Scott Hanselman writes a thought provoking post that asks the question, Is Microsoft Losing the Alpha Geeks? An interesting question, but troublesome to make sense of, let alone answer. First of all, how do you define “Alpha Geeks”? Who are they? Paul Graham would lead you to believe that alpha geeks are the influencers who use Macs and lots of parenthesis to write code. By that definition, the alpha geeks were never there or left a long time ago. But I don’t think this is a fair definition of alpha geeks. Certainly there are still alpha geeks who love writing...
Joel Spolsky follows up on his earlier remarks about scaling out a Ruby on Rails site with this post on Ruby performance. I’m afraid it is a thoroughly unconvincing and surprising argument. He states... I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that’s just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance. A bumper-sticker slogan? That’s a surprising statement considering that FogBugz is not written entirely in C. Is it because Wasabi compiled to PHP or VBScript is saving CPU cycles? Hardly. As one might...