Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36712724

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

But what's bothering me about this is that it's not a small company doing this. It's a company that's got crazy amounts of cash, who has been trying to trade on a "we're nice now and we love open source" image in the last few years, now taking all the open source code and balling it up in a closed-source app they will charge us for.

I'd be fine if I got to use it for free, extend it to whatever editing platform I like through its open API, and it was a part of an open project.

But right now it looks like they'll charge, and that bugs me.

Your version control system and ticketing system should be able to identify things like this.

If not, then nobody's minding the store, and that's why things aren't working. Not cos people are working remotely.

Some humans do not think on their feet. They often need time to digest thoughts and new ideas. If you start observing this behavior, you will notice that an impromptu brain-storming session often results in a couple of people talking and many others observing.

It ends up being highly productive to the people talking, and very frustrating to those who are observing.

If you don't see this trend, your hiring practices may be optimized for finding only one type of person - extroverted people who can say things quickly.

Consider that you may be missing out on some very good ideas from people who aren't comfortable with quick context switches and immediate requests for feedback on ideas.

According to audience feedback I've collected, my talks where I do a lot of live coding are engaging and fun. But that's cos I practice, and I put effort into the talk.

The key to a good presentation is to polish it and engage the audience. It's part teaching and part performance, and if you don't do both of those well, you'll lose people. Ask the audience questions to get them involved at key places. Practice so you know the timing of things.

If you just show slides or just live code, you're probably better off recording a youtube video, tweeting it out, and spend conferences enjoying the hallway track. :)

It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.

But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.

I run an office hours chat for my online classes powered by IRC. I use KiwiIRC as the front-end.

Students need only the web address of the web page I want them to go to. When they get there, they need only a username.

No signup, no verification, none of that. They're online, getting help in seconds.

Individual public channels requiring nickserv registration and all that? that's another story.

But seriously - the barrier to entry to get started is this:

https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?##irc_can_be_ea...

Isn't it cool to have choices? I don't care if it's not cool to use jquery anymore. I shipped stuff and I'm not even sorry.

This was the case with jQuery, Angular, and things that came before.

I see two main problems in software development, especially on the front-end. First, developers jump on brand-new ground-breaking frameworks and use them in production, learning how they work as they go. This results in brittle systems. That's not necessarily bad, but it's not always great from a maintenance perspective. React is hot right now. But there are a ton of in-production Angular 1.x apps out there because that was what was hot when those projects started.

That brings me to the second problem in tech - developers doing the "hot new thing" displaying a ton of hubris. It's "easy" and "straightforward", implying that anyone who doesn't get it just isn't smart or will be obsolete soon.

I'd worry more about losing my job due to not keeping up with machine learning rather than not learning whatever new JS framework people think is hot right now.

Here's the deal - web developers figured out server-side rendering 20 years ago, and managed to make turning databases into web pages easy about 12 years ago. It's possible to create applications that people love using a lot of that technology, with some JS on top. It's certainly faster to go to market with something that way.

Not every app is Facebook. A lot of the stuff people work on outside of HN fall into one of two categories:

1. Apps that are behind a firewall - internal in nature, used by a handful of enterprise users. 2. Apps that won't be around in 3 years from now because the company will shift focus/replace it with an off-the-shelf product/company gets acquired.

In both those cases, I'd look for the simplest approach to get something running, and simplest to maintain.

Bottom line: it's easier to leverage existing skill-sets than it is to ask people to learn a whole new thing all the time.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I don't really get too worked up about how another person chooses to solve the "make the browser display a web app." Every situation is different. React can be simple. So can server-side rendering with some Knockout/Stimulus/Intercooler/jQuery sprinkled around.

Maintainable quality code that makes money wins in the long run. Whatever you implement it in.