How to end up with 500k commits in your log

> People often seem dismissive of that value i18n, “everyone speaks English” Well, depends on who your customer base is. Even in the Netherlands where almost everyone speaks some English there are still loads of people who are not especially good at it and much more comfortable with Dutch. This is probably over half the population, and it’s really not just old people.

> Or people just want to do the work in their mother tongue instead of a foreign language

These two sentences mean the same thing. While sometimes people say “or X” to reword X I don’t see why you’d do that. It’s clear as it is.

I at least know a few companies that would avoid hiring people who criticize old employers, afraid they will be next. I mean, most companies have at least some "skeletons in the closet" of bad practices or what not.

Having said that I'm usually brutally honest in job interviews, I see it as my way of screening companies, if they don't want the honest me, then I would probably not fit the company culture anyway. So there might be nothing wrong with having an honest blog in the end, maybe you receive less offers, but the offers match you more.

I've seen people advise that you should "avoid controversial topics" on first dates, as that "might be a turn-off". Well, maybe it can be (certainly had a few dates like that), but that would also be boring conversation, and not very meaningful as such if you're actually looking for a serious relationship (which doesn't apply to just romantic relationships by the way, also other kind of social relationships). Related comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788380

It's partly cultural as well; I've seen this in certain countries (cough England cough), where everyone avoids talking about anything meaningful so all they talk about is the weather or some such pointless conversation because they're afraid someone could possible disagree with something they say. It's not like I'm against small-talk, but if that's all you do... Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's certainly very different from my own Dutch culture where people tend to be a lot more forthright.

It's not like I will just say whatever without any filter or consideration for other people's feelings, or what might be inappropriate, or without being receptive to feedback. Actually, I try to be quite conscious in how I communicate, especially online where the lack of body language and diversity of culture/social norms can make things pretty darn hard. But at the end of the day this is mostly about how you say something rather than what you say. e.g. "this is stupid" vs. "I'm not sure if this is a good idea".

There are always trade-offs of course. I was known as "Carpetsmoker" online for years and I changed it across the board over a period of a few years to "arp242" mostly because I felt "Carpetsmoker" didn't sound too professional (a lot of people seem to associate it with drug use – I don't even like to smoke cannabis! It was just a funny joke I made when I was 14 that turned in to a nickname). I still think it's kinda funny, but what's an appropriate nickname when you were 14 isn't necessarily appropriate when you're 36 and actually use your GitHub as a way to earn your living, and it doesn't really matter all that much what your name is; so I just changed it.

I publish it on my personal name because I see it as my personal space. Being anonymous would make it "arp242's personal space" rather than "Martin's personal space". I know some people like to keep their "online identity" more separate from their "real life identity", but personally I don't really separate things out all that much.

This is a bit rambly maybe; I'm having a hard time to articulate my feelings on this ... but I hope it makes sense.

And, of course, everyone can make their own choices in this.

> At one point I learned that one company we connected with would literally just invent concerts: they would guess “they’re probably doing a tour next year” and start “pre-selling” tickets for it at extraordinary prices.

“I very much regret working on this First job, insecure about your career prospects and whether you’re able to get a new job, and it becomes easy to rationalize these things to yourself.”

For me, commits of work in progress are only done on my development branches before I want to push to a remote to save my work in case of my computer failing (or getting lost/stolen, whatever force majeure), I usually write a "WIP: <what's been worked on>" message that I will squash later on when I have a meaningful commit.

You can commit every single character if you in the mood. At the end, when your new feature is complete, you just squash all commits in this branch to one single commit ("add feature xyz") and merge/rebase it to your main dev branch.

Now it is really easy to identify the actual code behind a new feature.

Edit: this is mixing up two things, what you want in this case is "git commit --amend -C HEAD && git push -f", i.e. replace the current commit with a new hash and force push.

Alternatively you can create an empty commit as above, but that isn't amending.

> No one liked how any of this worked, but just accepted it as a fact of life, like how you would accept that it really sucks that it rains today. That’s an attitude I’ve seen more often and never really understood: if I see something that’s really awkward, frustrating, and time-consuming then I want to fix it, but a lot of people seem happy to just and accept it.

Often, the root cause of this will bite you hardest when you need it least.

Some of them make their changes locally in VS Code (or Notepad), FTP the changed files to their home directory, then sudo cp to replace the existing files. Others SSH into the server and directly edit files using vi.

Due to that workflow, none of those devs ever use a proper debugger (and have committed a lot of random console logging) and there are often conflicts when more than one person is working on a file. To address that, there is a Slack channel dedicated entirely to announcing what file you are working on.