I don't want to disclose too many details I thought the idea of a developer release was to do exactly this.
To them? Sure. On my blog, for (what's currently around) 8000 people to read? Nope.
Trouble with Diaspora
101–110 of 166 posts
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#102This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
Plenty of successful tech startups have been launched by students coming straight out of college, so I think the attitude of "sorry kids, better do your time somewhere else first" is very harmful to both students and the industry as a whole.
Sure there's a lot they have to learn, but there's no reason why they won't be able to learn by doing. They clearly have all of the funding and motivation they need to get to the point of having a stable release. I'm glad the author (of this blog post) submitted a patch, and hopefully momentum on this project will continue to grow, as more experienced developers offer their advice and expertise.
edit: Also, I'm not sure if "startup" is the best thing to call Diaspora. Given the fact that they're already well funded, and working towards the public good, they might be better off incorporating as a nonprofit, similar to what the Miro guys did (http://participatoryculture.org/).
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, P does indeed stand for product. And this is not a product. Not yet, anyway.
If you do some reading around MVP, you might be surprised at what a low standard exists to constitute a product. Some folk even count an ad + landing page as an MVP. ie. 0 code base. An MVP is a point of departure, not arrival.
I will certainly concede that, especially given that this isn't anywhere near my realm of knowledge - I'm strictly a coder and don't have the vision or insight into product presentation, preparation, or anything like that.
However, my instinct tells me that the example you mention of say, an ad + landing page, IS an MVP in one good sense - to gauge interest in a potential product (an iPhone app, etc), gathering subscribers to mailing lists, beta signups, etc.
But in the scope of what Diaspora is trying to accomplish, releasing the code base like this doesn't qualify as a product - I think.
I am way more than willing to be wrong on this point, though. I'm also probably just splitting hairs by this point.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#104This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
This whole thing makes me wonder...
Many startups are started/coded by young programmers in or fresh out of college -- people who probably haven't really earned their 'black-belt' in programming through time and experience. This would lead you to believe that many startups (even relatively successful ones) have plenty of bad/buggy code under the hood, but they have the benefit of not being out there under the scrutiny of public eye.
That said, if you're a young (and thus, probably somewhat inexperienced) coder, it would seem you can get stuck in the conundrum of wanting to have enough experience to write good code, but also wanting to go for starting a company while you're still young. Would love to hear opinions/thoughts on how to solve that conundrum.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#105Good thing: the project already has 292 forks and 2051 watchers on GitHub!
I believe they will get an amazing quantity of outside work.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#106This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
I agree with you up until your last paragraph "a startup was probably the worst endeavor for them". The sheer gumption to throw yourself whole-heartedly at problems you are unqualified to solve is one of the most important characteristics of a startup founder. Even if you spent time learning to be a great coder, there would be a dozen other things you'd need to be doing for the first time when you first start a startup. Rather than spending a bunch of time learning in industry, it's just as well to just try it when you are young and have less to lose.
Diaspora is also a somewhat unusual case. For most consumer web startups, the back button is a much bigger threat than security vulnerabilities in the early stages. Once you've iterated a lot have a better idea of what you're actually building, one of the first steps is usually to hire coders who are much better than you. In Diaspora's case, it's unclear to me whether their vision is a business or an open-source project - in the latter case then having stronger coders lead the effort is more important.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#107This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
Plenty of successful tech startups have been launched by students coming straight out of college, so I think the attitude of "sorry kids, better do your time somewhere else first" is very harmful to both students and the industry as a whole. Sure there's a lot they have to learn, but there's no reason why they won't be able to learn by doing. They clearly have all of the funding and motivation they need to get to the…
how do you make that link clickable?
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#108This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
This whole thing makes me wonder... Many startups are started/coded by young programmers in or fresh out of college -- people who probably haven't really earned their 'black-belt' in programming through time and experience. This would lead you to believe that many startups (even relatively successful ones) have plenty of bad/buggy code under the hood, but they have the benefit of not being out there under the scrutin…
My guess is that the startups get VC funding, and then they hire professionals who take it from there. The "wonder boys" that started it are mostly just figureheads at that point.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I've already brought this up on Reddit... For example: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/app/controll... There's no check to see if this is your photo or not. And before you mention it, the before_filter only checks if they're logged in, not permissions. There are many, many similar things to this. Check out lib/encryptor.rb and shudder. I'm no security expert, but...
How is that a fundamental problem? It takes two lines of code to fix. This is an alpha release. People shouldn't be using it, that's all. They should've put in an artificial limitation like max. 2 users with max. 2 pics each per server to avoid people using it. The whole thing being in Rails is much more of a turn-off for me.
If I saw "# FIXME: check perms" in that code I'd have said, sure, it's alpha, no biggie. But without any acknowledgement of what should be a totally obvious security hole, it makes one question what other holes there might be, and maybe they can all be reviewed away... but it can also lead to a lot of pain for a long time. But maybe the visibility of the project will help get that review done.
Realistically, though, so long as they don't get clever it might be fine. If they do clever things then review becomes very hard.
Re: Trouble with Diaspora
#110This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…
"Every programmer I've known thought he was a super hacker by the time he got out of college. Me included."
This is referred to in the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquistion. It refers to a space in time where we are advanced enough to not be a novice, but not advanced to realize our own lack of expertise. Merlinn Mann refers to it as being an "advanced beginner". The problem with this stage is that's it's impossible to rationalize until you've escaped it - that or you use metacognition - with awareness of said likely ineptitude because of posts like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisit...