Nicest of the Damned: Running a business on OS X and Linux:
I’m not saying that Macs and Linux boxes are no work, but the work, it seems to me, is focused on the solution at hand, rather than the problem of the moment. It looks like I’m continuing to marginalize the Windows boxes — our CEO wants an iMac when we move into our new space next week.
Frank has written up his experience of the past few years in different environments on building and supporting information technology solutions that work, day in and day out.
Repeatedly, he finds that Windows is the weak link and the less he relies on it, the more reliable the whole system becomes.
There’s also some good stuff about loosely-typed, flexible scripting languages versus more tightly constrained development tools: short answer, Python et al rock, proprietary toolkits don’t. Our time at CNN.com coincided (we were cube neighbors for a while) and where our day to day responsibilities differed, our experiences seem to have been much the same. I supported some Windows-based services that were uniformly unreliable and flaky, and in at least one case, the CTO of one outfit decided to rewrite their whole app from scratch, based on it’s performance in our environment.
Worth reading: I think the idea deserves a more detailed exploration.
[Posted with ecto]