Viewing profile — bballant

I can only speak from my American experience, working as a software engineer for ~12 years in NYC. I am 33 years old--I never feel too old for this. My non-tech co-workers and engi…

My main point is that the JVM manages memory better than ruby. Its dead easy to benchmark it yourself by writing a pair of tiny programs. As I said, the JVM will use up all the mem…

I've heard good things about Play, but we've chosen to go with Spring MVC because we didn't need the full stack -- we have a lot of existing Java ORM-ish code and a bunch of existi…

On my team such remarks cost a dollar. The JVM generally does very well in terms of memory use compared to many languages. It's easy to test: write an a small program in both langu…

I've worked in ruby, python, java, and most recently, scala -- on both small and large projects. Tangled hairballs and hidden runtime exceptions can happen anywhere. I've just seen…

I also thought that was a weird comment. But In my experience a big team benefits from a compiled, statically typed language like Java (better yet, Scala). Perhaps that's what the …

To use your analogy, I don't think Brad is saying to wear shorts outside during a blizzard. He's saying that if it's a sunny day, you shouldn't wear earmuffs just cause it's unseas…

Well maybe it was my mistake to generalize (and say "much"). And by develop, I meant develop, test, support, and maintain over a wide range of phones and capabilities. These issues…

Mr. Wilson's numbers leave out some key realities about Android as it stands as a smartphone platform. First of all, Android is much harder to develop for than the iPhone. This is …

I agree. Cable news is horrendous. On the other hand, the photos of the tsunami devestation published by the Boston Globe alone tell a story that is deeper and richer than anything…

It makes sense that the post on women founders wouldn't be similarly flagged if the difference is related to comfort level. Comfort comes from trust and exposure, among other thing…

You're right, a lot of things take years of experience to learn, which is why solving a difficult problem is not the only way I evaluate a candidate. I definitely look at their pre…

I've recently been on the other side, trying to interview and hire people. It's difficult. My primary concerns are: Is the candidate going to be competent and capable of solving di…

It depends on what you do, but if you're a freelancer, finding your own clients, managing your own projects, and paying for your own social security and benefits, then 100/hr is fa…

i would prefer to always use Linux, but my company gives all the engineers Macs, so that's what I now use. I miss Linux deeply, but maintaining two dev environments, not to mention…

Re: good vs. bad clients -- I commented on part 1, basically saying that being friendly helps me find work, but it also means my clients are friendly/casual which can lead to time …

Thanks for the tips. Perhaps I could raise my rates, but I think I lose money more by a) not properly estimating timelines and b) becoming idle while waiting for client feedback/he…

I've only been freelancing for 6 mo. but I have about 10 years of experience as a software developer in the same market. Right now I'm totally saturated with work and it's come ent…

Another quick comment about doctors and pay (because I had this conversation the other day w/ a young doctor). Doctors are incentivized to prescribe costly tests. They get paid mor…

For point # 3, it's actually even worse than that. These days, the best doctors also do a fellowship after residency. It's slightly less ridiculous than a residency, but it's anoth…

"I turned these and other activities into necessary and weekly scheduled tasks.." I hope you scheduled some time to be spontaneous.