ltcoleman's comments

ltcoleman | 2 years ago | on: AWS us-east-1 down

We are seeing console, codebuild, etc. access issues. Possibly all using Lambdas, foundationally?

ltcoleman | 7 years ago | on: Tesla owners protest over drastic price cuts

I can empathize with the anger over a price reduction when you just bought a product. I bought a truck and a month later, the dealership had an additional 5k in rebates. Same happens when you buy an expensive tv, and a couple months later, the price drops by 1-2k. Technology products are constantly becoming cheaper through innovation and to satisfy supply/demand economics.. why is a tesla any different?

If you bought a tesla for resale value, you are doing it wrong. Buying a tesla helps the environment, furthers innovation, and provides a status symbol.

ltcoleman | 7 years ago | on: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

No. I do not believe we are in a bubble. At least for skilled professions that keep learning, the likelihood is the reverse. As more layers of abstraction make it easier to produce business value, a smaller number of skilled professions will be able to generate more and more revenue with less time.

Programming is different than doctors or lawyers. Programming in terms of value can scale. Doctors can only see a certain number of patients or perform a certain number of surgeries. A lawyer can only take a certain number of cases. They produce value based on their time in each of these tasks. That amount of value is somewhat fixed.

However, a skilled software professional can complete one project that produces a large amount of business value, or the coder can develop a new product that generates a long-tail stream of revenue over time.

For example, a coder that built the Google Ads Platform has helped generate a tremendous amount of revenue for Google, and that revenue keeps pouring in.

The bubble is real, but for IT/SD professionals that tend to get complacent with their skills. Traditional IT is getting abstracted away entirely. SD is getting more and more complex as many more frameworks/knowledge is needed on a yearly basis to do modern software development. Building a simple monolith is no longer acceptable for many companies. One must learn modern distributed systems.

The sad truth is that it will continue to take less and less resources to accomplish the same business goals in the future. One must stay on top of the latest technologies to climb on top of the coding pyramid. Luckily, this pyramid is starting to segment based on Front-End, Back-End, DevOps, etc. which means the truly skilled professions in those domains will rise to the top and command salaries much higher than currently seen.

ltcoleman | 10 years ago | on: Lessons learned writing highly available code

I agree completely here. Many of my dev1s want to use the latest greatest stuff, but you will most likely not find those technologies in large stable production systems unless to facilitate some one-off service or piece of architecture that does not need SLAs.

I remember a slew of small tech companies having issues when they decided to build out there app stack with nginx fronting a nosql hotness which inevitably led to overload scenarios because of the lack of constraints/scalability concerns.

Please note : this was years ago, and I know that nginx is a great web server and mongo is a great nosql db, but without a focus on scalability, you can end up with a large headache.

ltcoleman | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: AWS or Dedicated Server

AWS should work fine for you, but I would spend a lot of time up front going through the AWS security blog to make sure your infrastructure is secure. I was bit by this and experienced a hack within 2 hours of starting up my first ec2 instance. I learned quite a bit back then from that.

AWS can be very expensive depending on what your application will do.

ltcoleman | 11 years ago | on: No Swift for UW's Certificate in iOS

From the article : we will present examples in both Objective-C and Swift and will include a few weeks of Swift coverage as part of the second or third course.

A strong foundation of knowledge in Objective-C will still be key to being a strong iOS developer. Since the program is still going to be showing some swift examples, and including some time on the language, I am confused as to why the poster is inferring from the title that not using swift in their certification process is such a big deal.

I would not hire an iOS developer that was only certified in swift. I can see the argument to include swift into the certification process, but I would not assume that universitys will immediately change their process without at least seeing how swift matures.

ltcoleman | 11 years ago | on: The Myth of the Full-stack Developer

Yes, they do exist. I have a whole team of full-stack developers. I gave one an iphone application to fix bugs in and convert from ios5 to ios7. He had no prior objective-c experience and in a week and a half, he had fixed all of the bugs and even dove into a 3rd party framework we were using to describe a problem to me using it with ios7.

A full-stack to me is somebody that can do web development, do server-side development, optimize SQL queries, understand security, scalability, and able to build linux server infrastructures for large software systems. They also are able to take any technology and provide value to a business using it in a matter of a couple of weeks.

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

From my point of view, this is due to lack of tech education. There just are not enough people graduating/learning the technical skills necessary for medium to large size software companies to employ.

I am a manager/developer/architect at a relatively large software company, and we have to task our developers with devops-type tasks constantly. Not because we want our developers spending time outside of coding, but because for lack of ability to hire the competency needed.

As you stated, good developers can generally perform these tasks so when you have nobody lower to perform them they become a weight on the developers' shoulders.

No it isn't necessarily fair, and yes, I believe in the future specialization will come back as the education system starts to realize there are many jobs in tech, not just a Comp Sci degree jobs.

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: How Rare Are Anti-Gay-Marriage Donations in Silicon Valley?

I really appreciate all of the replies. My main concern lies not at all in the gay marriage debate. It lies in the increased bullying for views that aren't aligned with what individuals believe is right. For example : http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5506&app=cro

BTW I have no affiliation to campus reform nor do I know what it is.

And for the guy calling the campaign a "hate group".. You should look up SPLC's hate group map, you would love it. And just so you know, that map has allowed "activists" to target institutions for shootings, just look up the Family Research Council.

Once again, I do not affiliate with any of these organizations nor would I because I believe in true love. I believe every human has the right to be loved and listened to in our democracy.

It is when activism becomes violent justice that upsets me.

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: How Rare Are Anti-Gay-Marriage Donations in Silicon Valley?

Isn't the point of a democracy to allow the people to have a voice? It is starting to seem like many progressive groups are trying to vilify an individual's freedom of speech/thought. The Brendan Eich controversy highlights the issue as of late. Do I share all of the values/beliefs that my CEO does? No. Should I boycott my CEO for having conflicting values/beliefs? Maybe. If I am totally against something, then I should stand up for my beliefs. I believe everything starts to collapse when I try to use my beliefs to rally against another individual.

I have the belief that our founding fathers knew America would be a melting pot of religions, cultures, and beliefs and that is why they established state's rights to accommodate the beautiful array of citizens of which would make the United States of America.

If we continue to push one set of beliefs how different are we than North Korea, Iran, etc?

I am not very political, and I have many left and right wing perspectives. I am just saddened to see our country starting to stumble on a slippery slope.

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: Seems that a significant part of HN about dealing with depression?

If you are not careful with work/life balance, the hustle of working in the startup world can easily get you down. Also the high rate of failure in the startup world contributes. A startup founder/employee that is working 80 hour weeks has every right to be depressed.

A mentor had a slogan that I try to model my life after : Faith, Fitness, Family, Finance and Balance!

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: Startup aims to bring Call of Duty-like tech to live paintball games

yea, I think it would be a ton of fun. The concern with paint balls may be warranted but with their case it would take an amazing shot to cause phone damage. I think the airsoft angle is the real killer. When I was younger, I always wanted a videogame style play for outdoor play. This could be it.

ltcoleman | 12 years ago | on: New Treehouse site launches

The new site looks great guys! I have had our dev staff using treehouse for over a year now, and for the devs that get into it, I can see their excitement after each new technology they start to pick up.

Treehouse is AWESOME!

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