swagtricker

Of course, he left out the fact that the $40,000.00 USD worth of computer time was stolen from a US government owned computer on loan to one of his professors. He didn't actually PAY $40k USD or even raise funds to cover the equivalent value of the stolen computer time. Gates is a thief, and this was just his first big heist. I was always of the opinion that he US government should have gotten a cut of MS BASIC since it couldn't have been built without the modified emulator handling the ALTAIR 8080 assembly instructions.

1 - Correction: writing late, typo - BASIC should have been property of the US tax payers.

2 - It was still pretty novel back then, but "borrowing" computer time w/o paying for it is (and was) theft of services. Like sneaking into a movie theater without paying. It wasn't their hardware to use, it was a critical part of a commercial endeavor. They didn't have permission in advance to use it. They didn't murder someone, but they were a couple of spoilt brats who figured they could get rich by ripping people off. They ripped off SCP (next point) and they screwed over IBM & Digital Equipment Corp. with the OS/2 gaslighting & NT intellectual property theft (case settled out of court).

3 - Gates wired up the deal with IBM then "bought" 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products knowing very well it was going to be worth millions since people were waiting for IBM to release a PC at the time. SCP made less than a million dollars and had it drawn out in court (from that same article - "Microsoft paid SCP US$925,000 and reclaimed its license for DOS"). He saw an opportunity to play middle man and then shanked SCP.

The general guideline isn't actually an amount: it's 3 - 6 months worth of living expenses. That is, what it takes to cover housing, transportation, food & utilities. If you're "living paycheck to paycheck" that's a problem, because it means 3-6 months worth of paychecks.

Personally, If you're living below your means, I would try to target 6 months to 1 year. Then again, the past 3 years have made me paranoid as hell. Your mileage may vary.

FWIW - I sleep a LOT better knowing I've got a year worth of expenses sitting in a high yield savings account. If I lost my job tomorrow? I'd say fuck it and take at least 4-6 weeks off before bothering to look for a job.

Scrum is training wheels. The time boxes are supposed to make you reflect and improve. Ditch Scrum. Go to Kanban, scope your stories smaller and prioritize bug fixes over all new work until you're not writing bugs. Can't ship code without writing bugs? Improve your skills as a team. Start pair or mob programming. Do TDD to improve your design, testability & maintainability of your code. Start moving towards trunk based development and use feature flags to do REAL CI/CD (hint: using a build server doesn't mean you're doing CI). Code deployment != feature deployment! Strive to "roll forward" your code as much as possible and disable/enable features if you run into problems - learn to not "rollback".

Now of course, since this is HN somebody's going to sneer divisively at everything I just said and tell me it's not possible (despite the fact that I've done this, repeatedly in different organizations in a developer and coaching capacity for almost two decades now). Here's my preemptive caveat/STFU for detractors: the above method only works if you, as developers, have full control & ownership over your application code data, and do your own deployments or are partnered strongly with an OPS team that gives you full monitoring & Read Only access. If your team is working in an environment where you don't actually get ownership over your code and data, this won't work. If management, architects, or egotistical prima donna staff/senior developers "won't let you" pair/mob, do TDD, do trunk based development, or do proper CI/CD, this won't work.

P.S. If you're in an environment where "this won't work" - QUIT! Life's too short to put up with being expected to build software with one hand tied behind your back. These things are often easier to do in medium to small sized companies. These things are often easier to do on greenfield (or at least recent) projects.

No, no. Go right ahead and sink time and money into this sort of crap. Just like every attempt before, it'll generate a pile of garbage that's unmaintainable yet will still manage to poop out ONE single nugget of value: determining what needs to be built after the idiot suits thrashed all around with the 'wonder toy' system. Then, we experienced developers can have a walk in the park while cashing out on contracting rates. Fat stacks of cash simply for replacing exact like-for-like functionality with REAL software and then bring in the extensions the vendor toy systems couldn't. I could do with a nice, easy, early retirement path to pop up in 7 years. Bring it on ;)

Yes! This is exactly my point. Having included something as fluff as "Essential Scrum" on TOP of skipping Beck's "TDD by Example" or Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" is very regrettable.

Not only why is there a garbage book like "Essential Scrum", why is there no mention of any unit testing or TDD books? If the author is seriously going to plug Martin Fowler's Refactoring book but make no effort to call out any books to help guide in writing good quality tests, I'm starting to have serious doubts about the nature of those "10 years of experience". I don't care if you "buy into" TDD or not - refactoring without test coverage is flat-out "Cowboy coding": reckless & irresponsible.

I feel like the concern here is that we're quickly moving from open ended, content and _capability_ creation era(e.g. I can program anything I want for my PC _WITH_ my PC) to a mere _content_ creation at best and preferably _consumption_ only era of computing. Your iPad doesn't self-host any flavor of XCode that you can build and run iPad programs on.

It seems with a bit of cruel irony that for a moment in history, due to the intersection of affordability and the limitations of computing power, the home computer allowed anyone with the money to the full scope and capability of a computer with "higher level" programming languages. Such that they could not only use available software from others to create content (images, video, audio, text, web sites) but also create _capability_ programs that that made it easy to whatever the limitations of the machine would let them. But as the computer became more powerful, it became "easier" to hide the elements that allowed creating _capability_. We had it for a while, now it seems to be fading away from common view.

This is what scares me. We're no longer becoming true 'computer users'. We're becoming 'digital content consumers'. Companies are fine with that. I'm not.