toadi

In my home country no one can do a background check like that. But they can ask me to produce a "proof of good conduct and morals". Seldom they ask for this. The only places they ask for it I know of is working for NATO, EU or something like that.

Close to real life issues :) Traffic.

Maybe US is out of whack a bit with salaries. As software engineer I never made 80k in Europe. I made more when I was freelance engineer.

Now I live in Asia only the very senior people will make like around 100k.

I have had several leadership roles still not make as much money as a SWE in America.

Now I bought land and build a nice house on it, with a big garden, pool and big garage for my motorcycles. All out of my own pocket without going into debt. Think in the end it is not the size of the paycheck that matters. But quality of life is calculated with cost of living and your paycheck.

I never live without noise. Not thanks to what is around me but due to tinnitus.

It is just background noise for me. But have friends where they are more disturbed by it...

I started coding because I loved games. Thing was there was no unreal or other frameworks to help out. I was no Carmack writing my own 3d engine. I'm just not good enough in math for all that.

But once I retire I will go back at writing games.

Can't review your past employers anymore...

Archived all my old mail in a paid service. Still use the google one for the easy one tap login at many places. But if possible I added the other account too. Some places you can link logins together with regular email password.

what is happening with me is I start to consume less and less content online. Many movies and series are crap and I don't like them. Video games the same. I'm not sure it is because I'm getting older and have the classic it used to better before syndrome. But what is happening and this is probably due to getting older I am more careful what I spend my time on. Consuming crap content or in a way it is a crappy experience... fuck that I will go outside and touch some gras.

This brings back memories. Was linux only since the 90s until 2009. I went to mac and now I just use windows with wsl2.

Fluxbox was my favorite window manager.

There was a book written in 1936 and it is the only one you need to read.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0...

Here us a synopsis: https://fs.blog/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/

All the information is timeless. Most people just re-hash stuff from it and make it sound like it is new.

First 10 year of my career(am now close to my 25 years into my career). Yup searching and hustling. After that during good economic times I get pinged/called with job offers. During down turns the only jobs came through my own network.

I worked for a large health insurance company. The development team switched to macbooks and could install their own tools. Corporate laptops where shitty and no one had local admin. The installed a tool like that on the macbooks. In the end they just used to check if the OS was up to date and your virus scanner was running. No one checked anything else.

Now this could be a slippery slope. A new manager finding out what is possible and demanding reports on the "dangerous" stuff could change this quickly.

In the Oreilly days if you wanted to learn about a language there were 3 options.

1/ Learn the language with exercises - Fun book but you only use it once 2/ The definitive reference guide - that was the book I had on my desk with post its in. 3/ The cookbook - solving real world problems with examples

Mostly I got the 2nd and 3rd options and didn't bother with the 1st. I think this concept was the best.

Even for example command line tools. I read it once but I re-read it occasionally. You forget what is possible with the tool when first learning it. The next rounds will create a-ha moments and you pick new stuff up.

I am getting old. But in the old days when you asked on IRC a question that could be answered by reading the manual you got the answer RTFM.

Then there was stackoverflow where everyone got used asking questions and people obliged to answer even those. All just to get karma and/or badges.

Personally I still prefer to run through documentation...

think around 2010 I worked for the one and only payment processor in my country. All ATM tx, POS, online were handled. The back office handling was done with Agile and Java. It was a pile of garbage. The frontend was still a massive mainframe. It had 10k+ COBOL program running it. With comment changelog on top from somewhere end of the 70s. The code review guy was doing this for 20 years and could tell if things would be slow and not scale all the Tx with just reading the code. Until today they never replaced it and is still running on it.

sometimes you don't need fancy new stuff. Just learn the things very well at your disposal. Heck sed, awk and bunch of simple cli tools still work well on Big data sets :)

My personal favorites are waterman just because during highschool this was my favorite tool to write. The one I had at that time was expensive for me at that time ;)

Same here. Have a nice Chopin Mont Blanc fountain pen. 2 starwalkers a rollerbal and pencil. I have some leather good stuff too. I would never ever buy electronics from them. Heck I won't even buy anything else besides pens and leather goods from them...

