Sorry for the offtopic post: just noticed now that three months ago, you mentioned I misrepresented your words. I deeply apologize; that's not at all what I meant. I had found your Ricon talk refreshingly honest and quoted it admiringly to people I know. (I had zero issue with anything you said; but rather with certain institutions.)
I'm sorry for any errors/misrepresentations I made about your words, and will be more careful in the future. (Unfortunately, I can no longer edit, delete nor respond to that post.)
My main point was that all this stuff can be learned without a degree, but should always be learned, and that these jobs mainly require skills not taught in school; that charm goes a long way, etc.
Your parsing of what I said is unfortunate and your characterization of what I was espousing ('sociopathic', 'cheaters') is wrong.
EDIT: Try to interpret what I said in a positive way.
I was talking about personal intellectual growth, not obtaining things you don't deserve via lies.
I was talking only about bootstrapping yourself into a career you want - of course you must then master whatever it is you have set out to do or will be found out and fired.
If you want a job and know you can learn it, then obtain that job however you can and prove yourself.
Saying Riak is categorically non-operations-oriented is a bit hyperbolic, but I will be the first to acknowledge that we need even more visibility into failure-recovery / degraded mode situations. I've spoken to a few customers who have "cheat sheets" of Erlang console commands they use to debug things like handoff slowness or poor performance in general. This alone means we need to do better,
On the other hand, Riak continues to function in scenarios where other databases would be completely unavailable. I'll take immature visibility during those situations over complete unavailability any day,
I appreciate your feedback - I can assure you that this is something we're constantly working on and you'll see improvements with each release.
Finally, if you've been bitten by anything specific you'd like to see fixed, we do all our development in the open at http://github.com/basho, so github issues, pull requests, etc go right into our internal tools and workflows.
Robbert is indeed one of (if not the) smartest men you'll ever meet in relation to fault tolerance in distributed systems. However, if you're looking to build a fault tolerant consensus algorithm, you owe it to yourself to check out randomized consensus (which predates Paxos, and really is the same algorithm - just simpler)
