Segment7 : Comments

Comment on Mechanics of Programming by Tom Lee

2012-05-03T19:22:03-07:00

Hi Eric,

Just wanted to weigh in to say that when I realized I worked better this way, I had a similar lightning bulb moment & it had a profound impact on my problem solving & productivity.

I used to just try to smash my way through things without giving too much thought, and would often get frustrated when things didn’t work.

These days, if I find myself hitting walls over & over again, I try to further decompose the problem into smaller chunks. Whatever I can fit in my head at a given point of time — which seems to be a function of both how much sleep and alcohol I have the night before.

If I break things down to a point where things feel like they should be dead simple and I still can’t progress, I take a break or go to bed. Rather than getting frustrated, I just recognize I’m hitting the limits of what I can do “right now”.

Took me a long time to realize I was “doing it wrong” though. It’s funny, all that talk of decomposition in University struck me as sort of obvious at the time, and I guess it should be. But I suppose maybe I forgot along the way, while I was busy picking up syntax, grasping semantics, fighting with APIs and just generally trying to understand what it is that makes good software :)

Great article! Thanks.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Eric Hodel

2012-04-01T23:07:19-07:00

Discussion, disagreement and criticism are important, even critical to the health and livelihood of any community. When you skip criticism and continue to jokes and personal attacks you end up harming the community.

Yehuda and I don’t agree on everything, but when we have a disagreement I do my best to treat his (or any other person’s) position with respect. I try to focus on what I feel is wrong the the issue, not the person behind it, and avoid personal attacks.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Alex Coles

2012-04-01T16:01:25-07:00

You’re correct that Yehuda doesn’t deserve nastinesss, but that shouldn’t mean the idea/crowd-funding process is beyond criticism. I had more than a comment’s worth to add, so ended up writing a blog post in response: http://alexbcoles.com/code/2012/04/02/crowd-control.html

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Avdi Grimm

2012-03-30T11:02:15-07:00

Perfectly stated. Thanks for saying what I’ve been wanting to say, better than I could.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by valerie

2012-03-30T09:55:42-07:00

What Jakob said is perfect. I probably won’t use rails.app, but thanks to Yehuda’s hard work (along with the work of many other generous people), I have a good job as a Rails developer, and my life is happy.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Jakob

2012-03-30T09:38:20-07:00

I guess I’ll never use it too but it’s a great way giving something back for all the amazing work yehuda has done so far FOR FREE!

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Bertrand Chardon

2012-03-30T09:38:11-07:00

Always easier to be a destructor than a builder anyway, eh?

Props to Yehuda for tackling problems when he could be sitting on his a*s talking smack about people trying to make the Ruby ecosystem a better place for everyone.

I only wish more Kickstarter projects could be created to fund research and development on topics like client-side Javascript MVC frameworks integration to Rails (Ember or Backbone) and even more so for anything dealing with concurrency/asynchronous Rails and related drivers.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Eric Hodel

2012-03-30T09:35:39-07:00

Remember that your needs aren’t the same as an absolute beginner’s needs, nor are they the same as an intermediate user’s needs that is more interested in exploring Ruby or Rails than they are at learning how to install all the individual components.

Much like a Ruby release frees you of the need to install autotools and bison and rvm frees you of the need to install zlib, OpenSSL, curses, etc., and Rails.app will free users from the need to install a compiler, rvm, etc.

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Rucksell

2012-03-30T09:24:35-07:00

Another thing: every excuse for doing this project starts with: “When I first started learning Ruby I had to do battle with compilers, RubyGems didn’t exist”. But we not live in this times anymore? Right?

Comment on On Community Funding of Open Source by Rucksell

2012-03-30T04:14:47-07:00

I mean nobody is doing this on OSX