I love the price on that.
836 karma · joined November 28, 2018
One question I have found useful in embedded development is asking someone to discuss the difference between a thread and a process, and the difference between thread based OSs and process based OSs. It is a general question, not bound by anything like CPU architecture, but just gives an idea into whether the person is comfortable about general memory domains.
I have mentored people, bright programmers that never worked in small embedded systems, that initially tripped all over the thread model, but eventually came to understand it.
On the other hand, I have reviewed resumes from people with five years of experience that are 'experts' at twenty five unrelated technologies. As soon as I see that, I think, 'yeah..... no'. I worked with some genius level folk at Bell Labs back in the mid 1990s, ten years into my career, and they were each really good at two or three things. I took note of that. Yes, they could figure other stuff out, they could move on to new technology, updating the three things that they were good at, but that list always seemed to be short.
You have to laugh at 'experienced' or 'expert at' followed by JS, JAVA, Full Stack, Python, Linux, BSD, C#, AWS, C, C++, MySQL, PostGRES, Lisp, Lua, Azure, MathCAD, DSP, AI, Excel, SystemC, Perl, regex, Bash, git, assembly, Verilog, ...
I am concerned at some level on the lastpass breaches, but I am less affected so far than I have been by the equifax, target, and t-mobile breaches. I have had years of free credit monitoring since each one of those handed out enough data to compromise my identity several times over.
User authentication has been a hot mess for at least two decades. Passwords need to go.
It astounds me, in this day and age, that employees think HR is there to protect them. I understand the misconception from young people at their first job, but the author is 60 (+/-) over the time of this story.
In my 38 years of working at medium to large corporations, I have had exactly one time when HR was useful to me, and that was on my way out the door in my prior job.
I think that was the sole value of doing homework assignments and term papers. Going through the act of working out a problem, or researching then writing about a topic, is what reinforced the learning for me.
In 2010 we bought a 55" HDTV (but no cable service), a BluRay player, and a Nintendo Wii. We also got a Netflix DVD subscription. We had three young kids at the time. I carved a 16 foot by 16 foot square of space out of the basement, floored with resilient foam tiles, hung the screen on the wall, added some inexpensive Ikea chairs, and the kids would jump around playing Wii games, often times with their friends over, and the whole family would share a movie on occasion. Two years later we added a Roku streaming box. Still no cable service.
My wife streams something from roku, netflix or prime, while she folds laundry (she does laundry, I do most all of the cooking and dish washing). I rarely watch the screen for entertainment at all. I sit in front of a screen for work, eight or nine hours a day, for the last thirty eight years. I don't need to see more glowing pixels than that.
I know my wife and I are outliers. She sees maybe four hours of TV streaming a week. I average maybe two hours a month, only because on occasion we will sit and watch a movie together.
It is important to buy different bottles of the same grape to see how it varies across vintners and regions. It is also important to buy different grapes, because you may be surprised over time what vintages you settle on as your tastes develop.
Friends of mine have held two professionally run wine tastings over the years, and they were great fun, and very educational. The wines were all decanted, you could not see what they were, and it was interesting to see that every wine scored on a bell curve with the group. The scores were anonymous, so you didn't have to worry about how you felt about any given wine.
My favorite part is that in each of the two tasting sessions, the highest price bottle scored well, but not at the top. In each, the top white and the top red were both roughly $30 dollar bottles. Also in each, a couple roughly $10 bottles scored really well.
The other thing that I learned, and apply regularly, is that at the $20 price point, you are generally buying a good tasting bottle of wine. $16 to $24 seems to be a really safe range for my tastes
The beauty of canned goods is that you don't expend energy to store them.
The beauty of frozen veggies (and some frozen fruits, blueberries for example) is that they keep and work well for small quantities. I ate a lot of frozen veggies when I was single.
If you highly diversify your diet, if any one thing is 'bad' for you, you are by your actions, reducing your exposure to it.
As far as processed foods, there are different forms of 'processing'. For example, canned vegetables are pretty minimally processed. Cured sausages are more highly processed, and nacho cheese doritos are really highly processed.
> if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas
My kids were allowed to walk, scooter, and tricycle around our block from the time they were five years old. They were allowed to walk into town, as long as they were with at least one friend, from the time they were eight.
From sixteen up, as long as they were with a group of at least three, they could take the train into NYC.
When my son was sixteen, we put him on a bus with one friend (also sixteen), for a five hour bus ride to Boston so he could go visit his sister at college, and so his friend could visit her sister at college.
And this mom got arrested because he kid walked a half mile on sidewalks to get home?
In our town, there are no busses for the middle school, the kids walk, some of them over a half mile, every school day.
Nothing like hitting a really rare corner case at runtime that just fails syntax and the process exits.
The really good ones won't do that. The ones that do suffer from some weak superiority complex. I had three awesome mentors when I started writing C, and a couple great mentors when I did what little C++ work that I had to do.
The only scold I ever dealt with wrote overly wrought, overly complex crap. Kitchen sink patterns to handle any possible future variation, instead of solving the problem at hand.
Stay away from people like that, they'll just turn you into the same old grouch.
As an embedded systems developer for 38 years, with 26 years writing for small threaded RTOS, including 16 and 32 bit DSPs, and the remainder being platform work on QNX Neutrino, NetBSD, and Linux, most of my code has been K&R, then ANSI C.
A very small amount of C++, but by comparison, a very small amount.
Everything else, Shell, Perl, Python, is a shadow by comparison.
Google Maps on my phone works fine, and on my current Pixel 5A, I can navigate off battery for a three or four hours. Plenty of walking time to hit multiple points in a day of walking.
Maybe some day the TomTom app will be competitive with Google maps, but for now, Google maps is the reference by which all other mapping will be judged.