michaelvkpdx

12 ms·

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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Trying to charge people for carpooling, something we've traditionally done for free. The "sharing economy" isn't about sharing- it's about monetizing free things and taking a cut. This is not in any way improving hu
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Great article and observations. It's always good to see what this field looks like from a newbies' eyes. If it only it were so simple as keeping a small tool set and a dev team committed to it. You can certainly build a business f
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Oregon legalized marijuana on Tuesday. Microsoft open sources .NET today. They say miracles come in 3. What's next?
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
This is innovation? Why would anyone waste their time developing this? You know how you find beer and dogs at a stadium? Go walk the concourse! Follow the smell! Flag down a vendor! What an utter waste of time and money.
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
market cap != quality of life. The Valley works well at convincing people that fake money is equal to the quality of real life. Market caps have nothing to do with happiness, health, and interpersonal relationships.
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
The premise here is that Silicon Valley "works". What do you mean by "works"? If you mean creating artificial wealth for a small group of already-rich folk, yes, it works. If you mean transforming one of the most natural
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Psychedelics, mushrooms in particular, are essential tools for any wise programmer. Very very powerful, only to be consulted on rare occasions, but immensely valuable in solving intractable problems. We essentially owe our profession to psy
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
They do, true, but Google legal -> Oracle Legal : NCAA football -> NFL
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
This is a fantastic presentation, and if I were developing a history of software class, I'd reuse this presentation for a unit on API's and libraries, given the author's permission. I've never seen such a concise and inf
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
I appreciate Gates' analysis of Piketty, but Gates is still blind to an important point- he came from a middle-class background and therefore had enough capital to gain a footing in the world and to be able to write his initial code wi
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
If you classify an English degree as "un-useful", you should not be involved in educating developers. I studied both CS and English in college, and got my degree in English. The communication skills and translation techniques I le
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Generally true, but I work on a system that has to comply with government regulations that basically say "this is the most important thing the user can possibly be doing. PERIOD." So alerts are pretty much a must for us, and the o
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
I just spent a few days down in the area, where I grew up and used to live, and came back to my home. And I can tell you all with certainty- the only reason people are paying this is that they're all in a shared hallucination/brai
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
With a codebase like that, it's better to look at it through the users' eyes, rather than trying to reverse engineer the business from the code. Things that look like bugs in the code may actually be features for the users, or may
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Well, maybe it's just seasonal affective disorder, or Portlanders being weird, but every programmer I've known who's been in the field longer than maybe 15 years is a little bonkers. I wish there was a good study on mental he
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
I've known several. "Sharp" isn't necessarily the right adjective for them, but they have all been excellent problem solvers. Sharpness is for young programmers, with or without weed. I must say that I do not know any pr
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
As goes the recruitment, so goes the employment. Despite the efforts of the Valley's largest companies to "be different, think different, not be evil", etc..., they are human endeavors run by human beings subject to the same
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
If you use the same language to solve a problem as you use to describe the problem and to define success, then your ability to accurately solve the problem will be constrained by the level of precision that is available in the language bein
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
The tech industry is just a vehicle for money laundering by the rich now. At least IPOs gave engineers and workers a chance to win a lottery ticket. Developers, stop slaving away for the VC's. You are wasting your time and have no chan
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Most of my development work in recent years has been on learning management systems (LMS). I've built lots of different types of LMS's for different types of schools and students. When the MOOC "bubble" started, I was so
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Poor founders and your VC-funded pain. How about some empathy for each of those employees you are firing, who have to go home and face families and lives that they've shared with you and you have essentially shat upon? They are not &qu
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
The proliferation of shitty Javascript is crushing the web. J Javascript is designed from the ground up to enable bad developers to write shitty code. It's fine for alpha work, terrible for production. It is possible to write beautiful