amsha's comments

Yeah, disabling the discrete card made a huge difference to my laptop's stability (also 2010 15" MBP with NVIDIA GT 330M). There's an open-source app called gfxCardStatus [0] that lets you switch between integrated and discrete from the menubar.

On 10.12 the original app doesn't work properly, but one of its forks [1] fixes the issue.

[0] https://github.com/codykrieger/gfxCardStatus

[1] https://github.com/steveschow/gfxCardStatus/releases

Does anyone here have insight into how widely Pronovost's ideas have been implemented since the article was published?

Yes, email is federated.

Any programming language can do IPC, but Erlang/Elixir is the only language I've seen that makes it really easy. Erlang IPC is transparent whether you're sending messages between to local processes or remote processes. Most languages have trouble with local IPC (usually because of race conditions in data). Every other language I know of, including Go, needs custom code to handle remote IPC.

In my experience, writing (or any other art) is maybe the most downwardly-mobile profession there is. The supply of artists far outstrips the demand for art, and getting your first job often depends on proximity to industry gatekeepers. I can't speak specifically for the publishing industry, but in film and television people tend to get writing jobs through personal connections.

The four paths I've seen for people who make it in film/tv:

* Have a family member who gets you your first job.

* Have rich parents who completely subsidize your work for a few years and provide anonymous funding for your first feature film.

* Have upper-middle class parents who partially subsidize your work for a few years, and get ready to be an assistant for 3-25 years while you build connections with the business bros that determine your future.

* Have lower-middle class parents. Be extraordinarily driven and ignore all material needs while you win festivals and get noticed.

The lower you are on the list, the more effort it takes to maximize your probability of success. Realistically, almost no one makes it from the bottom category.

More concretely, Phoenix sets itself apart through its own features, Elixir's features, and an (as far as I've seen) unparalleled commitment to the community:

* PubSub, so if you're building a communication-based app your job is automatically easier.

* asynchronous jobs by default (it's a language feature), so if you need background processing your job is automatically easier.

* Rails-like database interactions. I don't know of any framework that makes dealing with the database as simple as Rails, and Phoenix (really Ecto, the ORM it uses) matches that simplicity. Models, validations, transactions, queries, migrations - it all feels very well thought-out. First-class support for PostgreSQL arrays and json(b) are nice-to-have, too.

* Fast templates. Template rendering is one of the biggest performance problems in Rails, and Phoenix solves it with some compile-time tricks.

* Built-in support for multiplexed real-time communication channels. If you need to push data to clients, your job just became easier (notice a trend?). It supports both WebSockets and long-polling so you don't have to make the hard choice about whether that new feature is worth the risk of losing users on outdated browsers.

* Asset building, another built-in goody that very few other frameworks have. The choice to use Brunch (rather than WebPack) is debatable, but I think that having a controversial build tool is 100x better than having no build tool.

* IRC support: If you ask a question, you will get a complete answer without anyone telling you to RTFM. This is both good and necessary because, although the official documentation is pretty good, Phoenix and its dependencies don't have the huge number of blogpost tutorials and StackOverflow answers that make Rails so easy to learn. I suspect this will change over time as the community grows.

* It keeps getting better. This is an outsider's perspective, but after lurking on #elixir-lang, Phoenix-Core, Phoenix-Talk, etc. it's obvious to me that Phoenix and Elixir are going to be better in 2017 than they are in 2016. Its core contributors are knowledgeable and dedicated, and many of them are being paid for their open-source work. That gives me confidence in the future.

Security and fault-tolerance are cost centers, so unless they are explicit features of a deliverable they will be ignored. Planes, cars, and banks all have anomaly detection and auditing because people demand it. They understand the risks of failure. Conversely, very few people are demanding remote loopback facilities for IP. That's not a criticism of fault-tolerance, but if it's important then we should communicate more effectively. Why is fault-tolerance important? What goes wrong without it? What catastrophes could have been averted if we had considered it?

Edit for clarity