It's plain and simple: If there's no good reason to log long hours, you're doing it wrong.
Good reasons: - Pipeline isn't in place yet and needs to be built alongside the first project (Prerequisite:Boss and crew have agreed on the pipeline and everybody's working on automation with extra time payed for, Boss has understood that building the pipeline is a strategic investment.) - Crash Project has come in and there are obscene amounts of cash involved with big bonuses involved for everybody pitching in and scooping water out of the projects hull. (Prerequisite: End of project is foreseeable because 'Deadline!' and customer is relyable/has the cash and boss knows what he's doing and so do you and you and the crew trust boss and each other) - You've agreed to try a new technology with strategic product and pipeline shift if all works out well and are trying things out/learning things on a real world project and need to put in the extra hours up front (something like moving from LAMP to Node would be such a thing, or from on-premises monolith to cloud-microservices or such) (Prerequisite: Boss has your back and knows what's actually happening and understands the long-term implications)
Hint: All the reasons mentioned above are very rarely the case and that you ask here on slashdot tell's me and my software veteran gut feeling that there is no case of the above with you right now. If you'd trust your lead and your crew you'd be enjoy a little extra time on the job and not be doubting the jam you're in and asking questions here.
Bad reasons: - PM/Boss is an idiot or out of his depth and couldn't definine requirements if his life depended on it and you're saving the day once again with a nightshift (this is a telltale classic and screems "Switch job!" or "Go freelance!") - Team or mates does shit work and you're constantly cleaning up behind them - Team has no process or pipeline and your putting in extra hours to compensate
General toughts on this: In 90% of all cases repeated extra hours are totally unnecessary and usually a sign that someone is screwing around. The extra hours mentioned above are more of a fun/adventure thing if done right. Another thing: If *you* need to put in extra hours you're not automating enough.
Point in case: I'm doing part-time since 3 years ago (5 hours per day) and I automate my shit. To automate it, I actually do sometimes put in extra hours, but only once. If the crew can't follow along that's not my problem - or at least I see to it that it doesn't become mine. If the crew/PM/Boss is to dumb/stubborn/complacent to handle/call for/implement Planning, Agile Methods, OOAD, Analysis, Tasking, Versioning, CI, Testing and such correctly and expects me to do extra work to compensate I am polite once, get angry the second time, loud the third time and tell them to fuck themselves the fourth time and move on. This actually happend just a month ago. Very nice people, very bearable for 3 years doing part-time as mentioned but sadly too effing dumb/out of their league to see the necessity of such things as strategic pipeline building, versioning, CI, regular timeboxed meetings, Glossary/User story, proper offers/analyis, etc. I was saving the day with yet another weekend every odd month despite only doing part-time.... Websoftware in an agency - always the same thing. Although I really like the people and we're good friends (even with the Boss I split with) there was no way this was going anywhere. Hence: Byebye.
Bottom line: You're a software developer - automate your shit. If you regularly put in extra hours, you're doing something wrong, are in a team that can't organise (enough of those around) or are not a very good coder (yet). You're career will move on faster if you do not put in regular long hours. If you do, you're just showing everybody that you are a willing code monkey, nothing more.
This is a serious question. Yes I know there's init, but systemd must have something going for it, otherwise it wouldn't be the default of just about all distros on the planet.... Faster boot times come to mind.
So, is there an alternative to systemd since everybody seems to be bickering about it? What about a Linux that boots in under 10 seconds? If systemd is so shitty, what's holding people back from developing a system that is better and faster?
I'm actually preparing for this right now. I've been - broadly speaking - doing web development for a living for the last 17 years and most of it was bullshit work or so marginal and specialised it could've been forgone completely without anybody noticing. I wasn't saving the environment, doing any meaningful medical IT, helping the transition to renewable energy, doing useful political work or any of the sorts. I was however trying to be a good father to my daughter and I'm confident I pretty much succeeded in that, including holding a steady job that may be bullshit but actually brings in some cash.
But she's doing her last A-Level exams in 3 days and will be off to south america for a volunteer year in a few months once she's recovered from the learning binge she's been on the last 10 months.
With all that right up next for us I'm regrouping my emotions and my take on my life considerably. I have no doubt that if things play out correctly the work I do right will appear beyond pointless in 5 years from now, no matter how much they pay me. Consulting people, helping others out or doing similar stuff is where I find I gain new meaning. I think I will attempt to see programming more as an art than a job and I will further limit my screen time and do yoga, dancing or surfing instead. I'm two steps away from moving all of my everday work into the cloud and on a chromebook, with googles AI taking care of everything in my digital life, Googles every-watching lidless eye be damned. It's so much easyer than worring about someone pinching some 1000 Euro ultrabook vis-a-vis a 300 Euro cheapo Chromebook.
