Judging by the harsh reaction to your first post, I think many of our colleagues have become a little too obsessed with the programming part of their profession. We should be focused on building better solutions. Programming is probably no more than 20% of the work in delivering a solution. Projects rarely fail because of technical issues. As others have blogged, we should be spending more time becoming better communicators and solution builders (and encouraging others to do the same). Instead it's easier to have the same old programming arguments. I think the issue some take with the "everyone should learn to code" movement is that it seems to put coding at the center of the information age, while in reality it's just a small part of what goes into solving problems. It's also the part that's least likely to look the same in 20 years as it does today.

I'm shocked by the number of acquaintances that have had their e-mail compromised in the last couple of years. However, none of the victims were computer savvy people. I think the audience that most needs two-factor authentication is the least likely to use it, and encouraging friends and family to use strong passwords would be a better, and more readily accepted, first step. A little education regarding safe computing would also go further and be less burdensome. I've always wondered how these exploits are happening on such a mass scale. Weak passwords? Brute force attacks? Keystroke logging malware? Phishing? The similarity of the hacks I've seen leads me to believe they're all using the same automated tools to do them. Why isn't this being covered more by the tech press? Understanding the attack vector would help us better defend against these hijackings.

Best wishes, Jeff. As you noted, too many in our field don't realize what's really important until it's too late. I don't think there are many people who find themselves on their death bed saying "I wish I had worked more."

Wow, looks like the telco lobbyists are out in full force today. More seriously, network neutrality is a more complicated subject than it first appears. Most people can't even define it properly. I think a big reason for the Internet's success is the fact that network neutrality has been a de facto principle to date. We can lament the fact that some intervention may be needed to keep the Internet neutral, but I think it is critical to do so. However, any regulation should be measured and only target clear and present threats to neutrality. The Internet has leveled the playing field -- everyone can have an equal voice on the Internet. This clearly makes some of those in power uncomfortable. That's exactly why we need to preserve network neutrality.

Wow, I'm surprised by the amount of anger in response to this post. Sure the quote "Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM." is provocative, and probably meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I have to agree overall. Most of us are already coding on top of many layers of abstraction, each of which comes at some cost in terms of efficiency. However, hardware is cheap and getting cheaper, and each layer helps us to be more productive as developers. The overall response here really reinforces my opinion that as an industry we're often too focused on the geeky details, such as optimizing for minimal RAM usage, while we fail so often at understanding the problem domain and our customer's needs.