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My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

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Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#51

Post by ww520 »

wyclif wrote: post #6

That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will. I'm interested in education, hiring, and matt…

I found education benefits most in expanding your mind and abilities (of learning, critical thinking, and sharper mind), not so much about the knowledge. Of course knowledge helps but you can pick them up on your own. Education force you to learn some topics that you might never use later but would benefit you in other way anyway. Some people can gain those without a formal education, more power to them. What it means is that the hiring manager can't be lazy to use degree as a filter. Have to really understand the individual's capacity.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#52

Post by ndimopoulos »

run4yourlives wrote: post #50

Now is the time for me to focus on spending as much time with my son and family as I can and I can no longer commit to 100 hour weeks at Engine Yard. I also wanted to move to Portland where my folks live so my son can grow up near his grandparents and my wife and I can have trustworthy babysitters so we can have a social live of our own(even if it’s just a little bit;) This is a man with his head on his shoulders. My…

So true! It is so easy to focus on the wrong thing. Family time is precious and priceless no matter whether your code compiles or not.

Yeah for sure, we all have to work and feed our families but we can do so with 40 hours a week and not 100.

Kudos!

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#53

Post by rossedwards »

jackowayed wrote: post #32
rossedwards wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Merb compare to Padrino? Any ideas? Besides Merb being part of Rails now.

The way I've been explaining Padrino is that it's Merb built on top of Sinatra. Merb was a lightweight, modular framework made up of a small merb-core and then merb-more, a collection of 20ish gems that provided various bits of functionality, most of which were problems that Rails solved in its core. Stuff like merb-helpers. If you wanted fancy helper methods, you required the merb-helpers gem. If you didn't care, yo…

Ive played with PAdrino a bit and its really quite nice. Very flexible and has a good communittee. One of the problems i have with Rails is that it seems to leave the other frameworks behind. In fact i only know of one or two places using something other then Rails. ANd its usually for backend stuff such as i think serving json. At the same time Rails is a heavyweight which not everybody needs.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#54

Post by SkyMarshal »

maukdaddy wrote: post #24
wyclif wrote: post #6

That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will. I'm interested in education, hiring, and matt…

That's a terribly short sighted thing to say (by the poster). I know HN users don't seem to value education, but a college degree has a lot of value outside of the education component. Living with others, compromising, group work, social life, classes outside your area of focus, etc. I'd rather hire someone who has been through this than a hacker who has only spent time in the echo chamber of forums and fellow geeks.…

>HN users don't seem to value education

HN users value education a great deal, many just refuse to let school interfere with it, especially when school == java school.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#55

Post by jackowayed »

mishmash wrote: post #38
smiler wrote: post #7

Is there anything in this "Oh the stories I could tell if only I could. But I feel that telling this positive story of the history of EY is the classy way to go out and I wish Engine Yard all the best in the world" Any unrest?

I don't think anyone would leave right before their stock was about vest, without a solid reason. :) But the key term is classy. True story: in the early days of Merb, before it had really gotten a lot of attention, I once hit a show stopper - hopped on IRC, told him about my problem, he found the bug, fixed the bug, pushed a new release in something like 15 minutes IIRC, and stayed cool about it the entire time. Bes…

> I don't think anyone would leave right before their stock was about vest, without a solid reason.

I wouldn't assume that there's some hidden reason for him leaving. First of all, leaving right before his stock is about to vest just means that he's leaving a little bit of stock on the table. As he said, the vast majority of his stock has already vested (as one would expect after 4 years), and he gets to keep that. It's the 5%, or whatever, of his stock that hasn't vested that he's losing.

I read this as "I've been working startup hours for way too long, and I'm tired of it, especially now that I have a kid I want to spend time with".

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#56

Post by [deleted] »

rossedwards wrote: post #22
keeran wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails doesn't need any hand-holding any more. Apache+Passenger take care of most cases, Nginx+unicorn/mongrel take care of the rest. Big, heavy traffic apps require special attention, but then that's the same for all big/heavy apps.

The only issue so far ive seen is that there arent any rails/ruby sites that have complex interfaces. Twitter is barebones. ONce theres a site that has heavy traffic and a more complicated interface its possible the perspetion of the technology will change.

[deleted]

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#57

Post by rossedwards »

cullenking wrote: post #27
rossedwards wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only issue so far ive seen is that there arent any rails/ruby sites that have complex interfaces. Twitter is barebones. ONce theres a site that has heavy traffic and a more complicated interface its possible the perspetion of the technology will change.

justin.tv, check their traffic/interface lately? scribd.com, though maybe that doesn't qualify on interface. shopify.com, basecamp.com

None of those have interfaces on par with say amazon or ebay or even facebook. ALthough i know facebook uses mostly ajax anyway. IN fact justin.tv and scribd really are just a cms that pushes the video rather then the site being based around the interface as it is with facebook.

Its not really that important just something that ive noticed. THen again there arent really any java sites that i can think of that are high load sites that have complex interfaces either. Meaning newer sites. MAybe they just arent in fashion anymore. Or everybody is just moving to ajax front ends.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#58

Post by mrdodge »

someone_here wrote: post #26
mrdodge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of what relevance are those numbers to a deft software developer? What's is the unemployment rate for skilled software developers?

How do you define what a skilled software developer is?

I personally define people by their track record.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#59

Post by ezmobius »

maukdaddy wrote: post #24
wyclif wrote: post #6

That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will. I'm interested in education, hiring, and matt…

That's a terribly short sighted thing to say (by the poster). I know HN users don't seem to value education, but a college degree has a lot of value outside of the education component. Living with others, compromising, group work, social life, classes outside your area of focus, etc. I'd rather hire someone who has been through this than a hacker who has only spent time in the echo chamber of forums and fellow geeks.…

I'm not saying not to get a degree and I do sometimes wish that I had gone for a CS degree. But that being said I have learned all I needed to know in order to grow a 100 people strong cutting edge company and all I have is my GED.

And even though I only have my GED I am still very familiar with how computers work, memory management, building virtual machines, etc. I have a small scheme here that compiles to rubinius bytecode and then gets JIT'd by LLVM into machine code that I will release one of these days and I have read tons of papers and feel like I know as much or more then your average CS degree grad.

Everything you need to know is on the internet nowadays. All you have to do is spend the time to reach out and grab it and you can learn anything you want to learn and eventually get any job you want to get if you only apply yourself hard enough.

I did not mean to disparage college degrees, merely to make a comment that you can learn as much or more then you would learn at your average CS degree school by just applying yourself and reading online, then practice, practice, practice.

Re: My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

#60

Post by beffbernard »

alex_stoddard wrote: post #48
beffbernard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there is no direct correlation between a developer being good or bad based on whether they had a degree or not. However, what I did find was that someone who had completed their undergrad is generally capable of thinking at a higher level and can work through harder problems. IMHO, a University shouldn't be about training students to go into the workforce but to teach them how to effectively think an…

I would argue the presumption that college is critical to developing higher critical thinking is a damning indictment of pre-college schooling.

I generally agree with that statement but I wasn't making any presumptions only stating my observations. College is not critical to developing higher critical thinking but it certainly doesn't hurt.
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