"As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world."

Also you live in San Francisco, I'm sitting in a cafe in Florida, and we got 2 macs (me (developer) and another guy that is a designer apparently) and 10 PC, welcome back to the PC era.

Inhabitat credits treehugger.com as its source. Treehugger's article is not breathless about biomimicry, not spread over two pages, and not interrupted by adsense and images. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/13-year-old-makes-so...

Edit: The source of treehugger's article is Aidan's own article, which is better still, and addresses briefly some of the issues raised in comments here (e.g., about fixed vs. tracking pv arrays). http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201...

From what I've seen, there's just no crossing the skill chasm as a software developer. You've either got it, or you don't. No amount of putting your nose to the grindstone will change that.

What a scary thought. Good thing it's not true.

One of the many reasons I became a programmer was that the sky was the limit. Still is. Want to learn something new? Learn it. Want to build something cool? Build it. The only real limitations are your belief that you can do it and your willingness to perservere until you do.

We are not like basketball players or musicians or chess masters where only the extremely gifted (who also work hard) can rise to the top of their craft. With few exceptions, we all can.

I didn't always think this way. I had a college math professor who once said, "Many of my students are simply not suited for the sciences." And I was stupid enough to believe him! In retrospect, his comment said more about his weakness as a teacher than anything about his students.

How do I know this? Because I learned the hard way. When working with my first mentor, I was always too quick to blame someone else for their limitations slowing progress. Until he said, "So teach them!" He believed that almost anyone can learn and get good at almost anything. This seemed counterintuitive but after a while, I was able to adopt this belief system, and it has made all the difference.

There are many reasons why so many programmers suck, but "not being able to cross the chasm" isn't one of them. Just a few of the real reasons:

  - They never learned right in the first place.
  - They never built anything of real substance.
  - They were a tiny cog in a machine and never saw the big picture.
  - They got pigeon-holed into a small area for a long time.
  - Other things in their life took over.
  - They had shitty teachers.
  - They had to build on top of pre-existing shit and couldn't do it right.
  - They were stuck in environments where excellence never mattered.
  - They went into management too soon.
  - They got trapped into old technologies and methodologies.
  - They made too much money to make a career u-turn.
  - They just didn't care enough.
  - <add your own>
  

My programming has always gotten better every year. Sometimes I read my old code and can't believe I wrote it. And I still have tons of room for improvement.

I'm firmly convinced that almost any of us can get better, much better. And even become "elite", whatever that means. Please don't listen to anyone else who tells you otherwise.