If I had a billion dollars I would...
- Travel
- Fly to the moon
- Go to culinary school
- Practice cooking
- Read magazines, blogs, and books all day
- Audit classes
- Teach myself everything I wanted to know
- Maybe some other stuff too...
Monday, December 20, 2010
If I had a billion dollars I would...
Just a thinking exercise...
Friday, December 10, 2010
Everything is Everything, or, Everything is Meta
Even the title of this is meta.
Very few people get rich from doing anymore. There are a few - your Zucks, your Gates', your Williams-Dorsey-Stones (although some might argue they're not rich...yet). So many people go for the quick way out - early moderate success, then write about it. And why shouldn't they? Today's technology allows for a 4 year old to start a blog. Why wouldn't everyone write about everything, in the hopes of landing a book deal, or some serious readership? And so they do.
People don't like to do anymore. I can speak from experience. When I was younger, I LOVED programming. It was like creation. Like art. But as I grew older (read: more corporate), I started to enjoy programming less. School certainly had something to do with it. An undergrad degree in computer science took all the joy out of programming. Deadlines? Grades? That's not what the world's all about. A master's degree in computer science actually didn't emphasize programming nearly as much as I thought it would. If I had wanted, I'm sure I could have gone the entire program without writing any code. Everything was an abstraction, a level up from the code, since it was assumed that we already knew how to code.
Now, programming tends to just be something to pay the bills. The real fun is thinking through hard problems. How would I solve this? Big block diagrams, API's, service layers, database schemas. Let me design, and let someone else code. It's much easier that way. Let me get rich on a single idea, and turn that into an even more lucrative career speaking and writing about it and these grand life lessons I've learned. "Don't have meetings," "focus on the customer," "follow your heart," and on and on.
It's sort of a shame that the people who work hard for 6 months, a year, 5 years, hit it big, then turn it into a speaking career get far more acclaim than the guys grinding it out every day, coding, fixing bugs, making sure shit that runs our modern world works. Those are the unsung heroes*. What has DHH done since the invention of Ruby on Rails and running 37 signals? Written books, "how-tos" with pithy little one-liners for how you can succeed too.
These are the VH1 One-Hit Wonders of today. The advent of blogging, and the prevalence of media keeps them around.
* I was thinking about this the other day as I look around at job opportunities. There's the cool start-up that's positioning itself to go public - a developer can get in, get a few thousand shares, and cash out at some point in the near future. Then there's the established game development company. They're not giving out shares - they pay a salary, and that's it. You fucking grind that shit out, you don't cash out.
Very few people get rich from doing anymore. There are a few - your Zucks, your Gates', your Williams-Dorsey-Stones (although some might argue they're not rich...yet). So many people go for the quick way out - early moderate success, then write about it. And why shouldn't they? Today's technology allows for a 4 year old to start a blog. Why wouldn't everyone write about everything, in the hopes of landing a book deal, or some serious readership? And so they do.
People don't like to do anymore. I can speak from experience. When I was younger, I LOVED programming. It was like creation. Like art. But as I grew older (read: more corporate), I started to enjoy programming less. School certainly had something to do with it. An undergrad degree in computer science took all the joy out of programming. Deadlines? Grades? That's not what the world's all about. A master's degree in computer science actually didn't emphasize programming nearly as much as I thought it would. If I had wanted, I'm sure I could have gone the entire program without writing any code. Everything was an abstraction, a level up from the code, since it was assumed that we already knew how to code.
Now, programming tends to just be something to pay the bills. The real fun is thinking through hard problems. How would I solve this? Big block diagrams, API's, service layers, database schemas. Let me design, and let someone else code. It's much easier that way. Let me get rich on a single idea, and turn that into an even more lucrative career speaking and writing about it and these grand life lessons I've learned. "Don't have meetings," "focus on the customer," "follow your heart," and on and on.
It's sort of a shame that the people who work hard for 6 months, a year, 5 years, hit it big, then turn it into a speaking career get far more acclaim than the guys grinding it out every day, coding, fixing bugs, making sure shit that runs our modern world works. Those are the unsung heroes*. What has DHH done since the invention of Ruby on Rails and running 37 signals? Written books, "how-tos" with pithy little one-liners for how you can succeed too.
These are the VH1 One-Hit Wonders of today. The advent of blogging, and the prevalence of media keeps them around.
* I was thinking about this the other day as I look around at job opportunities. There's the cool start-up that's positioning itself to go public - a developer can get in, get a few thousand shares, and cash out at some point in the near future. Then there's the established game development company. They're not giving out shares - they pay a salary, and that's it. You fucking grind that shit out, you don't cash out.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Debasing Security, and 12 Programming Mistakes
"There’s no purpose in security if it debases the very life it intends to protect..."Great article. Loved the point about zoos, casinos, etc. Dead is dead, no matter the how; why do we invest so much to protect air travel, when the likelihood of getting struck by lightning is so much higher? Why do we not conduct a war on bad piloting like we conduct this war on terror? Let's take that $338 million and get portable lightning rods for everyone.
The dirty dozen of application development pitfalls - and how to avoid these all-too-common programming blundersI thought for a second this might be a really good article, but it's a wishy-washy piece of garbage. Mistake #2 counteracts Mistake #1, every even-numbered mistake is the opposite of the odd-numbered ones. "#5 Trusting the client," "#6 - Not trusting the client enough." WTF? If #5 is a mistake, then isn't #6 the opposite? Also, nowhere do I see any mentions of how to avoid these problems.
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