I expect huge swaths of our professions to fall prone to automation and cloud-centric consolidation and 90% of the remaining fields to be sucked up by Facebook and other online services. Physical and Mental Coaching, Lifestyle design and perhaps some useful environmental activism is where the useful stuff is at IMHO, and I will attempt to move further into those fields rather than stick around for another dreary decade of people who don't know what piece of websoftware they want but always seem to know what it may cost and when it needs to be finished.
AI & cloud are coming for us and will change our lives big time and we'd better be prepared.
Rails is the primetime tentpole project for Ruby and it's a hideous mess. And - unlike PHP - it's a mess that doesn't work. Yeah, Ruby itself is neat and well built and well designed and all that but the stack that includes Ruby barely works compared to other solutions.
LAMP (with P for PHP) OTOH just works. Install and fire up your LAMP stack, upload your PHP files via FTP, call the URL, works. End of story. Yes, PHP is a historically grown mess, but it get's the job done and it is a very well documented mess that offers solutions for any web problem you can think of. Contrary to such blowhard tools like Ruby/Rails that pisses it's pants when you've got some wrong minor version running and need an entire extra Node installation just to handle rollout and such.
If anything will replace PHP for serverside web, it will be JS/Node or something like that. And even that is still up for debate and will need a few years to show and tell. And will probably only be able to happen if microservices and vertical + horizontal scaling become a widespread need - which actually doesn't appear to be the case.
Ruby/Rails hippsters get lost in details while the PHP folks just roll out their Drupal and WordPress balls of hair within 5 minutes, slap on a few of the bazillion plugins available, do a little PHP-style sticky-tape and chickenwire coding and then go home with a happy customer and a web-project delivered on time.
Yeah, PHP/LAMP does quite a few things wrong, but until a new PL actually copies what it does right, it will remain king of the web hill. And for good reasons too.
The metaarticle is spot on. We are drowning in plastic. The problem with plastic is, that it is also a very large third world problem, as any sense about protecting the environment often is dimished there more than it is in some parts of the first world.
We need what I would basically call a total ban on garbage, including plastic waste. Direct recycled sturdy standardised bottles can be made out of plastic, but reusing them has to become a standard. s to become a standard.Plastic wrappings should be banned entirely expect for maybe things that need to be kept sterile, like medical equipment or health and hygiene products.
If I were King, I'd push for a ban of 95% of all Garbage (wrappings) we produce including a total ban on one-way plastic bottles.
- Make a complex pocket-sized super-computer usable for normal people - Put a proper webbrowser into a pocket sized device - implement the concept of an online marketplace for software (henceforth called "Apps" - short and poignant so everyone can use the word) - kill Flash and trailblaze it's replacement by an open standard web
My first all-touch device after my Blackberry was the HTC Desire. And while it was way better than the iPhone at the time in every aspect, you still have to hand it to Apple: They started an entirely new industry.
... country. Healthcare is one of them. That's the plain, simple and painful truth. Crowfunding for healtcare being an option is about as obscene as it gets. Obamacare was the first step. Not the best healthcare system by a long shot, but at least a healthcare system, like every other normal country on the planet. What the Trump administration is doing now by undoing all that is borderline criminal.
I'm so glad I live in Germany. And even though I don't like the way things are going here all that much either, we're not half as fubared as you lot across the pond.
... anything else. That it is an old tradition only has to do with the fact that knowlege about the skeleton and the muscular body is easy to come by simply by looking at it and pocking around. British Chiropracters are know to have a solid anatomical and related medical knowlege and there are methods know that actually are a few hundred years old that work.
That there also is a lot of foo-foo wah-wah and homeopathy nonsense around with Chiropracters is a problem, but manual therapy itself isn't pure non-sense. For instance, I'd take a very old and traditional Tai massage over a modern medical massage just about any time, even though they too have some magic stuffed mixed into their very solid tradition.
Truth be told, manual therapy works and if you're not entirely stupid, can observe and learn a little about anatomy you can figure out a lot about your self. However, and this is just as true: Chiropractice is nigh pointless if not accompanied by systematic training to handle the problematic regions of your body. If you don't do that, you'll always be going back to the Chiropracter. A good one in my book would know how to give good training and excersize advice.
This sounds like something straight from the mouth of Captain Obvious.
Truth be told, Yoga is about as "full body workout" as it gets.
If you think Yoga is just some spiritual foo-foo wah-wah shit and all the health benefits are placebo, you are soooo wrong. Yes, the fortune-cookie wisdoms Yoga instructors dish out at the end of a workout when everybody is chilling and meditating can be flat-out cringe-worthy and inscence and sitar music (or whatever that string-instrument is called) isn't everybody's thing, but the 90 minutes that went before that are enough to put any regular iron-pumper or cross-fit person into gasp and sweat mode. Taking the positions slowly and elegantly ("Ansanas" in Yogaspeak) and holding them is really hard and requires a lot of strength and coordination and at times goes beyond pro level gymnastics.
