So far I'm just not using the Developer Tools at all, because they don't give me what Firebug does.
Debugger, Inspect and Web Console just aren't working well together, aren't interegrated smoothly into each other and I hardly can get from one to the other. I can't enable ALL of them at once.
If they _were_ like Chrome's tools or Firebug I'd wish for the features of Firebug's XPath and CSS extension: input expression, get matching elements highlighted.
So, either they have to be as useful as Firebug, or throw them out to keep FF lean for users who doesn't need them anyways.
Also "keep the DevTools as simple as possible" makes absolutely no sense to me as a Web Developer - I need those tools as GOOD as possible and as USABLE as possible with a specific range of features I've come to expect from Firebug and Chrome.
I mean, I basically live with an open Firebug during work...
I absolutely believe what he writes, because he's quite precise about his experiment and how he did it and this really works for a couple of reasons:
* This guy isn't 20 anymore. He has actually explored and learned and trained "productivity and focus" which he blogs and writes books about - so he doesn't start like a 18 year old directly from school, unexperienced maybe in this level of focus and discipline.
* He was pragmatic in his goals - very much so. He didn't write "becoming the world's foremost expert in linear algebra" but "passing an exam". And so he did. He also didn't write "passing everything with a top grade" but "just pass, if better - wonderful".
* He actually did his math on "hours to put in" - a semester doesn't take full 6 months, you usally don't attend lectures/lab every day 3 hours a day but 1-2 times a week, 2 (university) hours plus preparation. If you carefully add this up, you actually get a surprisingly low count of actual course/lesson hours.
* Taking in a course in a focused manner is actually quite efficient and helps you (at least it does for me) follow the material without interruptions. You also can repeat as often as you like (he mentions a fast forward and replay button in his TEDx talk) - which btw. makes part of the success of e.g. Khan university material.
* He also put some effort and training into the right way of learning and _that_ pays off massively in terms of speed.
Also, one of the points he is actually making is part of what most of you critizise: Going through the list of MIT requirements is something different compared to "becoming an expert in X" - don't mix that up.
Well, this kind of insanity made me step back 10 steps and invest some time (almost a year by now) into the "classics" so to speak.
Inspired by Crockford's talks in which he mentioned a couple of times the lack of history and historical knowledge among developers, I suddenly remembered that I got an education in humanities before I even went into programming and really did start with the classics - Greeks and Romans and Philosophy - and I asked myself why on earth I never really considered doing something similar in computing. (Someone called it in some article I've sadly forgotten the Oxford way - you learn Latin and Math and from there you can learn anything anyways ;)
So I decided to ignore all fashions, new things, upcoming frameworks and such for some time until I got what I would consider (totally subjectively) a solid foundation (not there yet, will probably take another year at least) of knowledge.
I personally decided to define "classics" along the lines of "knowing Unix and its history and concepts well" (re-learning shell and commandline wizardry on top), "understand decent C and Assembler", "becoming familar with the influential languages of important concepts like functional and OO programming (Scheme/Lisp and Smalltalk). This includes really understanding SQL (which I suddenly started to really like to my own surprise). Maybe I add some PostScript and TeX along the way. I also found a new appreciation for Perl's text processing capabilities and its influence from the 1990ies on.
Set aside that I constantly have to fight kind-of a "bad conscience" exactly BECAUSE I'm not hurrying along to try out the latest and greatest new fashion, I'm starting to feel a deep change in my programming skills, in my thinking about design and I'm constantly marveling where computing already has been and how much there is to learn from the classics. I also started to get a distinct feeling of "Man, I just don't NEED all this clutter and stuff" and a newly found appreciation of "simplicity" (Watch Rich Hickey's talk about "simple versus easy"..).
I started to slow down, to think more carefully, to read a lot more on concepts and ideas. I've finished recently Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language book for example to get a better feel for the "orginal" idea or read up on the history of "lean production" and Toyota's influence or looked again at Dieter Rams' design principles (I'm German and I basically grew up with Braun appliances, I didn't even realize how influential his designs have been to me..)
All this changed me and my thinking about programming deeply and made me find kind of a "central theme" or "essence" in programming and design I like and I'm starting to strive for.
In the long run, this also gives me a foundation of how I'm judging new tools, ideas, frameworks and programming languages.
On top of that, I'm better able to place myself into a certain "style" or "culture" of programming I'm not going to give upon as long as I can afford it.
Anyways - I personally think there actually is a choice whether one tries to catch up with everything new or peek into new things selectively or just steps back a little and watches how all this will unfold in the long run.
(I also have a long-held, un-proven personal theory that people simply like _writing_ frameworks a lot more than _using_ them - some are just faster to release theirs into the public.. :)
With relational databases, I found that when I actually took at look at logic and set theory that I started to really understand what Codd wanted to achieve.
Stability, maturity, great backwards compatibility, whipuptitude, a sea of well-cared mature modules on CPAN, the ease and convience of CPAN itself, already installed/available everywhere, Unicode support, creativity and competence of the community, exceptionally good documentation, "the spirit", MOP via Moose if I want to, rarely gets in my way, scales very well in terms of "thinking" and "project" (everything from tiny admin-script up to full-blown financial district application possible), speed, amazing interesting features in perl 6....
And no, you don't write the same Perl as in 1996 anymore.
I'm seeing the same thing in Berlin these days - tech conferences of all kinds, usally 2 days, tickets ranging from 300,- euros up to 1200,- euros.
Even if employers would send their developers to one of those two or three times a year - how many developers from different countries can even afford those prices? Half of europe simply isn't that rich and doesn't pay nowhere near that high salaries.
On top of the two-days event you'd have to add hostel/hotel and travel (train or flight) - even with my (in comparison) rather high german salary I think twice if I really want to pay several hundred euros for an event of two days.
And conferences don't have to take place in hotels, there's all kinds of venues - some hotter, some less so - one could meet with 50, 100, 500 or 1000 people. Some developer conferences simply take place in rooms of the local university for example. (Usally a not so hot location, ok..)
I would really like to see that developer's conferences stay (really) affordable for _all_ of the intended audience.
Couldn't get through with Firefox (haha) and my german VISA, too.
Also note that 55 Euros shipping is NOT the only option.. ;)