The hero worship is one aspect of a much larger problem, I think, which is that technology culture is almost entirely defined by trends in the startup and VC spaces. It's been that way for at least a decade and a half, by my reckoning.

There is very little genuine technology subculture anymore that is willing to critique dominant trends, raise up our own heroes, and create alternatives.

I'm really hoping that demystifying "disruption" will create a moment of reckoning for technologists.

[edited to say "decade and a half"]

VS Code is very nice, when it works. My main problems had to do with the extension ecosystem. It felt very chaotic: it was hard to figure out which ones to install to get the functionality I wanted. Updates to Python extensions sometimes caused instability, crashing the editor. And I found it difficult to set extension preferences: the UI tries to be slick but in practice it ends up being clunky and awkward. On top of that, there was an annoying bug on Linux, related to Electron, that prevented the Save dialog box from appearing properly, which... kind of sucks. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/32857

Sublime is the perfect programmer's editor for dynamic languages like Python, and for general text editing. It's lightning fast. LSP is just enough to be helpful without getting in the way. Workspaces work the way I would expect. I prefer editing JSON files for preferences over navigating a complex GUI.

Best money I've ever spent on a license, and I'll happily renew just for maintenance updates, to be honest.

Early in my programming career, work was a mix of repetitive, somewhat mindless tasks (implement this webpage, fix this bug, etc) and more intensive, thoughtful activities (figure out a better algorithm for something, help architect a solution for a problem).

I think this is healthy. We can't be "on" 100% of the time. And I'm convinced that during those times when we're doing mindless tasks, our brains are actually working in a different way that we're not conscious of. It's like how a solution will sometimes come to you in the shower.

I don't think increasing intensity of work is the single cause of burnout, but it's definitely a part of the equation, and one that's definitely overlooked.

In a nutshell, the key is not to insist that your friend recognize that they're paranoid and suffering from delusions. You can't win that battle. Instead, get him to see that he can alleviate some of the immediate problems he's currently encountering (with work, family, doctors, you, etc) by getting an evaluation and medical treatment. In other words, to motivate him to get help, you might have to entertain some of his delusions to a certain degree. You have to play his mental game, until he (hopefully) gets treatment or medication and begins to see things more rationally.

If the two of you are not on speaking terms, find someone that he trusts and is willing to talk to, and get them to try this strategy.

This helped me when I was trying to convince a loved one with severe mental illness to make certain decisions about getting assistance and medical care that they were very resistant to.

Good luck. This is a very difficult and stressful thing to deal with, and as many others have advised, you should consider seeking support for your own mental health as well.

They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API users. That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days.

Not everyone. Business that build on top of other company's APIs will arrange contracts with their API providers. Those contracts generally include warning periods for changes or discontinuation and penalties for early termination.

The key here is that it was a free API with no contract or guarantees. Four days is short notice and frustrating, but it wouldn't have really changed the trajectory of his business if they had given him 180 days. If he didn't intend to pay for the API, he couldn't really sell an app that was going to stop working in a few months.

So I know we're supposed to be angry about the 4 days thing. It's not good, obviously. However, I don't think it actually changes the situation at all if he wasn't going to sign up anyway.

As I said in the post and comments here if it made financial sense and they gave me a more reasonable deadline with a less threatening email I would be willing to pay for the API. In this case it didn't make financial sense, so you're right at the current API prices it wouldn't make sense even with 6 months-notice.

That said, 6-months (your suggested time period) is a much better grace period for our shared users (users of Restaurants who use it as a frontend and continue to read more reviews at Yelp.com) and much more likely to make me convert to a paid API customer if it had made financial sense.

I don't understand. Are you saying that even if it did make financial sense, you would have voluntarily shut the app down in protest of the 4-day notice period? Even though the sales rep pointed you toward the free trial option to continue using the API beyond the 4 days while you decided?

I know you're angry and want us all to be angry at Yelp too, but I have a difficult time believing that anyone would choose to destroy a profitable application out of protest just to stick it to the company about a short notice period.

An app that sold 467 copies over 10 years at less than $5 a copy is not worth the trouble of dealing with a company that gives you Friday->Monday ultimatums. Obviously, if it were a big source of my income I would have to seriously consider it. But luckily, it's not. I discussed this in the "Development Ends" section of the post. Here is the pricing deck they sent me: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...

It seems to indicate a $229 base monthly price on the third slide for my use case.

> I know you're angry and want us all to be angry at Yelp too, but I have a difficult time believing that anyone would choose to destroy a profitable application out of protest just to stick it to the company.

I'm sorry you're reading so much anger in my post. I thought my blog post was pretty balanced. The worst I called them is "quite rude" (I think it's hard to read their emails otherwise) and spent the first half of it describing my app. I never expressed much emotion in my post, and frankly as mentioned above it really doesn't matter in the scheme of things for my life. What I do want is Yelp to change the way it treats developers. Perhaps if someone there reads this it will cause a tiny reflection on their part. I also hope the experience here expressed in the "Lessons Learned" section of the post is useful to other indie developers.

That's what's crazy to me about all these comments. What does it say that so many developers have glossed over this simple ask for more considerate and respectful treatment for THEMSELVES? What does it say that the knee jerk response is fatalism to whatever big tech does?

Just as I have zero chance of getting Apple to sign that they won't remove my app if they feel like it.

This is kind of the salient point.

Either you test on the free API and plan on paying for access slightly before its ready to go live, or you try the "free lunch" approach and see if you can get one by the tendy and see how long you can go before you get shut down and have to pony up the money.

Either way. they should've had the cost of the API in their budget.

We should all know by now. . . . nobody rides for free.

There was no cost to the API ten years ago. I submitted a prototype of my app to their developer program, described its functionality and exchanged a few emails back and forth with someone in developer relations. They specifically approved it and decided how many API calls to give me. A paid API didn't exist back then to my knowledge (perhaps there was some kind of enterprise API but I don't know?). The point of the post is how badly Yelp handled the transition from free to paid. They are perfectly in their right to transition to paid. But they should've handled the emails and transition better.

As mentioned in the post I developed the app on a whim. But after 10 years, it had a few users, although not many. They and I should have received more than a few days notice from Yelp that the API was going to become unsustainable (see my comments elsewhere in this thread).

Well, free APIs anyway. If you are paying for API access, you hopefully have a contract which gives you power.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or, they completely get it but they work for large platforms that leverage API access commercially or strategically, so their response to unruly peasants is to figuratively chop their heads off.

This has been known for like 20 years now. We all know that if you're relying on someone else's API that's a massive risk to your business. What more is there to say at this point? What sympathy is there to give when the inevitable happens?