Comments on: Do the Stupidest Thing that Could Possibly Work

By: Anton Olsen.com » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for February 12th

Anton Olsen.com » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for February 12th — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:26:27 +0000

[...] Do the Stupidest Thing that Could Possibly Work — Global NerdyLet’s suppose that once you’ve told your past self to avoid doing those things that you now regret, s/he asks “Hey, Future Self, what interesting changes happened — er, I mean, are going to happen — in the tech world?” [...]

By: Samantha Wilson

Samantha Wilson — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:55:21 +0000

Can i borrow your time machine please? My mother passed away on August 31 2008. She had a dieasse ever since 2003 and she wouldn’t go to the doctor. The only thing that would’ve saved her was a operation were they remove her collapsed lung. Over the years it got worst and she got weaker then August 2008 she went but she was too late she was too weak for the operation. I want to start from 1999 and I’m gonna talk her into going on April 18 2004 so she’ll live and there are other things I wanna change in the past too.

By: Myself

Myself — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:39:29 +0000

I totally would make out with myself … no second to waste of those 5 minutes!

…

I wouldn’t even talk to me … it was so obvious what to do.

By: Trav

Trav — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:28:00 +0000

In 2000 I never would have believed my future self if he’d told me that in 2007 (and 2009) developers are still spending effort arguing about what computer hardware they should use to develop software — software in languages that are only supported by virtual machine languages.

By: shawn

shawn — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:44:22 +0000

What Would I Tell to my Past Self? Simple. winning number combinations of lottery draws.

By: Robert 'Groby' Blum

Robert 'Groby' Blum — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:39:21 +0000

1. Work on C++1x has barely begun. One of the main features discussed is skinnable syntax. Proponents would like to use ” to indicate skinnable syntax, since they’re not overloaded enough yet. Also, operator whitespace is finally included

2. According to all research, the singularity is about 20 years out. Then again, you knew that. It was 20 years out in 2000, and it was 20 years out in 2009

3. People finally realize that video blogging is a major waste of other people’s time and provide transcripts for easier access. They will be called vblogs, and all the hip people will complain about the name.

On the serious side:

1. A major online application will have had an irrecoverable data loss (either caused by tech issues or insolvency), teaching people that maybe having local backups is not a bad idea after all.

2. Java/C#/PHP/Javascript will still be the mainstream languages of choice. Ruby and Python are catching up, but only the version running on the JVM/CLR.

3. We will have 64-core machines, and most developers *still* won’t be able to code threadsafe. Mainstream programming starts understanding that “shared nothing” is a good idea, and is desperate to hire all the web guys who did it already.

By: Too Much TV

Too Much TV — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:32:15 +0000

Then again, maybe I’ll just stick with my Diet Pepsi

By: Ritesh

Ritesh — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:04:11 +0000

I would have told my past self to buy Google shares :) More realistically, my past self would have thrown me out and told me C rules. I would have also told myself, You will learn about databases, but they will become unimportant soon. So do a Phd in distributed storage systems using Hashtables

My future self would probably tell me Mac’s rule the world. All developers are now using Windows or Ubuntu. Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.08 are really cool!! Yahoo shares are up again and Wikipedia has been replaced by twitter.

By: Pure Roon

Pure Roon — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:57:19 +0000

If I were to tell my past self all the glorious secrets of the future, it would be just my luck that by knowing my own future it would change again, simply to spite me.

By: Ollie Saunders

Ollie Saunders — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:34:14 +0000

1. The use of programming languages to build web applications falls to minimal as instead we string together a bunch of domain-specific languages to get stuff done.

2. Web services effectively replace the need for any kind of persistence layer.

3. Distributed version control takes off.

4. The HTML 5 spec is completed.

By: » Scenes from Last Night’s Ruby/Rails Project Night » The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century : Joey deVilla’s Personal Blog

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:14:11 +0000

[...] As per tradition (well, as much tradition as you can get with this being only the second Project Night), I presented the opening monologue, titled Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work. The basic premise: if a stupid idea works for you, it isn’t stupid. It’s something I’d been meaning to do — a live version of this article from last June. [...]