Oh, and the countless chicks that do it are often pretty hot. And I mean that in more ways than one.:-)... Which reminds me that I actually just had an excessive flirt (and some very nice dances) with a cute Yoga instructor this weekend...
So, yes, there are a lot of benefits to doing Yoga, including those of regular physical health, strength and flexibility at the same time. That Yoga is about as good as it gets when treating muscular deficiencies in your back is something well established.
So Amazon went and bought yet another company. AFAIK they're still not profitable and AFAICT organic foodies like buying local and from people they know and can meet in person. Also the newest bottleneck Amazon an Co aparently are facing ist existing delivery infrastructure.
So unless this delivery robot/drone thingie takes off, food delivery might just hit a wall soon.
Like most, I like my desaster recovery to be hassle free. I've found the most important aspect of this to be dedicated HDDs for this. I use 2.5" external 0.5 or 1TB HDDs. On macOS TimeMachine and on linux BackInTime. Same thing.
The external USB HDDs have labels on them, like "(HOSTNAME) TimeMachine" or "(HOSTNAME) BackInTime". I don't use these for anything else. This is important!
TimeMachine / BackInTime cover my main users home dir. Pure and simple.
For archiving I have two seperate USB HDDs of the same type and size (2TB). UnifiedDataSorage 1 and 2. I archive stuff on 1 and roughly once a year rsync to 2, then use 2 for the next round. When I rsync 2 back to 1 I use 1 again. This keeps both HDDs in resonable use. The archive not in use is hidden in my bathroom cabinet, so it's not easly found in a break-in.
WiFi Drives under the floorpanels or NAS on a VPN with a computer buddy in another town in case of a fire would be a better solution, but we haven't gotten aroind to this yet. But I consider my setup usable, cheap, resonably hassle-free and safe enough.
1.) Tabs are characters specifically meant for indentation - that is the only reason this character exists.
2.) They use up way less bandwidth. I once cut down an HTML document from my space fanatic buddy from 80kb to 36kb just by converting from spaces to tabs. When 50+% of your bandwidth is used up by whitespace, you're a shit coder. True thing.... Use spaces on my product and I'll woop your ass.
3.) With tabs everyone can decide on his own how far the indent is. That's how it's meant to be. That's the whole point of the indent character called "tab".
That said, I've given up on trying to explain the above to space junkies - they really don't seem to get it. Today I usually avoid this discussion and settle for whatever the official standard is for a given programming language and use buildtools that clean up the code form excess whitespace before deployment on the web. For JavaScript that's space-indent with two spaces - really shitty, but I guess they're trying to suck it up to the C-snob crowd, so who am I to think I could stop them. The advantage in going with whatever is the standard for a given PL is that you can use the standard linters and commit hooks as they come and easyly set up your CI and build environment in such a way that it enforces uniformity. If that means only commiting two-space indents, I'll bite the bullet. Especially if I'm the lead and/or responsible for the dev-pipeline.
1.) Space-indent is almost universially used by old-school C coders and other compiled languages, because they use ancient CLI editors that don't tab by default and care squat about sourcefile size and bandwidth usage (as webdevs do), because they always compile. Those types are more rare but get more money for their work. Specialists.
2.) Space has come to dominate the indent-wars, which means a passionate tabber is more likely to be percieved as a stubborn non-team player and hence get lesser pay or be at low paying jobs where he/she is the sole programmer in a smaller shop that pays less.
3.) Because space dominates the official indent rule space, there are more automated tools enforcing space-indent which in turn means tabbers only are able to tab in smaller non-CI environments, which in turn means they are again more common in mixed shops.
4.) Tabbers are most commonly found in the web development community, where tab-indent means way less data travelling through the intertubes. Web coders earn less.
German gouvernment is planning to pass a law that requires messaging services such as WhatsApp to be monitorable like phonecalls should a court order requested by the authorities give them the permission to do so in order to fight crime.
There, FTFY.
Like many politicians German politicians too have little clue about how the internet and computers work, but that's no reason to write headlines that are so sensationalist that they are flat out wrong.
Automattic appears to be a pretty cool companyto work with. There's a bestseller book written on it "The year without pants". A read I recommend. Small Teams working together, zero paperwork,everything online, teammeeting every 3 months in a place of their choosing anywhere in the world and an anual global Meetup that Mat organises. Basically a digital nomad Hippster paradise. They do get work work done but for someone who likes to travel or can muster the discipline it's an amazing company. That no one comes to the office in SF when you can be chilling in Bali is no big surprise.
