I have found that any art does the trick for me. Over my life I've played Viola, crafted pottery, attempted to paint, and done photography. Of those two were wildly expensive (photography, oil painting), and the others were cheaper. I think the main draw of modern photography for programmers is that a great deal of our technical skill transfers into every part of photography except taking a good picture -- so we don't feel baffled when we first start.
That said, if you want to take up music or some other art, it's never too late. Music lessons are fairly cheap and honestly indispensable (I held my viola wrong for six months of practice before I started lessons). Painting is a much freer art and you can produce decent works on your own without instruction. If you do painting, I personally found oil painting an amazing medium because it allowed me to constantly improve my paintings no matter how bad they started =p.
This guy suffers from the "schools are job training" mentality that I've noticed has grown in popularity recently. He expects students from the university to be able to work on his development environment without significant retraining, when he is not using the development environment that the universities are teaching.
The fault here is in the business owner expecting freshman grads to be skilled in highly specialized software development specific to their business. The schools are pumping out students who are perfectly good programmers, and if he actually trained them to use his tools, they would be good programmers for his environment.
Edit: To be clear, if the were a university teaching only Java to the students, it would be a bad university. Such a university doesn't exist. If he wants formal methods, he needs to higher Masters students or higher -- or optionally donate a few $$ to a CS department in exchange for adding the course to ugrad.
Just so you know, if you plant an apple tree from an apple you buy at the grocery store you will likely be sued for patent infringement. Though, it's probably sterile anyway.
I like the facebook redesign. I think it's snappy and I can still easily get to all the information I need when looking up contact info. Further, the AJAX loads pages considerably faster, and in many cases incrementally (e.g. pictures), radically decreasing the effective "response time" of the site.
I really have to wonder why we're even talking about it in a controversial way instead of an analysis of the technological changes and their effect on the site. It seems this is the wrong site for a controversial facebook design argument.
It took me a very long time to learn how to hack without smoking after I got used to it. For those that have never done it, there is a real measurable performance increase for smoking while programming. It comes at the cost of killing you years earlier, and making you chronically unhealthy, but it does make you hack faster.
I eventually found that when I took wellbutrin to stop smoking it had the exact same mental effect for hacking. You may want to see your doctor and give it a try.
That said, don't start smoking, ever, for any reason. It's a terrible habit that takes forever to quit, costs thousands of dollars a year, and can easily start with just one smoke.
there is a real measurable performance increase for smoking while programming.
I used to smoke and found this also to be true. HOWEVER, when actually working with a team at an office I realized it was actually decreasing performance because I had to constantly dodge out back for a smoke break, completely disrupting my flow. Even most places where I've lived the past 5 years weren't really smoke friendly, so smoking just became a huge distraction rather than a concentration aid.
In addition to the obvious health and financial reasons, this was a big reason that I quit. Thus, even though I'm all for less government, I fully support smoking bans.
I wonder if the same technique would work for harder drugs. I.e. legalize cocaine and heroin, but make it so that the only place people can legally do them is in a cold alleyway 30 yards behind the pub, next to a garbage dumpster. This way you'd get rid of the drug-dealing related crime but make it seem like a pretty lame habit to pick up.
I find that taking that break to smoke actually increases performance.
Coding is a miracle for the smoker, and vice-versa.
When working on a specific task within my code, I refuse to go smoke, wanting to stay in the zone and get all of my thoughts in there and working - thus, savings my lungs.
After a task has been completed, especially the difficult ones, I find the 5-7 minute break before moving on to the next task to be extremely beneficial. It gives me a few minutes to unwind, gather my thoughts, and anticipate/plan what my next steps will be.
In good news, the security conscious part of you needs to stop browsing the web in a graphical browser now, because all the competitors were also hacked in a similar manner :).
As I see it, if we get enough traffic to be worried about scaling issues we'll deal with it then. Django isn't terribly designed and going in and hacking multi-db and sharding in should take less than a week from a competent developer.
Discussing this before starting a startup sort of feels like trying to figure out how to do salary for hundreds of employees before getting your first one.
I agree it's worth discussing (especially if you're unsure about future malleability of the web framework to your needs), and I apologize if I was excessively curt.
