I remember applying for a position a few years back. After I saw a bunch of questions related to high school I noped out due to weird vibes. Sounds like it was a good call
They did the same for me: I was - like the author - vague here, instead of "10/10 perfect score" and thus rejected pretty soon without any further information.
I envy those with a solid plan to get out. I feel age is going to start to count against me and my passion for programming is dead. But I can’t deny the compensation in this career is great, which makes me not want to move on, for now
I'm just glad I started contributing to my retirement plan before that happened. I can't afford to retire yet - but it looks like I'm well on my way to retiring early. Which is the ultimate out: If I don't like what I'm doing I can find a new hobby, then when that one gets boring either another or go back to a previous. (note that sitting around and doing nothing isn't in my plan)
You triggered a memory from when I bought Avatar on blu-ray.
PC at the time had a blu-ray drive. Booted up Windows. Opened up one of the few dedicated software options I was forced to buy for blu-ray support. Disc doesn’t work properly?? Check software’s support forum and the software hadn’t been updated with the most recent DRM.
I felt burned at that point. Pirate copies already existed but I couldn’t play my legally acquired copy. So yeah, +1 on fuck DRM.
Perl was one of the first languages I learned and also the first language I used commercially. I have a huge soft spot for it as a language. Still love Perl regular expressions like no other. I loved the camel book and its various footnotes with both humour and deeper knowledge on a topic.
I attended Sun’s road show announcing Java to the world in 1996 (IIRC) and when I asked about regular expression support, I was shocked that it not only didn’t have it built into the language syntax, it wasn’t even available in the library.
As a die-hard Perl fan, that seemed a ridiculous oversight for a language being promoted for Internet programming.
The Perl Journal had that flavor too. I hardly ever read it because I had no interest in actually coding Perl, but it was great to see this kind of culture on the magazine rack at Borders or wherever.
Poorly thus far. I’ve got stats from when I applied for jobs two years ago and it’s a very different picture. Previously: 19 applications and 4 solid offers.
Same number of applications this year. I’ve been ghosted, told my skills and experience don’t match salary expectations or level of seniority, and at times not made it past the initial application due to some short tenures on my CV.
I haven’t used any one specific strategy. I’ve been networking, reworking my CV to better present my experience, and building a small personal website to talk about some projects.
Pretty sure I used the suggested config and it's been working flawlessly in the background.
Or something like that. With wireguard, it's just a matter of pointing the config at the local socket for the fec tunnel (or any other type of tunnel, there was a dicussion about making it look like TCP http traffic the other day), so it's pretty much plug and play.
Thank you! That’s very helpful to know. First time I’ve even heard of things like this but when using low quality networks I can see how this would be great!
This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?
It's fun to set up static site generators but I think it's better to pick something you can start writing in immediately instead of spending time thinking about what to use.
If you end up enjoying blogging you can switch to different software later if you like. But don't let that stop you from starting to write now.
This is really great advice and I appreciate it. You're right about having something to start writing in immediately. It's funny getting tied up in the process when I haven't really even discovered if I have much love or knack for writing yet!
All the replies to my comment have been super helpful but the mindset to write immediately is important. I'm grateful for the suggestions and one of the other replies also sound positive for bearblog - it could work out well and I'm going to check it out :-)
If I had discovered bearblog I probably would have never written my current static site generator. Bearblog is exactly what I was looking for because you don’t have to make any choices. Just write!
Just use whatever is easy to get started with for you and go from there. My first version was something like:
#!/bin/sh
for p in *.html; do
cat .head >out/$p
txt2tags $p >>out/$p
cat .footer >>out/$p
done
And that worked for me. It was simple to set up and it allowed me to focus on the writing itself, rather than all the plumbing surrounding it. You can always switch tools later if need be (as I have done).
Sometimes programmers can get all hung up on the tooling: "I want to do X", "Oh, I need to find or write software to do X", spends more time tinkering with or writing software for X instead of doing X.
If your barrier of entry is setting something up, I'd definitely go with wordpress as it makes it quite seamless when writing new posts.
As for me I use 11ty [1] for my blog [2]. I quite like 11ty as I just write markdown files and it gets converted to static content. I'm also testing the grounds on using it for an online magazine, basically want to do some css garden tricks for different types of content. Seems to work quite well for this as I want as little JS being sent as possible.
Gosh this is a horrible spiral I've been going through as well. My personal experience is:
1) WP: You start with promising yourself to never touch any PHP and will still end up in this mess. I always regretted setting up WP few days/weeks after.
2) Gatsby/Next: I'm saying this as one of those frontend hipsters: For a personal blog, just don't. The npm ecosystem imho got so messy that it always added more pain to actually start writing.
3) Hugo: just do it. It's small, fast, nice and once you wrapped your head around their taxonomy and theme model, it's really nice and easy to extend and fun to actually blog.
Either you want to just get it done or you enjoy the process of tinkering on the infrastructure.
If you want it done: pay somebody a small amount to do the things. Sometimes it's even free.
If you like tinkering: pick a static site generator. Whichever one you pick will be wrong, but the process of setting it up and getting the first entries through will be a learning experience. In a bit you will have an opinion on what went well and what didn't, and be able to learn from others.
(I use Pelican with a bunch of plugins and a repeatedly abused CSS file. It's not right for everyone, but I like it.)
I started writing plain .md files in GitHub and published using their default jekyll template for about a couple of years while. In the meantime, I messed around with several static generators before eventually just writing my own. Gives you something to blog about too :)
More than 1000. More than I'd like. I can't help but wonder how many websites my personal information is on at this point between random shopping, forums, and all the rest.
> and I haven't seen Apple discontinuing support for 6 years old computers.
You mean the way macOS Ventura is only for their hardware released in the last six years? [1]
Apple’s absolutely do discontinue support for older hardware all the time when they release new macOS and iOS versions.
You can keep running the older operating system but it will stop receiving updates. It doesn’t seem hugely different to having to stay on Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.
