Religious Wars and New Years Resolutions
Yeah, so I suck at keeping this blog fresh. Sue me, I have a business to run.
Actually, please DON’T sue me.
Wow, do one’s perspectives change on so many things once responsible for owning a business. Take that funny little “sue me” colloquialism. One part of me enjoys the snark, the other part of me feels the cold tentacles of fear wrap around my heart. Lawsuits aren’t a joking matter when one could put you out of business. Never mind the fact that there’s nothing legitimate for which a party could take legal action against us; just the cost of paying an attorney to dispense of unwarranted litigation would bring the pain.
Here’s another thing you don’t care about once running your own business: religious wars of the nerd kind. I just read a comment thread on Slashdot about Perl having moved over to using the source code version control system git. These guys were blasting away at each other with warheads like “git takes up less space” or “subversion has better GUIs” or “you’re just too lazy to use the command line” or “git runs faster.”
These are the arguments and conversations of developers who are on someone else’s payroll. I can tell you straight up, I don’t give a damn about hard drive space, not when I can buy a terabyte for less than it costs to pay an developer to work for a couple of hours. I don’t care which is better, command line or GUI; I care about what will enable my developers to spend the least amount of time jacking with version control. Nor do I care about which runs faster (within reason) as I can buy a dual-core funny car for, again, less money than a couple hours of highly skilled labor.
Simply put, owning and operating a business has stripped me of all religious beliefs of the nerd kind. In place has grown an agnostic pragmatism. My goal is to get code written at the highest quality within the smallest reasonable timeframe at the lowest cost. In our case this means running Apache on hardened Windows servers, writing PHP using Microsoft Visual Studio, using SVN to manage source code, and Python on roided up Ubuntu boxes for number crunching.
On a different note, my only conscious New Years resolution is to be more diligent about this blog. I believe that what we’re doing and learning represents a unique perspective, but if I don’t take the time to communicate that perspective is lost to time.
