Slightly off-topic, but once ActiveRecord(Rails) - always ActiveRecord. After years of developers complaining about SQL DBs being "difficult" and MongoDB allowing to "easily prototype", I still don't get what's hard about working with PostgreSQL if you use something like Rails.
Nothing comes for free. If your schema doesn't live in your DB, then it lives in your app code. In the end of the day, you have to handle data model changes.
No you don`t. DB should be a single source of truth and there is no better tool that cares for the integrity of the data then the DB itself. If you have highly concurrent web app, and X connections are changing same collection, good luck with keeping the data sane without checks and transactions on the DB level. And let me not even mention if you have several different apps/services accessing the same db.
Managing replication and consensus for me is valuable. Map/reduce infrastructure is valuable. Forcing me to fit my data into a square table model is not helpful. Transactions at the data layer are rarely helpful (transactional behaviour always needs cooperation from the application layer, and that's very difficult to achieve with a traditional RDBMs; almost all database-backed applications I've seen don't actually offer useful transactionality). My tool of choice is Cassandra or similar.
Last time I've used Ubuntu was about 5 years ago. And it seems to look the same now. I wonder if anything meaningful was achieved during that time in terms of UI/UX besides switching desktop environments back and forth.
They must be decades behind, then. I don't think in-house Russian engineering capabilities have been competitive let alone ahead of the consumer electronics curve going back at least a decade in the of fabrication. Maybe when it was 1997 and everything was DIP.
The idea I commented on was to ban Intel chips. Russia cannot do that, military or not. The military accounts for a fraction of a fraction of tech that Russia depends on.
And the military are also dependent on foreign technology. If not for CPUs inside tanks and planes, then for CPUs inside command center computers. (and not just CPUs)
I worked with only one, the one my partner foolishly chosen before I've joined him. Issues we faced:
- Developers were almost completely illiterate when it came to basic things, like http vs https, using git, encryption vs encoding. That's just something I wasn't ready for
- Using old technologies, i.e. Eclipse for Android development when almost everyone is on Android Studio, having libraries which haven't been maintained since 2010 as dependencies
- Communication was horrible, I had to write 10-20 emails before I could get any answer
I was working as a remote developer on frontend. I literally had to explain what is difference between get and post requests in REST apis to the android guy. When I checked his profile, he had mentioned he was working from three years as Android developer. :/
I haven't had the longest career, but the little I have see empirically confirmed to me that there's actually a strong connection between engineering culture and business success. Of course, a great engineering culture alone is not enough, but it can act as multiplicative factor.
In an engineering centric product. Why would a mom and pop email / news / casual gaming portal succeed directly because of good engineering? Time and time again we massively over-play our role in many business stories.
This is so true. For a website so heavily focussed on content, tech is only a small part of the game. Case point is youtube, though the tech challange with youtube is more complex. Nevertheless, youtube now has to survive on business deals and cannot depend on tech alone, unlike google search.
I would think they aren't all that correlated. Look at apple, Steve job treated some of his engineers like crap and they were successful. Its nice to have a good place to work, but I don't think it ensures success.
b) were engineers allowed and challenged to innovate? or did their work effort primarily consist of navigating red tape and beurocracy to the point that all creativity was crushed?
To me a good engineering culture isn't a "nice" engineering culture, it is one where the company consistently delivers outstanding work that is on point with business requirements.
I once saw an apartment for rent where host mentioned only vegans are allowed. I wonder if accepting people regardless of their food preference should be part of Community Pledge.