Big Python fan myself. It's my favorite PL. (Public Service Anouncement: Old-fart space-indenting whitespace-whiners please go f*ck yourselves and please quit pestering us with your petty issues. Seriously now, grow the f*ck up.)
Point in case for getting into Python: Python is the only language that is used professionally in *all* industries. Science, Media, Entertainment, Games, Heavy Industry, Military, Services, etc. No other PL has such a broad adoption. Java is business (on the server-side, initially unintended), C/C++ is games, science and industry, PHP is server-side web. Python is trivially easy to learn without being so batshit crazy like PHP. At the same time it scales very well into serious projects and long-term maintainability is better than just about anything else out there.
In popularity however, there is one exception going orthogonal to Python though and that PL is, of course, JavaScript. Yes, JS is/was a web frontend PL first and foremost, but browsers run everywhere and with Node JS returned to the server (it started out server-side on Netscape Server, which no one remembers aparently) and today, to many peoples surprise, JavaScript has just about won the PL wars. Sure some snobs are bickering about this, but those usually just haven't come to terms with this cold hard fact yet.
So, in a nutshell, no, Python isn't winning the PL wars, JS most likely did that already. But I say don't hesitate to stay with and dive deeper into Python, Python is here to stay and that's a good thing, because it is a very good, modern PL. Unlike JS btw. which does have the one or other awkward/annoying thing vis-a-vis Python imho. But then again, it runs in the Browser, which is why I do more JS than Python these days. It's a bit of a shame if you think about it, I would like to do more Python.
Thanks for the replys and the lively discussion this far.
Lots of sentiment here.
First of all, on a sidenote: People should drop the notion that professional web development is trivial. It isn't. Yes, there is a disproportionate amount of eternal n00bs and dolts in the field and truckloads of throw-away code straight from Nightmare on Elm Street. Which is why I'd like to leave it and will only take jobs with teams that know CI, are building a product I'm interested in or pay obscene amounts of money. But bad software design isn't limited to web stuff and I have the suspicion that the wisecracks on this matter come from people who couldn't design a useful ux/pageflow if their life depended on it. So chill.... So much for that.
As for the AI development jobs being more rare and more difficult: Of course they are. It's AI/ ML. I guess it's not clear from the way I phrased the question that I'm aware of this.
As for AI being a fad: I said the same thing about the web in 1995, whilst I was using Fidonet and Crosspoint (still better than E-Mail and Usenet to this very day). So as an 80 computer kid who's been wrong more times than others have thought about something IT related I'm old enough to be careful jumping to conclusions too fast. Google is kicking ass with ML and Elon Musk is focusing on it and Mercedes Benz, BMW, Bosch and Co. are peeing their pants and scrambling to catch the trend. So from that alone I conclude there must be something going on here.
As for the insightful comments on academic requirements and your own experiences with AI: Thanks for those. Very useful and sometimes afirming. Keep it coming.
Yes there is. It's called CASE* and/or BPM* and/or DMI*. (Computer Aided System Engineering / Business Process Modelling / Direct Manipulation Interface).
The Problem with many of these Systems is that writing code often is quicker and easyer. There are special scenarios where the tool mentioned above can be used and are extremely effective (well-built cleanroom ERP setups, cleanroom UI toolkits (end-to-end Visual Basic (guess why it's called visual), Glade, QTCreator, JBoss BPM, Flash IDE, Squeak, etc.). Systems like these can speed up development by orders of magnitude, but they have their own learning curve and are very often sneered at because they aren't "real development". Flash being a very good example of this.
The biggest problem with these systems is, that you have to be very good at OOAD and abstraction before you can go back to drawing neat pictures and most people skip that step, drawing up shit and giving these systems a bad reputation.
Bottom line: Yes, these systems exist, but they haven't really gone mainstream yet. Maybe when the web decrappyfies and AI an VR take of they will. But even then a good PL will be a good competition still. I can type a model faster in YAML than I can draw it, thats a plain and simple fact.
... setup if their entire order processing can be turned off by a single guy.
I wouldn't even feel guilty if this happened to me. I'd just be surprised and say "Whooops... guess that was the wrong switch/command/ansible script/whatever procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
- Water ist wet.
- Summer is warm.
- Sky is blue.
Brought to you by Captain Obvious Science & Research Institute
No real surprise here. Said it before.
It's plain and simple: If there's no good reason to log long hours, you're doing it wrong.
Good reasons:
- Pipeline isn't in place yet and needs to be built alongside the first project (Prerequisite:Boss and crew have agreed on the pipeline and everybody's working on automation with extra time payed for, Boss has understood that building the pipeline is a strategic investment.)
