duggan

CircuitPython describes itself a fork of MicroPython, with the major difference being its deployment workflow. What makes it a “toy” by comparison in your book?

The hard drive analogy is appropriate; the solution is to buy more/bigger hard drives when you need them. You can’t foresee all requirements, “the map is not the territory”, etc.

Similarly, you build a system with the best information available, and be prepared to change it when the information changes.

It's 25Gbps now[1]. I have a rule of thumb: if I haven't refreshed something I think I know about AWS for more than half a year, it's probably out of date.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/s3-ma...

As with bugs in general, nobody sets out to write flaky tests.

Sometimes organizational imperatives like code coverage goals can result in less-than-stellar tests. Sometimes a developer doesn't understand the system well enough, and sometimes (often, in my experience) something outside the logical scope of a test changes, e.g., an underlying implicit dependency.

Even a test that is 100% reliable today may become unreliable tomorrow.

> when recruiters call and find out I'm married with kids they can't seem to hang up fast enough.

I don't really understand why this would be the case. From a purely practical standpoint, people loaded up with a family are more likely to stay and perform in a job for income stability.

I guess if a company is looking for people to burn through like firewood this might not be the case, but I think those are the places you want to avoid anyway!

I expect there's a fine line here between being generous and being seen as patronizing, but I try to cultivate a similar mindset (with varying degrees of success). I've always found it a sign of someone trustworthy, generally possessed by much more experienced colleagues.

I think you also have to account for the cost of acquiring senior staff. If you train them and pay them, your pipeline becomes more predictable than plucking them ad-hoc from other companies. That makes planning (your roadmap) more predictable.

I think that would depend on the religion, but generally I don't think the comparison is equivalent.

I'd always thought the primary difference between vegetarians and vegans was ethical, rather than dietary. That part of the ethics of veganism is opposition to the mechanised slaughter of individuals that should have the same, or similar, rights to people.

Maybe this is more of a fringe belief as vegan options become mainstream?

I mean, isn’t a large part of veganism an ethical stance against killing sentient creatures? It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t involve judging others to some degree.

As long as I'm paid a software engineering salary to develop software, I could be called a clown for all the difference it makes.

If you're programming, you're a programmer. Or a coder. Or a software developer. Or a software engineer. There is no consensus on the distinction between any of these things. Just lots of people with opinions because it's easy to have an opinion on.

I always enjoy demonstrating various combinations of cat, grep, uniq, sort, and cut to folks unfamiliar with the command line; data scientists in particular.

Even if you can't ship a bash script to production, they're great tools for ad-hoc exploration and validation.

I received a variation on this mail too. I signed up on their free plan years ago to play with the API, eventually setting it up just to do mail forwarding to GMail from my domains.

This move makes sense and I hope it works out for them, though I'm a bit disappointed, as $35 a month for low volume mail forwarding is just more than I'm willing to pay. I'd have paid $5 a month to save me the hassle of migrating, but $35 means I'll be finding an alternative. I doubt personal mail forwarding is their target market anyway.

Fastmail is probably more suited, and at $5/m is the right price point.

I don't believe for a second that there is an endless supply of capable software engineers. The salaries available to folks of even modest experience simply don't support such an assertion.

This problem should be self-correcting. If it's as unproductive as it is unhealthy, then better companies will win by retaining talent for longer.

> I got a couple of months' gardening leave (as it's known in the industry). The most senior guys would typically get six months off work: three paid, three unpaid.

I don't understand - three months unpaid gardening leave is just unemployment.

In companies that I've worked in, the traits listed would (very roughly) distinguish a junior from senior developer.

There's various ways of describing these levels, but I think programmer/developer is less clear, and seems to suggest programmer almost as a pejorative.

Alas, even the mighty telephone line is not infallible.

There is a post published on Jordan's blog covering this, might be easier to read (no Facebook login nag): https://www.jordanmechner.com/prince-of-persia-30th-annivers...

You’re a real asshole to say something like this.

The word “concur” means to agree.

As the article makes no reference to Bhutan, national policy, nor concludes that happiness is a worthy goal, perhaps you intended a different word?

I imagine in that scenario that Google and Facebook would get particularly good at resilience and security.

Once you've got enough people, 5% of them may as well have been hired by lottery, depending on what you're measuring. People get less productive, more productive, want to change the company, decide to steal things, etc.

I think it's interesting to think about.

Teams is truly mediocre, other than when it rises to irritating. I have no idea how anyone using it could prefer it to Slack.

It is imposed on people whose organizations have Office 365 subscriptions, it is not chosen.

There is a difference between a $172k "gift idea" and the single largest purchase most people make in their entire lifetime as a loan repaid over most of their working career.

I mean, a convenient commute is nice, but so is access to cinemas, museums, restaurants, bars, etc.

I didn't realize Canada had such a heterogenous national composition. Thanks for highlighting, and the poster below who linked to the wikipedia article on the provinces and territories.

Not the first time Wag has made the news for mishandling (and killing) pets[1][2].

[1]: https://nypost.com/2018/05/14/embattled-dog-walking-app-lose...

[2]: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/pet-dies-after-dog-walker-...

Other than multi-document transactions, many of the changes to MongoDB since 3.6 are to do with performance and scaling - this is AWS' bread and butter.

Something to consider is how many applications depends on cutting edge database features. Developers often consider a database an object persistence mechanism whose details are to be tidied away. See, for example, the emphasis on database portability in ORMs.

MongoDB's most effective enterprise offering is support, in my opinion. They know their database well, which can make a big difference if your company is heavily reliant on it.

I suspect for many users though, AWS support will be good enough. Presumably, that's the danger to MongoDB.

I think a lot of Clojure developers have worked with gnarly codebases before, probably for the bulk of their careers. It's a common reason for using Clojure in personal projects, and seeking out Clojure work.

There are numerous ways to find satisfaction in work. I'd merely extend the reasons you list to include an enjoyment of the tooling and software you're working with. Might as well try to tick all the boxes.

Until reading this, I had no idea the film Predestination was based on a Heinlein short.

Outline.com also seems to do a reasonable job[1], though only directed at the inner frame, and the result is still fraught with borders.

I found both the article and this little tangent into its markup interesting, however!

[1]: http://outline.com/GxBzrY

The command line has the advantage of presenting portable, terse and editable instructions that can be cobbled together into a recipe which can be abstracted and automated.

It's a very powerful interface.