Zed Shaw

Again, what does "cancel culture" mean? Can you define it in a way which isn't politically biased against left-leaning viewpoints from the get-go?

Obama's caution about a "‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues" seems little different than "Life of Brian's" caution about doctrinaire differences in opposing the Romans - certainly not some caution about a new sort of cancel culture! And how much might come from Obama wanting to deflect criticism about his support for using US military power - just how many drone strikes did he order? - or handling of the Central American refugee crisis at the southern border?

Do you think Chomsky is correct about everything? I don't agree with him about the creator of 'email' either. I certainly disagree with many of his co-signers.

Changing "blacklist" or "master" is not worthwhile to debate. The effort is simple, the benefits small (but non-zero), so do it ... and realize that it's a weak-sauce paper-thin covering over much harder and more intractable problems. It's a "recycle your paper cups while companies kill rivers" sort of issue.

Concerning 'Philosophy professors', if someone makes a philosophical argument that there are only males and females, and nothing else - clearly contrary to scientific evidence and cultural experience - then why don't they deserve censure the same way they would for making the philosophical argument that the Earth is flat?…

I was just listening to an older episode of Indie Hackers today as a matter of fact. Thank you for contributing something valuable to the ecosystem. A lot of similar podcasts/blogs focus on a lot of fluff, but you do/did a great job of directing the conversation, and summarizing long-winded guest comments that may not use the proper business jargon into concise and interesting tidbits.

One thing that was always interesting for me as a listener is that I'm actually the opposite of a lot of your audience. I'm a senior marketer who knows the marketing world inside and out, but I'd consider myself an "early" programmer[1]. It is a very different set of challenges. But one thing I noticed was the true lack of basic marketing skills many of your guests had in the beginning of their journeys.

Would you say that the "baseline" for that knowledge among engineers has increased over the last couple of years as the "indie hacker" movement you and others like Patrick McKenzie have helped foster has grown in awareness and popularity? Ie., given the propensity for developers to spend a lot of their time researching solutions online, do you find they are starting with more of the basics in place than they did maybe 5-10 years ago?

[1] https://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-coders/

Some interesting context for this comment:

"Congrats Dropbox"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660140

BrandonM: It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!

I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).

Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!

Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!

Zed Shaw's take on the matter.
https://zedshaw.com/2018/03/25/the-billionaires-vs-brandonm/

Completely agree - very excited to have just sponsored Ambrose's project as Snowplow Analytics. As an industry we need to get much better at acknowledging and supporting the role the technology components "under us" in the stack play in our own products' success; Zed Shaw made this exact point talking about Mongrel in his Why I (A/L)GPL post.[1]

So direct sponsorship to developers doing innovative things is great - and Typed Clojure is really innovative, one of the things I'm most excited about at the moment (along with Mesos, Rust and Summingbird). We don't use a lot of Clojure at Snowplow yet - but we use some[2], and we will likely use a lot more with Typed Clojure, because optional typing is such a great fit for ETL work.

Keep up the great work Ambrose!

[1] http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html
[2] https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/tree/master/2-collectors/clojure-collector

Completely agree with you.
In "My Favourite Interview Question"[1] The author asks:
How would you design a Monopoly game?
He goes on to say that with 'basíc' OOP you can model the elements: dice, buildings.

But What about the rules? One of his suggestions is to look to the Strategy, Visitor, and Command patterns.

But I disagree. I want to model the rules using Prolog!
That is what prolog is great at.

So can please the next high level language standup?
I just want:
top of the line OOP (Smalltalk)
constraint programming (prolog)
functional (haskell)
And Design By Contract (Eiffel)

And no... I'm not asking for the kitchen sink language [2]

Is simply that this concepts aren't exclusive and all of them helps us to better model reality.

[1]http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-question.html
[2]http://zedshaw.com/essays/kitchensink.html

I'm curious, did your contractors host regular demos, sprint retrospectives, etc.? If so, was it clear early on that the results were going to be substandard, or was it a surprise fairly late into the process?

I'm not going to debate about whether they were doing "true Agile", but it seems like even without settling upfront costs it would still be possible to control risks by tracking value added vs. cost on a sprint-to-sprint basis. Hopefully it should be evident early on if the project isn't worth it[1].

Of course, this requires that the contractors be able to deliver value incrementally, which might not be possible in all projects. In which case, upfront cost estimates (and more thorough planning) will probably be necessary.

[1]In fact, this is exactly why Zed Shaw says he uses Scrum on risky projects(http://zedshaw.com/archive/the-c2i2-hypothesis/)