- Crash Project has come in and there are obscene amounts of cash involved with big bonuses involved for everybody pitching in and scooping water out of the projects hull. (Prerequisite: End of project is foreseeable because 'Deadline!' and customer is relyable/has the cash and boss knows what he's doing and so do you and you and the crew trust boss and each other)
- You've agreed to try a new technology with strategic product and pipeline shift if all works out well and are trying things out/learning things on a real world project and need to put in the extra hours up front (something like moving from LAMP to Node would be such a thing, or from on-premises monolith to cloud-microservices or such) (Prerequisite: Boss has your back and knows what's actually happening and understands the long-term implications)
Hint: All the reasons mentioned above are very rarely the case and that you ask here on slashdot tell's me and my software veteran gut feeling that there is no case of the above with you right now. If you'd trust your lead and your crew you'd be enjoy a little extra time on the job and not be doubting the jam you're in and asking questions here.
Bad reasons:
- PM/Boss is an idiot or out of his depth and couldn't definine requirements if his life depended on it and you're saving the day once again with a nightshift (this is a telltale classic and screems "Switch job!" or "Go freelance!")
- Team or mates does shit work and you're constantly cleaning up behind them
- Team has no process or pipeline and your putting in extra hours to compensate
General toughts on this:
In 90% of all cases repeated extra hours are totally unnecessary and usually a sign that someone is screwing around. The extra hours mentioned above are more of a fun/adventure thing if done right. Another thing: If *you* need to put in extra hours you're not automating enough.
Point in case: I'm doing part-time since 3 years ago (5 hours per day) and I automate my shit. To automate it, I actually do sometimes put in extra hours, but only once. If the crew can't follow along that's not my problem - or at least I see to it that it doesn't become mine. If the crew/PM/Boss is to dumb/stubborn/complacent to handle/call for/implement Planning, Agile Methods, OOAD, Analysis, Tasking, Versioning, CI, Testing and such correctly and expects me to do extra work to compensate I am polite once, get angry the second time, loud the third time and tell them to fuck themselves the fourth time and move on. This actually happend just a month ago. Very nice people, very bearable for 3 years doing part-time as mentioned but sadly too effing dumb/out of their league to see the necessity of such things as strategic pipeline building, versioning, CI, regular timeboxed meetings, Glossary/User story, proper offers/analyis, etc. I was saving the day with yet another weekend every odd month despite only doing part-time. ... Websoftware in an agency - always the same thing. Although I really like the people and we're good friends (even with the Boss I split with) there was no way this was going anywhere. Hence: Byebye.
Bottom line:
You're a software developer - automate your shit. If you regularly put in extra hours, you're doing something wrong, are in a team that can't organise (enough of those around) or are not a very good coder (yet). You're career will move on faster if you do not put in regular long hours. If you do, you're just showing everybody that you are a willing code monkey, nothing more.
My 2 eurocents.
This is a serious question. Yes I know there's init, but systemd must have something going for it, otherwise it wouldn't be the default of just about all distros on the planet. ... Faster boot times come to mind.
So, is there an alternative to systemd since everybody seems to be bickering about it? What about a Linux that boots in under 10 seconds? If systemd is so shitty, what's holding people back from developing a system that is better and faster?
Thanks for any input on this.
You might want to watch this. Perhaps that will change your perspective on the things bound to happen in the near future.
You're welcome.
I'm actually preparing for this right now. I've been - broadly speaking - doing web development for a living for the last 17 years and most of it was bullshit work or so marginal and specialised it could've been forgone completely without anybody noticing. I wasn't saving the environment, doing any meaningful medical IT, helping the transition to renewable energy, doing useful political work or any of the sorts. I was however trying to be a good father to my daughter and I'm confident I pretty much succeeded in that, including holding a steady job that may be bullshit but actually brings in some cash.
But she's doing her last A-Level exams in 3 days and will be off to south america for a volunteer year in a few months once she's recovered from the learning binge she's been on the last 10 months.
With all that right up next for us I'm regrouping my emotions and my take on my life considerably. I have no doubt that if things play out correctly the work I do right will appear beyond pointless in 5 years from now, no matter how much they pay me. Consulting people, helping others out or doing similar stuff is where I find I gain new meaning. I think I will attempt to see programming more as an art than a job and I will further limit my screen time and do yoga, dancing or surfing instead. I'm two steps away from moving all of my everday work into the cloud and on a chromebook, with googles AI taking care of everything in my digital life, Googles every-watching lidless eye be damned. It's so much easyer than worring about someone pinching some 1000 Euro ultrabook vis-a-vis a 300 Euro cheapo Chromebook.
