reynolds's comments

My mom knows what delicious is. That's pretty mainstream in my book.

I'm not sure that I agree with the claim that retraining someone for a short while can place that person at a similar level of mastery as his or her high-tech peers. It may work for entry level positions. And even then they may not have the same motivations as someone devoted to their craft.

I do a lot of Python and have even worked on my own web frameworks before. I've done web development with many different Python web frameworks. I also don't consider myself just a web developer.

I was recently interviewing for a Python/Django developer position and was instead offered a SDET position (with the possibility of becoming a developer) because I don't have experience with Django.

I turned them down because it felt like an insult.

If you're targeting a specific platform, it can make sense to use a virtual machine instead of installing that platform on your development machine. As far as code is concerned, it doesn't care that you're running it on a Linux VM inside a Windows dev machine rather than directly on a Linux dev machine.

That being said, if you're trying to target Mac or Windows, it's generally a good idea to use that specific platform's tools. It's reasonable to develop Windows and Mac apps on Linux but it may not be the best environment to do so. It's really up to you as a developer to determine the best toolchain and processes based on what you're trying to accomplish.

The way I do it is to write all of the code locally and use git/svn/hg/whatever locally. I then rsync my changes to the virtual machine when I'm ready to test.

It's actually something I've been working on that I want to put up on github. I hacked up a Python version of it as a proof-of-concept but rewrote it in C as an installable executable using autotools.

Basically I tell it which directory I want it to watch for changes and it does automatic syncing by piping rsync. I keep a local and remote signature of the files and their timestamps. When it first starts up, it pulls the server sig file and compares it to the local one. If there's a mismatch, the server is updated. From there it manages the signatures locally until they're different.

Writing the sig file to the remote server is done in the same rsync pass because it's stored in the local directory as a dotfile.

I realize rsync does its own checksums, but using my own crude signature files makes it so I don't have to keep calling rsync. I only call it when something changes.

I also have some stuff I'm working on that ties into auto-restarting servers when syncing finishes, rolling server deployments for no downtime, db migrations, etc.

I'm not sure if this helps in your situation, but when I'm running VMware I don't share any local directories. I use rsync to manage the virtual server directories since it's similar to how I deploy to my remote servers.

Having to manually "deploy" code to a local virtual server can be tedious, so running a background process that watches your local directories for changes helps a lot.

That nugget of useful information is also explained (in a lot more detail) in one of the first chapters of the "Introduction to Algorithms" book.

When I was working through the book (and I still am to some extent), it was basically beat into my brain that some algorithms with worse performance could perform better than faster algorithms for a small enough n.

These types of rants always strike me as being ignorant. It seems like it's just taking this one person's view of software development and trying to apply it to everything. To me, it's on the same level as saying "real programmers use X".

Achieve.ly. I had a few people interested in using it but I took a contracting position and had to stop working on it. I have a few people waiting to use it too. I'm probably just going to open it up publicly to let the handful of people use it.

I'm also working on some client/server stuff for automated web deployments.

I used to deal with products like this quite a bit. There's a huge segment of the industry that is involved in rebill scams and are almost impossible to cancel. Is your product like that as well? It looks exactly like the type of landing page that does scammy rebills for "free" trial offers.

Thanks for the feedback. It may turn out to be better off as a standard API. I've considered that approach as well.

I currently use awesome wm but I run slim so I can login to any number of window managers. I was using xfce4 for a few months and still think it's a great environment. I also mess around with fluxbox. After seeing so many people rave about xmonad I'm going to give it a try as well.

I can't imagine using autocomplete or even an IDE. I remember when I first started I was writing C++ on Windows in Visual C++. My learning only accelerated once I moved off Windows and stopped using autocomplete. Once I started working on Linux and in vim, I didn't even consider looking back.

I like to think I'm a minimalist when it comes to my tools, so obviously my experiences and insights are very different from someone working in an IDE. I prefer the command line to a gui any day.

The real value I've gotten from using a vm is that it's easy to replicate across different developer machines. It's quick to setup and all the developers have matching dev environments. I also don't like messing with my base system all that much just to get a web app running.

We do web dev. The pain point for me is having to use rsync to "deploy" to the vm every time I make a change. That's a pretty decent tradeoff though when the alternative is maintaining tons of different development configurations on your host machine.

Our local deploy process is mostly scripted so it's not much of a pain point to have to redeploy new changes.

I second this. My team uses whatever they want. We have Windows users, OS X, and Linux. As long as virtualbox or vmware runs on your system, we don't care what the host OS is.

He mentions in the article that California has plenty of money but aren't spending it on education.

Machinarium is amazing. I purchased it last December when they had a sale going. I would've gladly paid the full price for it.

I've been working on some Chicken Scheme stuff lately. Also playing with epoll and libevent some more. I'd like to eventually get scheme and mongrel2 working together rather than writing my own web server.