"My education taught me to value getting the right answer. (It also taught me to value prestige, prizes, etc.) So I worked hard at memorizing things, and anytime I wasn’t sure I’d get the right answer the first time, I’d be scared to try, in case I failed or made myself look stupid."
Here's where the above really starts to hurt: during high school, I got away with avoiding failure because everything is set up for you to 'succeed'. As soon as I went to University the opportunities for failure increased by an order of magnitude and at the same time there was nothing and no-one there to assure you that this is OK and part of the process of learning. The spiral of self-doubt, depression and fear that this created almost completely ruined my academic career.
I got lucky and it all worked out such that I am now a software developer who knows failure and experimentation (on almost any scale) are part and parcel of getting better at what you do, and the impact of this knowledge on one's emotional well-being is immense. It's what I would tell my 18-year-old self if I had the chance.
You were lucky at least to find a better place in college. Although not all classes I took was as bad as high school, unfortunately I just graduated memorizing my way out of college most of the time. The idea and the gist of the subject was always elusive, there was no connectedness with anything else. There was no exploration however the workload was enormous, we were taking 5-6 college level math classes per term. Quantity ruled over quality.
So I agree, it would be good to hear from the devs about their opinions and thoughts on testing. (Is there a chance that they think the "realtime-by-default" approach lessens the need for testing?)
I'm no testing zealot, but I've found writing tests useful and it would be a shame to be frustrated by that missing piece in an otherwise great project.
You're 100% right though. We don't have a fully baked story yet for application level testing. It's something we're trying to push forward as soon as we can.
From product adoption perspective, you guys are going to win a lot more users if you can support the following scenario:
1) unit-tests
2) integration-tests
3) provide at least guidance/best-practices on client-side testing in the _headless_ scenario (no complex setup of remote machines with 3-4 browsers installed etc)
People may have their opinions about testing UI/client-side (is it end-to-end? is it worth? not testing using the browser no-go?, etc) but the fact that Meteor is leaning toward more code in the client-side will definitely put testing in almost make-or-break decision for a group of developers.
GWT with their MVP approach is definitely heading toward that direction and it is quite unfortunate that the client-side JS community out there haven't picked up that style (some brushed GWT off because it is Java).
Rails won the heart of many Java developers not only because of its simplicity but also because of automated testing.
So, show how easy it is to test the whole Meteor app and I (almost) guarantee you will get many more developers (especially those who skipped the Rails boat).
Same reaction here. Pretty sad to delete it, actually. The other day I was using Instagram as an example of a social app with a friend list that WASN'T Facebook. sigh
Funny, I had a similar reaction. I was really late to the Instagram party but the biggest thing I liked about it was that it was an alternative way to keep a circle of friends. For whatever reason, I quickly re-connected with some quality people that I had lost track of over the years, but was happy to find on Instagram. Fittingly, a bunch of us had actually taken photo classes together over a decade ago.
This was EXACTLY my feelings. I sat down after lunch, read the headline, opened up my browser, changed my user profile information and deactivated my account. Good luck Instagram, but I can't stand Zuckerborg.
Not sure but a contact saying "this service is now owned by $company, do you wish to allow your data to be retained". Similar offers could be required whenever contractual terms are altered, the default being to continue service.
That would mean that if a malevolent owner decided to change T&C and sell all your private data youd have a legal recourse with which to stop them.
Personally I think that Opera's browser based server offers a way forward whereby a user would have all their data local and a FB like service would operate as a hub/link - like how bt services are pointers to distributed data.
It makes me wonder how many people are going to have that reaction. I'm an Android owner and I still haven't checked out Instagram, and now I'm not sure I want to.
What would you say about trying to identify a potential co-founder's underlying motivation (money, experience, small team/flexibility, fame, actually caring about the market, etc.) for joining a start-up?
I'm actually asking from the perspective of a technical person who finds it hard to trust/gel with potential non-tech founders, but I thought perhaps you had some thoughts :)
In JavaScript, if you check for a non-existent property on a variable (e.g. aVar.lenght vs aVar.length) it will return "undefined". So people often rely on this behaviour to check if something is an array or not (no comment on whether this is good or bad), with:
if(somethingThatMightBeAnArray.length){
// do things with array
}
So misspelling of length can be making a lot of code out there behave in an unexpected way.
The same pattern is widely used to test whether an array-like object is empty. Since a length of 0 is also "falsey", it evaluates as false when the array has no elements. A typo in this case would result in the tested array always being "empty".
The school I went to in Scotland only offered computing up to a level known as "Intermediate 2", which was somewhere between a GCSE and an AS level. We did some Java programming, and it was quite an interesting class that provided enough of a basis in basic programming concepts that I was able to continue learning, but that was it.
Higher computing? You had to get a 30 minute bus to a local adult-education type college. Advanced higer computer science? I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 100 people a year actually sit that exam. I did advanced higher maths, and only 400 people sit the exam a year.
The Scottish curriculum is often quite good (AH maths taught me the first year and a half of my engineering degree's maths modules), but it suffers from a lack of students taking it. It's poorly recognised outside of Scotland (AH's are generally harder than A levels, yet are seen on the same level by most English universities), and the private schools that would give it some clout almost all use the English curriculum.
That's a remarkably smart thing for a politician to say about computing education.
I had to check, but that quote was actually from Ian Livingstone.
I'm very pleased he is so heavily involved. In fact, I don't think any of this would be happening without the backing of industry leaders and their complaints. Kids and teachers themselves have been complaining at least since 2005 when I was exposed to "IT education" in school but that obviously wasn't sufficient reason to take action.
Here's where the above really starts to hurt: during high school, I got away with avoiding failure because everything is set up for you to 'succeed'. As soon as I went to University the opportunities for failure increased by an order of magnitude and at the same time there was nothing and no-one there to assure you that this is OK and part of the process of learning. The spiral of self-doubt, depression and fear that this created almost completely ruined my academic career.
I got lucky and it all worked out such that I am now a software developer who knows failure and experimentation (on almost any scale) are part and parcel of getting better at what you do, and the impact of this knowledge on one's emotional well-being is immense. It's what I would tell my 18-year-old self if I had the chance.