I expect huge swaths of our professions to fall prone to automation and cloud-centric consolidation and 90% of the remaining fields to be sucked up by Facebook and other online services. Physical and Mental Coaching, Lifestyle design and perhaps some useful environmental activism is where the useful stuff is at IMHO, and I will attempt to move further into those fields rather than stick around for another dreary decade of people who don't know what piece of websoftware they want but always seem to know what it may cost and when it needs to be finished.
AI & cloud are coming for us and will change our lives big time and we'd better be prepared.
My 2 eurocents.
Rails is the primetime tentpole project for Ruby and it's a hideous mess. And - unlike PHP - it's a mess that doesn't work. Yeah, Ruby itself is neat and well built and well designed and all that but the stack that includes Ruby barely works compared to other solutions.
LAMP (with P for PHP) OTOH just works. Install and fire up your LAMP stack, upload your PHP files via FTP, call the URL, works. End of story. Yes, PHP is a historically grown mess, but it get's the job done and it is a very well documented mess that offers solutions for any web problem you can think of. Contrary to such blowhard tools like Ruby/Rails that pisses it's pants when you've got some wrong minor version running and need an entire extra Node installation just to handle rollout and such.
If anything will replace PHP for serverside web, it will be JS/Node or something like that. And even that is still up for debate and will need a few years to show and tell. And will probably only be able to happen if microservices and vertical + horizontal scaling become a widespread need - which actually doesn't appear to be the case.
Ruby/Rails hippsters get lost in details while the PHP folks just roll out their Drupal and WordPress balls of hair within 5 minutes, slap on a few of the bazillion plugins available, do a little PHP-style sticky-tape and chickenwire coding and then go home with a happy customer and a web-project delivered on time.
Yeah, PHP/LAMP does quite a few things wrong, but until a new PL actually copies what it does right, it will remain king of the web hill. And for good reasons too.
My 2 cents.
That's a plain and simple fact.
The metaarticle is spot on. We are drowning in plastic.
The problem with plastic is, that it is also a very large third world problem, as any sense about protecting the environment often is dimished there more than it is in some parts of the first world.
We need what I would basically call a total ban on garbage, including plastic waste. Direct recycled sturdy standardised bottles can be made out of plastic, but reusing them has to become a standard. s to become a standard.Plastic wrappings should be banned entirely expect for maybe things that need to be kept sterile, like medical equipment or health and hygiene products.
If I were King, I'd push for a ban of 95% of all Garbage (wrappings) we produce including a total ban on one-way plastic bottles.
- Make a complex pocket-sized super-computer usable for normal people
- Put a proper webbrowser into a pocket sized device
- implement the concept of an online marketplace for software (henceforth called "Apps" - short and poignant so everyone can use the word)
- kill Flash and trailblaze it's replacement by an open standard web
My first all-touch device after my Blackberry was the HTC Desire.
And while it was way better than the iPhone at the time in every aspect, you still have to hand it to Apple: They started an entirely new industry.
... country. Healthcare is one of them. That's the plain, simple and painful truth. Crowfunding for healtcare being an option is about as obscene as it gets. Obamacare was the first step. Not the best healthcare system by a long shot, but at least a healthcare system, like every other normal country on the planet. What the Trump administration is doing now by undoing all that is borderline criminal.
I'm so glad I live in Germany. And even though I don't like the way things are going here all that much either, we're not half as fubared as you lot across the pond.
My 2 Eurocents.
... anything else. That it is an old tradition only has to do with the fact that knowlege about the skeleton and the muscular body is easy to come by simply by looking at it and pocking around. British Chiropracters are know to have a solid anatomical and related medical knowlege and there are methods know that actually are a few hundred years old that work.
That there also is a lot of foo-foo wah-wah and homeopathy nonsense around with Chiropracters is a problem, but manual therapy itself isn't pure non-sense. For instance, I'd take a very old and traditional Tai massage over a modern medical massage just about any time, even though they too have some magic stuffed mixed into their very solid tradition.
Truth be told, manual therapy works and if you're not entirely stupid, can observe and learn a little about anatomy you can figure out a lot about your self. However, and this is just as true: Chiropractice is nigh pointless if not accompanied by systematic training to handle the problematic regions of your body. If you don't do that, you'll always be going back to the Chiropracter. A good one in my book would know how to give good training and excersize advice.
My 2 cents.
This sounds like something straight from the mouth of Captain Obvious.
Truth be told, Yoga is about as "full body workout" as it gets.