Weird because I am split on this. I still game a lot but never got those feelings again that immersed me in the world. Sid Meiers Pirates in my C64 for example. the first CIV or Xcom. I still rack up significant game time but the immersion is less. This I attribute to me not being a kid anymore.

When I was a kid I gobbled up all movies, good, bad, ... Whatever I watched it all. Last decade I haven't watched that much movies anymore. I am in the middle if it is me not being a kid anymore or it is quality.

The difference is that I still put significant time in gaming although it doesn't make me immerse into it like I did as a Kid. Movies I just quit on most of them and watch a couple of good ones.

Maybe it is unfair. A good movie you watch once but even if in a year only 1 good game comes out you can still rack up a big amount of time ;)

Like really? 80% of tests I read are crap anyway. Just crap written to pass the test coverage detection.

For basic CRUD and simple business logic I see TDD work. But for example most projects I work on I have no clue what or no clue how to do it. I just write code, play around get new ideas and build upon that. It changes so frequent and is so exploratory that I can not be bothered writing any tests.

Once I "get it" I write some tests. Mostly I understand also what will need tests and what not. Personally I think this if fine.

Online everyone is writing the ideal situation. I know what to deliver, I know how to do it and this is the perfect way to do it. Mostly it is I have taken loads of assumption and figuring it out as I go. Fuck it needs to be done don't have time to "optimize" it to look perfect.

Maybe I'm just not a good developer. But I shipped enough value in my lifetime to know I'm good enough ;)

For me it was installing redhat and finding the linux hoiwtos. For example networking was awesome and detailed going deep into TCP/IP etc.

At those times to do shit you had to learn it properly. Not just copy and paste it from stackoverflow...

My GF watches youtube vertically... only using 1/3rd of the screen.

I think it is an American culture thing. In Europe I worked in tech for at least 20 years now. Take 15 public holidays and 20 to 30 paid vacation holidays, affordable health care and education and yes I make less money then my American counterparts. But I never had "that" kind of stress. There is always some stress...

Isn't that bit the same as when people use the word literally but not meaning literally? It grinds your gears but who am I to tell people how to speak?

Exactly I live 600km from the capital. 1 hour flight. Still takes me more then half a day to get to my destination.

I ride my motorcycle most of the times 6 hours door to door. With pit stops on the way. Trains are slow here but I take the sleep train. Get on train 10pm go to sleep and arrive at 5am in the morning :)

I prefer these latter 2 over flying.

think last time I consulted it almost 10 years ago. Was fed up with it anyway.

Best thing for your career is read the documentation of the tech you are using. Most of the stuff is just right there.

Heck even on IRC 20 years ago first remark on Qs was RTFM.

Funny to see a blogpost. This is part from our onboarding. We ask github handle and ask people to use work email to commit to our repo. Hence the conditional so you can keep using your personal email for your own work or opensource.

Question is always what is suspicious ?

god I have hundreds of threads and I hate it....

I don't even had a car for the 6 last years. I don't commute(remote work), If I need items I do home delivery, If I need to be somewhere I ride my motorcycle or a cab.

I love enduro riding and MX racing though. Tried to do this electric didn't really like it. Maybe it will grow on me when it improves.

Not by sending a SWAT team....

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Belgium/Un...

Here you can see we have more crime per 1000 then America. But we have significant less gun crimes and/or violent crimes then US. Also violent crime with murder and murder crime. 1 more trivia item is that we actually have more police officers per capita then America.

Not sure what to conclude. Gun restrictions seem not to curb crime but seems to curb violent crimes and murders. Or maybe we are just less violent :) I'm not sure.

But what I can conclude is that our Police doesn't have to go many times to violent crime scenes and when they go the chance someone is armed with a gun even less likely....