EnderMB

I'm interested in how many people actually use their Surface Book as a tablet.

I know a load of people with the standard Surface that use it like a tablet, but very few people that regularly use their Surface Book's detachable tablet functionality. I can probably count the number of times I've ever wanted to take the laptop apart on one hand.

I wouldn't call the high-end Android market saturated. There are a number of players, but it's a market of compromises. If you want a stock Android experience, you go away from Samsung. If you want a headphone jack, you go away from Google and OnePlus, etc.

The Surface range is good because it packs so much functionality into a nicely designed package. The same design principles, with a full feature set, would sell like wild-fire, and would put a lot of other phone manufacturers on notice.

IMO, this is a problem that very few people like to talk about, because we all subscribe to the (correct) idea that a good developer should be tech agnostic. Sadly, those in charge of hiring don't seem to believe the same thing.

I was in a somewhat similar boat. I was a .NET developer that wanted to try something new, and despite eight years of experience few people wanted to take a chance on someone. I managed to find a role doing Ruby, and I've managed to transition to a new stack and language fairly well.

The only roles where I had any real bite were the ones where I applied directly, and where the person on the other end of the table from me was a developer. To highlight the issue, the second I had Ruby on my CV after taking this role, the same companies that wouldn't hire me for a mid-level role wanted to offer me an interview for senior-level roles...

During the last indyref, I'm fairly sure that anyone (British) living in Scotland at the time the referendum started would be granted Scottish citizenship, should they want it.

Obviously, the circumstances have changed drastically, and since indyref2 will have far more support post-Brexit I can imagine that the SNP wouldn't necessarily need to sweeten the deal as much.

It's a weird dynamic, and it's one that I would love to see researched, because being a moderator is a thankless job that doesn't really offer the use any real power - but evidence suggests that people will go to great lengths to abuse that power.

It gets especially weird in some of the football subreddits. Some moderators try to push the narrative that having a popular football subreddit, or controlling the subreddit for a particular football team (e.g. /r/reddevils) gives them the ability to pretend to be "in-the-know", and to speculate on transfers, pretend they know decisions going on at the club, etc.

I really hope that we see a single-screen Surface phone in the future.

IMO, Microsoft have done a fantastic job with the Surface Book. If they could replicate that high-end build quality while providing a solid feature set and a clean Android build, I can't see it not selling well. Throw a headphone jack in, and I'd wait in line for it!

The dual screen is interesting, but I don't see its use just yet.

Most of the issues I've had with Reddit have been down to moderators, rather than the admin staff themselves.

I won't name the subreddit, because it essentially names the moderator involved, but I answered a question regarding website performance on a popular developer subreddit. Someone responded back by saying that I was clearly a terrible developer because I said that squeezing performance out of a personal site wasn't essential. I told that person, quite bluntly, not to be a dick, and I got permabanned with the message "no, you're a dick".

I protested to one of the mods, not necessarily for my ban to be rescinded, but for that mod to stop being a dick to people. His comment history showed a pattern of that behaviour, and (most likely) a pattern of bans. The other mod unbanned me, and I left it at that.

Weirdly, the only subreddits I've ever had problems are the larger ones. I post regularly on /r/Games and /r/bjj, and both are moderated brilliantly.

It's an option in many places in the UK, but people often won't give out their email for a receipt because it also means that you'll be signed up to someone's shitty newsletter.

If I could pay on my phone and receive JUST the receipt, I'd be happy - but outside of receiving a copy of the receipt and having to flag future emails as spam, there isn't an option for this.

I agree with you on private schools. My other half went to a private school, and her parents were in no way wealthy. She left state education because her primary school messed her education up so much she (alongside other kids in her class) failed her Year 5 SATS and refused to take the blame for not teaching the class adequately. She went from failing in Year 5 to getting a first at uni - probably thanks to a solid private education.

With that being said, the current policy doesn't seem to be to scrap them entirely, but to remove their charity status. This does make sense, but will require more thought than what they've given so far. Removing their status ensures they're paying fair tax, but it also means that they are no longer required to share their facilities with state schools.

It's a weird policy to lead with, and the cynic in me believes they're doing so to push the class divide, in order to get more Leave voters behind them.

I guess it depends who you ask. I preferred the Labour policies from the last GE, but outside of some pie-in-the-sky thinking about private education and universal credit, I think they have some solid policies.

The average person doesn't care about policies, though. Labour under Ed Milliband had some good policies, but he was undone because he looked weird when eating a bacon sandwich. You could argue the same for Gordon Brown, who looked weird when he smiled when compared to the overly polished David Cameron.

IMO, the people just don't like Corbyn, and many people cling to the idea that the PM is the outright ruler of the land, when Brexit has shown the exact opposite - they are a leader, but they need a house to push their majority through.

I do agree with you, though. If Owen Smith had plotted a coup a few years later, he'd probably be 20-30 points ahead, and Boris would do everything possible to avoid a GE. The one good thing about Corbyn is that he is a campaigner, so the second a GE becomes a reality he'll be in his element.

If Boris wins, then I give up. The Tories will have sold their soul for Brexit, the Labour party will have destroyed any credibility as a viable opposition, and the Lib Dems will have aligned too heavily with the Tories to be viable themselves. I don't know where the country goes from there, but I would love to not be a part of it.

Regardless of whatever side you are on, you have to admit that we're currently living in extraordinary times in UK politics.

A decade ago, the kind of things we've seen over the last 3-4 years would have been borderline unthinkable. If this were all a TV show, people would've called it too far-fetched or too distant from reality.