If you think Yoga is just some spiritual foo-foo wah-wah shit and all the health benefits are placebo, you are soooo wrong. Yes, the fortune-cookie wisdoms Yoga instructors dish out at the end of a workout when everybody is chilling and meditating can be flat-out cringe-worthy and inscence and sitar music (or whatever that string-instrument is called) isn't everybody's thing, but the 90 minutes that went before that are enough to put any regular iron-pumper or cross-fit person into gasp and sweat mode. Taking the positions slowly and elegantly ("Ansanas" in Yogaspeak) and holding them is really hard and requires a lot of strength and coordination and at times goes beyond pro level gymnastics.
Oh, and the countless chicks that do it are often pretty hot. And I mean that in more ways than one. :-) ... Which reminds me that I actually just had an excessive flirt (and some very nice dances) with a cute Yoga instructor this weekend ...
So, yes, there are a lot of benefits to doing Yoga, including those of regular physical health, strength and flexibility at the same time. That Yoga is about as good as it gets when treating muscular deficiencies in your back is something well established.
So Amazon went and bought yet another company. AFAIK they're still not profitable and AFAICT organic foodies like buying local and from people they know and can meet in person. Also the newest bottleneck Amazon an Co aparently are facing ist existing delivery infrastructure.
So unless this delivery robot/drone thingie takes off, food delivery might just hit a wall soon.
... encrypted HDD or homedir. Really important if you don't want a stolen computer leading to ID theft and a large type fuckup of your life.
Like most, I like my desaster recovery to be hassle free. I've found the most important aspect of this to be dedicated HDDs for this. I use 2.5" external 0.5 or 1TB HDDs. On macOS TimeMachine and on linux BackInTime. Same thing.
The external USB HDDs have labels on them, like "(HOSTNAME) TimeMachine" or "(HOSTNAME) BackInTime". I don't use these for anything else. This is important!
TimeMachine / BackInTime cover my main users home dir. Pure and simple.
For archiving I have two seperate USB HDDs of the same type and size (2TB). UnifiedDataSorage 1 and 2. I archive stuff on 1 and roughly once a year rsync to 2, then use 2 for the next round. When I rsync 2 back to 1 I use 1 again. This keeps both HDDs in resonable use. The archive not in use is hidden in my bathroom cabinet, so it's not easly found in a break-in.
WiFi Drives under the floorpanels or NAS on a VPN with a computer buddy in another town in case of a fire would be a better solution, but we haven't gotten aroind to this yet. But I consider my setup usable, cheap, resonably hassle-free and safe enough.
My 2 eurocents.
It's tabs. Here's why:
1.) Tabs are characters specifically meant for indentation - that is the only reason this character exists.
2.) They use up way less bandwidth. I once cut down an HTML document from my space fanatic buddy from 80kb to 36kb just by converting from spaces to tabs. When 50+% of your bandwidth is used up by whitespace, you're a shit coder. True thing. ... Use spaces on my product and I'll woop your ass.
3.) With tabs everyone can decide on his own how far the indent is. That's how it's meant to be. That's the whole point of the indent character called "tab".
That said, I've given up on trying to explain the above to space junkies - they really don't seem to get it.
Today I usually avoid this discussion and settle for whatever the official standard is for a given programming language and use buildtools that clean up the code form excess whitespace before deployment on the web. For JavaScript that's space-indent with two spaces - really shitty, but I guess they're trying to suck it up to the C-snob crowd, so who am I to think I could stop them. The advantage in going with whatever is the standard for a given PL is that you can use the standard linters and commit hooks as they come and easyly set up your CI and build environment in such a way that it enforces uniformity. If that means only commiting two-space indents, I'll bite the bullet. Especially if I'm the lead and/or responsible for the dev-pipeline.
1.) Space-indent is almost universially used by old-school C coders and other compiled languages, because they use ancient CLI editors that don't tab by default and care squat about sourcefile size and bandwidth usage (as webdevs do), because they always compile. Those types are more rare but get more money for their work. Specialists.
2.) Space has come to dominate the indent-wars, which means a passionate tabber is more likely to be percieved as a stubborn non-team player and hence get lesser pay or be at low paying jobs where he/she is the sole programmer in a smaller shop that pays less.
3.) Because space dominates the official indent rule space, there are more automated tools enforcing space-indent which in turn means tabbers only are able to tab in smaller non-CI environments, which in turn means they are again more common in mixed shops.
4.) Tabbers are most commonly found in the web development community, where tab-indent means way less data travelling through the intertubes. Web coders earn less.
German gouvernment is planning to pass a law that requires messaging services such as WhatsApp to be monitorable like phonecalls should a court order requested by the authorities give them the permission to do so in order to fight crime.
There, FTFY.
Like many politicians German politicians too have little clue about how the internet and computers work, but that's no reason to write headlines that are so sensationalist that they are flat out wrong.
My 2 cents.
