Posts from 8th June 2010

Second Class Citizen

Posted on in Opinion & Programming and tagged rant & View Comments

Occasionally someone will pipe up and make you realise the sad truth amongst web developers, or for that matter, programmers. We are second class citizens in the eyes of many.

Gone are the days where making a computer do something different is cool, No, Now its a job, anyone can do it, you’ve just got to learn to code..  heck, some people are purely programmers for a day job, with no outside interest in it.

There Are No Famous Programmers – Zed A. Shaw (http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1275989245.html)
Let me tell you about this cool new web server. I figured out how to merge the ZeroMQ event polling system with the libtask coroutine library so that you can use libtask to handle tons of TCP/UDP and ZeroMQ sockets in a single thread. I then took this very cool hack, and started building a web server using my Mongrel HTTP parser, but I modified the parser so that the same server on the same port can handle HTTP or Flash XMLSockets transparently. The next step is to get this server to route HTTP and XMLSocket JSON messages to arbitrary ZeroMQ backends. I was inspired by this so much that I registered utu.im and may try to bring it back. Not sure how or when though.

Sounds cool right? Totally doesn’t matter one bit. I could hack on projects like this and nobody would care at all because I’m a famous programmer, and there is no such thing as famous programmers. I don’t exist. I’m an enigma.

…

And he’s right, Name a “sucessful” startup who you can think of the name of the current CEO, I’m sure you can think of one, Did they write the product you’re associated with them however? In most cases, No. They’re just the ones with the vision, The one with money, The one with the guts to say “This could work!”. Being a programmer isnt enough anymore, you need a masters degree in marketing, A bucket load of cash, and a face to put forward – and face it, you’re not it.

Gone are the days when a single person can be a superstar, without the help from others, you’ll never reach gold; and if you do, be sure your programming days are long gone..