taste, but it is at least worth mentioning Spring Roo. There is an integrated eclipse based IDE (STS) available as well.

You can get a nominal Java CRUD app up in short time with this.

I had been out of Java for a number of years, but we wanted to start w/jvm back end. I was surprised at how much of Spring complexity it encapsulates, it has worked quite well for us so far, although we are still very early on in the process.

We use wiki from earliest stage as a repository for all sorts of information. We don't go out of our way to get fancy it, though, so we don't need a lot of advanced/refined functionality.

I've been through this cycle a few times, this time we are using MediaWiki. I don't remember what we used last time, I think it was a Drupal-based wiki.

None of them made a whole lot of impression on me either good or bad.

I agree w/the other posters that this is a pretty ambitious goal ("better wiki") - I'm like a lot of other folks in that what is out there is more than enough and we probably don't even exercise 10% of the features.

I also agree w/the other poster that said "people don't bother". Very true, stuff usually doesn't end up in wiki unless I put it there or I ask somebody else to do so. Very few people will do this habitually without a lot of strong and recurring encouragement.

Right now, our privacy policy is "won't share your PID" with anyone.

How would you suggest such clients of your website rewrite their privacy policies in a manner that will allay user's privacy concerns.

I'm probably biased because of my years ago experiences w/writing compilers/vm's, but I'm a big fan of "code that writes code". Like any technique, there is a time and place for it though.

One use that is highly relevant to many shops is creating client tools for their APIs. That is, creating libraries in common/target client languages for higher order abstractions of some of the granular/repetitive stuff and/or some of the mechanical access actions.

Keeping this sort of stuff straight by hand as an API evolves is tedious and error prone. Creating the infrastructure to generate these sorts of libraries is a largish cost up front but pays off hugely downstream.

We are still working (very early stage) on our tools, but our tools code generator(s) works/will work off of the same infrastructure that generates our API model metadata (https://sigkat.com/services/api/model)

This isn't so goofy - it is like the same advice they give to people losing weight, they are allowed to have a pig out day once in a while.

"Also, software projects tend to reach points where they become overly complex or unmaintainable. Developers who are 25x better prevent that from happening, keeping everything working smoothly."

Actually, I think this is the heart of the issue in the productivity debate - I view my biggest challenge as writing code/architecture that can be maintained, easily debugged, etc, my devs (or future devs) are as a constituency for my software as well as my users.

But this is, in a big org, extremely hard to monetize, as disasters/chronic bleed avoided are not even entered into the balance sheet.

Actually, though I can't footnote it, the meme in the early 90's being pushed by Gates & Simonyi at M'soft was 100:1 or so "orders of magnitude" iirc correctly, so actually, Jobs is a downward estimate from that.

great post. Really, age is meaningless, the more meaningful number is how much time does one have left. Of course, nobody knows this with any certainty, so just proceed every day as if it were your last or the beginning of the next 1000 days, take your pick. (Yes, I understand at the extremes of age, odds start weighing heavily, but we're talking about 50 vs. 30 here).

I teach guitar, sometimes I'll get an older student, a beginner, who will ask, "Is it too late for me, I'm going to be 30 (40/50/60..) in x year". I always tell them, well, you are going to be 30 (40/50/60..) anyhow, lets just get on w/doing something you want to do.

This is actually the conclusion I came to a long time ago and have been acting on it since. Still haven't captured that value, but it has been fun trying & haven't given up yet.

This has long been known about the programmer/developer profession, that the standard deviation of performance between practitioners is extremely high compared to many other fields.

The more interesting part to me is why don't wages for this profession follow this spread. Except for the rare cases of striking it rich on equity, the compensation spread between mundane developers and excellent top notch ones with the same skill acronyms and seniority is 3-4x at best and that is probably an extremely generous estimate.

Very clever presentation that shows by doing (how many people could resist the temptation to scroll down on that page). Thanks for posting this!

Sales guys are great fabulists for the most part, so in the absence of "blue sky" stuff for reveries w/potential customers, they will just start riffing on their own independently.

This is where a huge amount of the rub between sales-marketing and dev comes in. But this "imagine all the possibilities" type of stuff is pure crack in the sales-customer relationship.

So I try to fill the void for the sales guys so they won't be making stuff up on their own. That is, I take a lot of care/explaining to them what are some of the near term possibilities of our app that we haven't built out yet, but make sense, that sort of thing, how much it would cost, risk factors, etc.

Fill up their fantastical story buffer in advance w/stuff that is acceptable to me. This seems to work well with little friction because sales guys tend to be a lot less intransigent than devs/designers about features - basically, they care less about the substance of the story rather than simply how well it sells.

In short, I try to make my fantasies their fantasies as well.

One hallmark of the truly great sales person is that they can sell the product they have rather than the one they wish you had.

Thanks for the link, learned something today, "Contracts of Adhesion"

I was living in Hawaii when I finished my time as a navy officer. I realized that I would never get a post-Navy career going because every day, and I mean every day, you look out the window and think, "wow, it is much to pretty a day to be inside".

But if aren't susceptible to "Polynesian Paralysis", sure, no place better than Hawaii. I couldn't and, much to my regret, moved back to the mainland to get things moving.

If we learned more from our failures than our successes, presumably unsuccessful entrepreneurs, especially serially unsuccessful ones, would be the ones most sought after for advice on startups....