rebelshrug

Snap Circuits are great: https://www.elenco.com/snapcircuits/

Also a big fan of Legos (and so are my kids).

Highlights magazine is great for that age and can fill up some time.

Step-by-step drawing books can also be fun, and can usually be found at libraries: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/reviews/drawing-book-for-k...

Can also take her stargazing and teach her about constellations. There are mobile apps to help you find them, but books and searching for them yourselves is also fun.

My wife was shut out of her paid accounts, and had difficulty reaching customer service.

She met many others who experienced the same as paying customers of Google.

Paid accounts.

She got through to customer support, they just weren’t able or willing to provide any information.

We have bad support and customer service experiences quite a bit, and don’t feel a need to “tell the entire world.”

Our experience with Google led to a considerable loss of income.

There’s also the problem where they disabled every product my wife used, but continued charging her.

They’re a terrible provider, plain and simple, and we feel that we should warn others.

No. She moved to other services. No more eggs in one basket.

I moved my side business off of GCP, and switched my personal email from gmail to another provider.

I posted this in another thread, but it’s relevant here:

Google disabled my wife's voice number and business account for several weeks, right after she ordered new business cards, signs, and started a marketing campaign. They continued to charge her for Google ads each week.

Her accounts were re-enabled about 7 - 8 weeks later. No explanation given.

She averages 2 - 5 new customers per week, gained largely through referrals and her marketing campaigns, so Google's actions had a significant impact on her business.

Customer support was very limited, and again they provided no reason for their actions, no timeline, no nothing.

I donate money to some open source projects, and also to the FSF and EFF. I was also able to get previous employers to match my donations. Good reminder for me to see if my current employer will do that.

> I do see a lot of people extrapolating from what is essentially individual customer support up to company customer support. It's not far off extrapolating from a bad experience as an Amazon customer to AWS being a bad option – a comparison I don't often see being made.

I think the difference with Amazon and some of it's competitors is that Amazon has made customer service a core business tenet as evidenced through "Customer Obsession" being their first leadership principle. It's ingrained in their culture, and it inspires confidence.

Typo, corrected. See edit.

Typo, corrected. See edit.

edit: typo, changed $700,000 to $70,000. Also note that isn't income, but revenue.

> For a certain size of customer this problem does go away

> We have an account manager, have received lots of support from Google in setting up, have been able to trial products in closed alpha before release, and haven't been hit by any meaningful deprecations

Too bad that level of customer service doesn't extend across their offerings and to smaller customers. A conservative estimate puts my wife's losses at just over $70,000 for the time her accounts were disabled. That doesn't include potential referrals from customers she would have gained during that time.

I've been an Amazon customer for years, for several of their products, and I have yet to experience an issue that wasn't handled promptly and to my satisfaction.

Several companies I've worked for have used AWS, and we experienced that same commitment to customer service. My network from those companies use AWS for their side projects and startups.

> we are not a Google competitor, and one of our major partners considered it a significant benefit of using us that we did not host on Amazon services.

Some companies don't use or have moved off of GCP for similar reasons.

Google disabled my wife's voice number and business account for several weeks, right after she ordered new business cards, signs, and started a marketing campaign. They continued to charge her for Google ads each week.

Her accounts were re-enabled about 7 - 8 weeks later. No explanation given.

She averages 2 - 5 new customers per week, gained largely through referrals and her marketing campaigns, so Google's actions had a significant impact on her business.

My wife cancelled her accounts with Google after transferring her voice number. I've also moved off of GCP for my side businesses, and several people within our network have done the same after hearing about our situation. I've even stopped using their search engine, and am moving away from gmail.

I advise anyone considering Google's products to look elsewhere.

Several years ago, I worked on some open source projects that involved Racket. The community and Matthew Felleisen in particular were very helpful, and it sticks with me that the project founder took time to teach me idiomatic/correct ways to write Racket code and tests.

Not condoning Matthew Felleisen's behavior towards Matthew Butterick - people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect - but there does seem to be a side to M.F that enjoys teaching and evangelizing Racket.

> One thing Amazon doesn’t bring up is that athletes train for an event with a definite end date. Athletes aren’t competing day in and day out, and they have time to rest and recuperate in between. The comparison becomes even more ridiculous when you look at what a pro athlete’s day is actually like: significant time is spent warming up to avoid injuries, practice may be only a few hours out of the day (read: not in eight or 10-hour shifts), there’s time made for rest or even naps, and significant effort is spent on nutrition. It’s safe to say that most Amazon warehouse workers don’t have professional nutritionists and / or chefs taking care of their dietary needs.

It seems to me that Amazon is trying to set the expectation that their warehouse jobs are physically demanding. Other physically demanding jobs/industries are: the military, construction, landscaping, firefighting, fitness trainers, farmers, dancers, etc...

Workers in those fields aren't necessarily given time to nap, and "don't have professional nutritionists and / or chefs taking care of their dietary needs." Of course most employers in those fields don't call their workers "athletes", but most athletes outside of professional sports have perks like naps and nutritionists. I think a lot of amateur athletes have jobs, and practice and compete in their free time.

I can see that story ending like this: "... and that's how our startup failed."

> Are you suggesting there might be an issue because they are ‘using your resources’ to do this?

Not suggesting, but asking. It certainly feels invasive to me, though.

Here's one of a few articles that I found: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/854014403/your-boss-is-watchi...

Your company might be less intrusive than the norm.

Do managers or HR personnel have the ability to dig deeper?

interested in this, too

Curious about the name - why Floyd?

I'm a customer, not a Thimble employee - but here are the instructions for the 1st kit:

https://learning.thimble.io/modules/wi-fi-bot-part-1

Should give you an idea of what's included.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with your suggestions.

It is meant for people who've never coded before, with the end goal of introducing programming concepts in a friendly, easy-to-understand manner. My hope is that it encourages people to explore the computer sciences in education or as a career choice.

I do plan to add more lessons that touch on other programming concepts - lists, recursion, etc... and I would also like to make the site multilingual.

I welcome anyone that is interested in contributing - the Github repo is here: https://github.com/arguello/trycode.io

And here’s my blog post on the site: http://meta.fja.io/trycode.io/

Great job!

When will comment voting be implemented?

Also, in comments - would be great if links were clickable, and if the user could highlight and copy text.

Very cool - just installed both.

>> Perhaps readers are too conditioned by the mathematician G.H. Hardy quote, "math is a young man's game"[1] in which he was talking about about intellectual output.

Readers might just be conditioned to taking things at face value.

The author's next blog post is titled Attracting Millennial Engineers - http://www.evanmiller.org/attracting-millennial-engineers.ht...

I can't tell if it's satire.

No - companies invest a lot of resources into their software development processes, and changing processes often involves a significant investment of it's own, not to mention a slow down in productivity.

>> Consider some meanings of "cultural fit"

Good point, and I can see how showing a video like this to your coworkers could be construed as a subversive act - particularly if the company has invested significant resources towards their agile implementation.

here's Dave Thomas' blog post on the subject: http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/

Fired for voicing an opinion? Sounds like a company worth leaving.

Not everything about agile software development is bad. Planning poker is a great team exercise if you replace the planning part with a deck of playing cards, poker chips and beer.