Yeah it looks so much sexier to throw together some lines of rails code over the weekend and become a millionaire over night. However, most of the time getting successful actually entails some hard work. So don't laugh about Joel's posts too soon.
Besides, his latest feature for estimates sounded quite interesting (when he described it, anyway). Certainly more interesting than yet another "vote me up, vote me down" Web 2.0 application.
Web 2.0 sucks, I agree. Its suckage does not preclude bug tracker suckage, though. The GP had a point, which is that boring software is boring, and really, it would be better to read stuff about interesting software, by people who regularly write interesting software. There is interesting software floating around; the problem is, most of the people who write it don't have time to blog about it. They sometimes do write about it, but usually in that case it comes in the form of either patents or academic papers, both of which are unnecessarily hard to read.
Still, I enjoy Joel's articles. And some stuff he built was neat, like "how to ship things". Reminds me that I still haven't watched the video.
I also don't think that Web 2.0 sucks, but it sucks if people look down on real software. two-week rails projects will only get mankind so far, I suspect.
Web 2.0 sucks in the sense that if you could be working on real things, it sucks to be working on two-week rails projects. Clearly, sometimes you have to do two-week rails projects or other equivalently boring things in order to get rich, but that doesn't make them any more interesting to talk about, from a hacker's perspective.
Besides, his latest feature for estimates sounded quite interesting (when he described it, anyway). Certainly more interesting than yet another "vote me up, vote me down" Web 2.0 application.