Automattic appears to be a pretty cool companyto work with. There's a bestseller book written on it "The year without pants". A read I recommend. Small Teams working together, zero paperwork,everything online, teammeeting every 3 months in a place of their choosing anywhere in the world and an anual global Meetup that Mat organises. Basically a digital nomad Hippster paradise. They do get work work done but for someone who likes to travel or can muster the discipline it's an amazing company. That no one comes to the office in SF when you can be chilling in Bali is no big surprise.
Big Python fan myself. It's my favorite PL. (Public Service Anouncement: Old-fart space-indenting whitespace-whiners please go f*ck yourselves and please quit pestering us with your petty issues. Seriously now, grow the f*ck up.)
Point in case for getting into Python:
Python is the only language that is used professionally in *all* industries. Science, Media, Entertainment, Games, Heavy Industry, Military, Services, etc. No other PL has such a broad adoption. Java is business (on the server-side, initially unintended), C/C++ is games, science and industry, PHP is server-side web. Python is trivially easy to learn without being so batshit crazy like PHP. At the same time it scales very well into serious projects and long-term maintainability is better than just about anything else out there.
In popularity however, there is one exception going orthogonal to Python though and that PL is, of course, JavaScript. Yes, JS is/was a web frontend PL first and foremost, but browsers run everywhere and with Node JS returned to the server (it started out server-side on Netscape Server, which no one remembers aparently) and today, to many peoples surprise, JavaScript has just about won the PL wars. Sure some snobs are bickering about this, but those usually just haven't come to terms with this cold hard fact yet.
So, in a nutshell, no, Python isn't winning the PL wars, JS most likely did that already. But I say don't hesitate to stay with and dive deeper into Python, Python is here to stay and that's a good thing, because it is a very good, modern PL. Unlike JS btw. which does have the one or other awkward/annoying thing vis-a-vis Python imho. But then again, it runs in the Browser, which is why I do more JS than Python these days. It's a bit of a shame if you think about it, I would like to do more Python.
My 2 eurocents.
Good idea. Good idea indeed. Goes right in my list. Thanks. :-)
Thanks for the replys and the lively discussion this far.
Lots of sentiment here.
First of all, on a sidenote: People should drop the notion that professional web development is trivial. It isn't. Yes, there is a disproportionate amount of eternal n00bs and dolts in the field and truckloads of throw-away code straight from Nightmare on Elm Street. Which is why I'd like to leave it and will only take jobs with teams that know CI, are building a product I'm interested in or pay obscene amounts of money. But bad software design isn't limited to web stuff and I have the suspicion that the wisecracks on this matter come from people who couldn't design a useful ux/pageflow if their life depended on it. So chill. ... So much for that.
As for the AI development jobs being more rare and more difficult: Of course they are. It's AI/ ML. I guess it's not clear from the way I phrased the question that I'm aware of this.
As for AI being a fad: I said the same thing about the web in 1995, whilst I was using Fidonet and Crosspoint (still better than E-Mail and Usenet to this very day). So as an 80 computer kid who's been wrong more times than others have thought about something IT related I'm old enough to be careful jumping to conclusions too fast. Google is kicking ass with ML and Elon Musk is focusing on it and Mercedes Benz, BMW, Bosch and Co. are peeing their pants and scrambling to catch the trend. So from that alone I conclude there must be something going on here.
As for the insightful comments on academic requirements and your own experiences with AI: Thanks for those. Very useful and sometimes afirming. Keep it coming.
We're an agency.
I'm leaving at the end of this month. :-)
Yes there is. It's called CASE* and/or BPM* and/or DMI*. (Computer Aided System Engineering / Business Process Modelling / Direct Manipulation Interface).
The Problem with many of these Systems is that writing code often is quicker and easyer. There are special scenarios where the tool mentioned above can be used and are extremely effective (well-built cleanroom ERP setups, cleanroom UI toolkits (end-to-end Visual Basic (guess why it's called visual), Glade, QTCreator, JBoss BPM, Flash IDE, Squeak, etc.). Systems like these can speed up development by orders of magnitude, but they have their own learning curve and are very often sneered at because they aren't "real development". Flash being a very good example of this.
The biggest problem with these systems is, that you have to be very good at OOAD and abstraction before you can go back to drawing neat pictures and most people skip that step, drawing up shit and giving these systems a bad reputation.
Bottom line: Yes, these systems exist, but they haven't really gone mainstream yet. Maybe when the web decrappyfies and AI an VR take of they will. But even then a good PL will be a good competition still. I can type a model faster in YAML than I can draw it, thats a plain and simple fact.
... setup if their entire order processing can be turned off by a single guy.
I wouldn't even feel guilty if this happened to me. I'd just be surprised and say "Whooops ... guess that was the wrong switch/command/ansible script/whatever procedure.