By: Global Nerdy | Scenes from Last Night’s Ruby/Rails Project Night

Global Nerdy | Scenes from Last Night’s Ruby/Rails Project Night — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:49:10 +0000

By: Global Nerdy | 10 Secrets to Success

Global Nerdy | 10 Secrets to Success — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:44:03 +0000

[...] Don’t be afraid to innovate. Be different. Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.” (It sounds like a variant of my own maxim, “Do the stupidest thing that could possibly work.”) [...]

By: ttt

ttt — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:24:39 +0000

i want to time travel to warn me to ask someone out at the beggining of the 6th grade year!

By: K

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:58:52 +0000

1. Nothing new has happened. Just smaller, better, faster, cheaper and generally improved versions of what we have today. Expect some mergers of current technologies, like the camera’s did with phones.

2. The embedded cameras in mobile phones will be good enough for journalists, but they will still have to have a specialized camera to use special lenses etc.

3. Speech recognition will finally understand enough to replace the keyboard when writing mails/essays. This will never happen to programming languages.

4. There will only be two platforms. The GPL’ed Java (the framework and JVM, not the language) and .Net. Both will run most programming languages (Ruby, Python, Java, Erlang). The only difference is the choice of operating systems.

5. Javascript will be the most popular programming language, even on the server side (JVM, .Net)

6. Internet Explorer still doesn’t support most web standards.

7. The web has become as interesting as the average cable network, and net neutraility is a thing of the past.

8. Iraq is still in chaos.

9. President Jeb Bush tries to stabilize Iran, after years of occupation.

10. While the U.S. economy is worse than ever after spending so much money on the military in the last decade, China prospers more than ever.

11. Most have forgotten about Facebook and Twitter, and Rails has long since been replaced by a new way of thinking about web applications.

By: dj

dj — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:44:39 +0000

1. DHH admitted he was drunk while developing RoR.
2. Ballmer fell from the stage and broke his neck. His last words were : “Delvelopers, f*ck …”
3. COBOL is still in top 20 languages.

By: ryan

ryan — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:50:07 +0000

1. Ballmer sets Microsoft HQ on fire in a murderous rage after Linux and the Mac break 50% combined market share.

2. Steve Jobs subclasses his RDF generator into a fountain-of-youth-like device and announces he will be Apple CEO for eternity.

3. California falls into the Pacific after a massive earthquake but 50,000,000 nerds sacrifice themselves holding it in place while Silicon Valley is moved brick by brick to a safe location.

By: HopeNot

HopeNot — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:14:39 +0000

1. The Internet has been shut down. Authoritarian governments everywhere cooperated to outlaw it, unifying against a common threat. Now, only an MSN service exists, unless you go to the seamy underside of the illicit p2p mesh.

2. General purpose programmable computers are outlawed. If you have a black-market computer not limited to strictly obey the worst excesses of copyright law, you will go to a Halliburton labour camp for longer than a paedophile rapist. Only annually licensed Microsoft Valued Professionals are allowed develop programs and they have to use Managed VB unless they’re Microsoft employees.

3. Patents have been made reneweable indefinitely. After all, it was necessary to “harmonise” them with copyrights, which were extended indefinitely.

By: Joost M.

Joost M. — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:59:38 +0000

I would need all five minutes to convince myself in vain that I’m myself. Even my secret pass phrase that I invented for this precise occasion wouldn’t help – what’s more likely, time travel or mind hacking?

By: Eric TF Bat

Eric TF Bat — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:02:56 +0000

1. The word “computer” gets the same old-fashioned sound to it that “microcomputer” or “home computer” has now. Computers are small devices you wear or carry, and all the peripherals like screens, keyboards and internet connections are separate and connected only by some kind of wireless connection. You never need to worry about setting up your work PC to have the same settings as your home PC, because your “device” keeps track of that sort of thing for you. In fact, people don’t even need their own desks, because any screen and keyboard they sit down at becomes their “computer”. As a side-effect, the Palm Foleo is seen as a blatantly obvious idea and nobody will admit to having laughed at it.

2. At least one language in very common use will work with non-ASCII symbols. Not just unicode, but graphs, diagrams or pictures. It may even be animated, making the print-it-out-and-debug-on-the-kitchen-table development cycle a thing of the past.

3. Perl 6 STILL won’t be out. Come on, this isn’t science fiction, you know!