CityWanderer

Super excited by a three-way merge tool, it's the thing I find most lacking in Atom and one of the great things about IntelliJ.

Exactly, this particular sentence seems to overly dramatise the situation.

Is this issue any different to using open wifi at a cafe, which many many people do, relying on HTTPS for their security? (This is an honest question)

Yes, I think they are very reliable. I worked for a London Startup that currently has 100% negative reviews and I regret not looking at them before I joined.

From what I've seen, a lot of good or decent places tend to have a general positive rating, and the really bad ones are going to have multiple negative reviews.

Take individual reviews with a grain of salt, but as a group I think it's fairly accurate.

fieldmargin | Web / full-stack developer | Clerkenwell, London, UK | Onsite | Full time | Competitive salary + equity + private healthcare + pension

fieldmargin are building a hub for farmers to access all of the technology they use across their farm. We allow them to integrate their drone photography, satellite imagery, historical paper maps, IoT sensors and machinery, with our easy-to-use note taking and collaboration apps. We're a small team of 10 working in Clerkenwell.

We have a React powered web application, native iOS and Android applications and a Java/Spring backend. We use Python for small services and for prototyping. Everything is hosted in AWS.

We're looking for a mid-senior developer to join our Web & APIs team, you'll be tasked with:

  - building our main React web application that forms the core of our product
  - creating integrations to pull data in from our partners
  - designing and building the public APIs that allow everyone to connect to our systems
  - working full stack with the most appropriate tools for the job

We expect you to have existing experience building React applications and knowledge across the stack, but Python, Java and AWS can be learnt on the job. If you're interested or have further questions, please email colin@fieldmargin.com.

fieldmargin | Web / full-stack developer | Clerkenwell, London, UK | Onsite | Full time | Competitive salary + equity + private healthcare + pension

fieldmargin are building a hub for farmers to access all of the technology they use across their farm. We allow them to integrate their drone photography, satellite imagery, historical paper maps, IoT sensors and machinery, with our easy-to-use note taking and collaboration apps. We're a small team of 10 working in Clerkenwell.

We have a React powered web application, native iOS and Android applications and a Java/Spring backend. We use Python for small services and for prototyping. Everything is hosted in AWS.

We're looking for a mid-senior developer to join our Web & APIs team, you'll be tasked with:

  - building our main React web application that forms the core of our product
  - creating integrations to pull data in from our partners
  - designing and building the public APIs that allow everyone to connect to our systems
  - working full stack with the most appropriate tools for the job

We expect you to have existing experience building React applications and knowledge across the stack, but Python, Java and AWS can be learnt on the job.

If you're interested or have further questions, please email colin@fieldmargin.com.

And it's existence doesn't make me any worse off? It only grants patents that I wouldn't by default have?

This is true, all of Facebook's projects have the same PATENTS file. The title is the most clickbaity though, which is the intention of the piece.

If what you say is true then I think our tool chains are failing us.

My React project has 1,015 dependencies (directories in node_modules). If I didn't have locked versions then every minor automatic update could bring in more dependencies without me knowing.

Can anyone honestly say they've done such due diligence?

What makes the PATENTS file legally binding? If I install React via NPM/Yarn, or even as a dependency of another project, I will not see this file.

LICENSE is a pretty common convention and you could argue I should seek out this file in every one of my dependencies' dependencies - but how would I know to look for PATENTS?

Are all statements in the code base legally binding? Could they be hidden in a source file somewhere?

I've been using Linux of some flavour at home for the last 15 years, only straying onto Windows for gaming. I've been lucky to use Ubuntu at work for most of my professional career too (6-7 years?) - so it's what I know and what I'm used to.

I started a new role a few months ago that forced me onto OS X and found physical and software issues. Physically OS X does not let you configure mice properly without installing third party drivers. Of course I ditched the "magic" mouse pretty quickly after my hand started hurting after a couple of days, but even with a normal mouse you simply cannot configure mouse sensitivity and acceleration properly - it cannot treat a mouse on par with what Linux or Windows will. You need extra drivers to even enable mouse buttons 3,4 and 5.

The keyboard shortcuts hurt too, sometimes using Ctrl, sometimes using Cmd, but that could be just fighting 15 years of muscle memory - so take that with a grain of salt (but it indirectly caused more physical finger pain).

Software-wise I don't know how objective I can be, but it feels faster/simpler to install software and things like the terminal are much better integrated - I can auto-complete git branch names on the command line for instance. Maybe OS X can do that kind of thing, but certainly not out of the box. To me, OS X feels like a 95% emulation of Linux, just that slightly bit lacking.

Then there are the embarrassing things like I couldn't find the shortcut to go to the end of the current line. On Linux it's the End key - on Mac I assume it's some combination somewhere.

Stability is a concern but it's notable that this machine is running a recent long-term support version of Ubuntu so shouldn't need any TLC in the short term.

Ease of use is very subjective and can't really argue with what people are used to. I do know that from a physical point of view that Linux lets me configure a mouse to not give me RSI.

I've run it with one monitor, two would be hard since it only has a single USB C and I don't have any monitors that can daisy chain.. if that's even a thing. The issue is that Linux doesn't play nicely with having different pixel densities on each monitor. You can try to make it scale, but then apps appear in different sizes depending on which screen you open them on. It's pretty horrible, so I run the laptop at half-res (1600x900) so that it matches the monitor and everything is the same size.

Suspend/resume works fine.

I've had to restart the network-manager service just once to get WiFi to refresh. Otherwise it's fine reconnecting when you come in/out of suspend.

Other things: battery isn't great but I don't use it away from a desk. On the first couple of days the Ubuntu Software Centre kept crashing; I think it's fine now but I don't tend to use it anyway. I disabled the Dell apt source because it was failing - I don't know if that was a one-off problem or it's just broken.

But, I'm running Linux as my primary development environment again and it just feels _so good_ after a few painful months on OS X.