boggled

  One of the most painful aspects of teaching mathematics is 
  seeing my students damaged by the cult of the genius. That 
  cult tells students that it's not worth doing math unless 
  you're the best at math—because those special few are the 
  only ones whose contributions really count. We don't treat 
  any other subject that way. ... But I see promising young 
  mathematicians quit every year because someone in their 
  range of vision is "ahead" of them.

Grothendieck couldn't solve a Putnam problem, incidentally. Not a contest winner. You might be interested to know what some Fields Medalists say about some prominent prodigies. That they are extremely smart, but haven't done truly major work. The facts and the gossip are no consolation: academic opportunities are overwhelmingly and increasingly weighted in favor of the prodigy.

Likewise, elite employers want to hire the math and programming contest winners. Well, if you're not one of them, it is rational to select yourself out. I've gotten calls from recruiters saying that I'd be working such winning individuals. "Will I be doing the work they're doing?" "Uh, no, you'll be doing system administration." "In that case, maybe you should hire a Nobel Laureate. I am unworthy." Cleaning the digital bedpans of the superstars is not my idea of success. "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven," as one famous antagonist put it.

As long as the STEM subjects remain a zero-sum game, with the overwhelming spoils going to the early bloomers, the winners, like the author, should be satisfied with what they have already won in an unnecessarily and destructively competitive field. The rest of us are doomed to provide them support as members of the economic precariat at slave wages, if we are foolhardy enough to remain in academia. There is no honor in adding to someone else's power law distribution, and I urge the contest winners to hire Nobel Laureates and other members of their own rank to do their support work, and not add to their winnings by exploiting the unworthy persons they elbowed out.

(I did earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, incidentally. This was wasted effort. When I was a toddler, apparently I impressed a child psychologist with my logic; my mother told the woman that she was an idiot for thinking that I was advanced. My experience in academia was not good--I was mostly exploited. I have decided to abandon mathematics and computer science for art.)

I did try to improve things after my first pseudonymous rant (which you noted). Remaining professional under difficult circumstances was a good exercise, but I have had enough. The experience of finding work in a place free of manipulation, hostility and psychological baggage led me to the conclusion that I need not suffer these things, especially not in a spare time project.

I have gotten better at it. I find arguing and this aggressive attachment to ideas that are obviously half-baked tiresome. My strategy in some cases has been to wait weeks for the bad ideas to prove themselves unworkable in practice, rather than argue. Deflecting an aggressive, argumentative and often gratuitously rude style takes energy.

Not launched, still, but I dislike repressing an instinct to improve. If it has taken me years to get to this point (we have tried other projects that have failed--this one seems to be succeeding, partly because I have managed to learn how to negotiate with my co-founder, at least to a point), I wonder about anyone else who might join the project.

The point about development buzzwords is well taken--I use them with some misgivings. I would like my co-founder to educate himself on some of them, however, instead of barking. Software development has advanced in the last 30 years.

My "droning" is confined to a question here. I don't believe I deserve angry, aggressive and peremptory behavior from an excitable person who seems to have anger management issues and delusions of grandeur about an app. What he does have is drive.

However, I find that adding features requires considerably more work than it would have been otherwise. It was a struggle to advance over every little point: use non-UI tasks for network operations lest you get an exception, etc. Also, I'm in the position of having to do merges since he refuses to use version control. Anyway it is a problem to work with one's hands tied--it takes me somewhat less work for me to implement features than my cofounder, even in the face of impediments that I find unnecessary impediments that would be straightforward enough to rectify--if only I could. This tends to perpetuate unfortunate practices.