Whatever happens - there will be enough content to create movies, whole modules for university classes, and a dozen or so questions for pub quizzes.

As for Boris - imagine being the first Prime Minister in British History to be found guilty of misleading the monarchy. Now, imagine going through a shattering defeat in court, while STILL being far ahead in the polls.

This is a very weird criticism. I'm a Ruby dev, but I spent eight years working with C#, and I can't remember any times where a Ruby gem was more readily available than a NuGet package.

If anything, I'd say there's less choice in the Ruby world, especially in the data science and ML fields.

Purely anecdotal, but half of the jobs I've had in my career have come from Twitter posts, either from my replying to a Twitter post regarding a job, or me applying to a role via a link I found on Twitter. I've also hired people that found the role via Twitter, and a surprisingly low number of people apply when social media is your only outlet.

Again, purely anecdotal, but the quality has usually been pretty high - probably because the candidates were always "known" to the company, either by knowing them from a user group, or being friends/associated with someone at the company.

Nope, not JP Morgan, although I did interview with them too and they talked about some of their Python systems and how they were currently in the process of porting to Python 3.

I won't name names, but they're also in the top ten and based in America.

I often see your response to #2 brought up, and I would generally agree with it.

With that being said, in my experience of working at companies that actively sell software, whether it's as a product or a service, you are still incredibly likely to be as much of a wallflower as you are at a non-tech company. Your perception of freedom is higher, but ultimately your time and budget is limited by whoever manages you.

I'd be interested in the slides to see if your questions dig into one of the most common issues I see at tech-centric companies - micromanagement? Is it a thing - and if you say no, would a random selection of three of your developers tell me the same thing?

I've never worked for a company of that scale, so I don't know how hard it'll be to find legacy developers, but I imagine it'll take at least several years to port a public-facing system to Python 3, if they were to start now.

If they start in the next few years, I imagine it'll be much harder to find ready and willing Python 2 developers with the experience to navigate such a big code-base? They could hire consultants, but I imagine the future hiring cost will also be astronomical.

That's good to know, because I was a bit sad at the rejection, despite a chat with their tech lead setting off a few alarm bells.

The biggest obstacle, at least in my experience, is actually getting that interview.

In ten years of writing software, I've had a handful of emails/messages from FAANG recruiters, and they've never ended up in an actual interview. I won't name names, but I was offered an interview and we agreed a three week timeframe to prepare for the phone screen, but that screen never came.

In another 6-12 months I might be lucky enough to get an email from someone else, but unless I spend my entire life on Leetcode to prepare for an email that "might" come it's likely that I'd fail it anyway.

Let's also not pretend that these interviews are easy. If we assume that FAANG interviews are around Leetcode medium to hard level, it still takes a significant amount of ability to do well, even if you can write a Max Heap from scratch and can traverse a BST. Even if you're had time to warm up for these interviews, you can come across a hard problem that rules you out for that company.

I like your organism explanation. This is something I've learned over the past decade, albeit not at any company at the level of Google.

The way I've often describe software to clients is likening it to Formula 1 cars. With a normal car, you turn the key and drive, and it should definitely work for anyone. With a Formula 1 car, the tyres need to be warm, the driver needs to be experienced, and there are so many reasons why a working car can stall that careful monitoring, maintenance, and revision needs to be done long-term by an experienced team.

Sure, the software on your computer might run like the former, but in the background that huge pit stop team has been plugging away for years, and will continue to plug away with optimisations and fixes.

This is probably far more common than we'd like to admit.

I've certainly worked in places where they'd rather I didn't get involved in the hiring process. These kind of places often heavily relied on external recruitment, and would rather that I spend my time working on projects than potentially rejecting candidates that could do the job, but weren't up to my standard.

These aren't non-tech companies either - these are companies that deal in/sell tech as a project and/or service. Even in companies that live and die by their development team, non-technical management can run the show and dictate hiring.

While the article is very "matter-of-fact" about the sunset period and what it means to those that still use Python 2, I'm still surprised that it's taken this long to finally close support. I had assumed that their approach would be to fork the language into a new language (call it something like Liasis) and to allow one of the big-name contractors that specialise on Python 2 to take ownership of it.

As an aside, a few weeks ago I interviewed at one of the top 5 investment banks for a software engineering role to maintain one of their main trading systems, written entirely in Python 2. My first question was what their plans were in porting what they called "one of the worlds largest Python 2 code bases," and it was "on the roadmap".

Surely the Python core team are aware that teams like this exist in some of the largest companies in the world, and I assume they've had at least some level of dialogue with companies like this to say "we're super serious this time, we're about to stop support for Python 2", or something along those lines?

Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that I was rejected?

Awesome - application sent!

Would you consider software engineers that require a visa?

99% of the time I run Windows 10. Despite the negative press that Windows gets on here, it gets the job done with zero issues, and any time I get a weird issue it's usually to do with permissions.

I used to run Debian alongside Windows 10, but I found myself not needing it as much, so I cleared Debian off and decided to use it as a VM instead.

My main language at the moment is Ruby, which is notoriously bad on Windows, so I use either my VM or WSL for Ruby work. The rest I can comfortably do on Windows.

I've had this laptop for years, and it's still fast and smooth. The trackpad is also a close second best to the fantastic MBP trackpads, with the keyboard being (arguably) better on the SB. My only criticism of it is the unnecessary tablet functionality. If Microsoft were to create a Surface Book equivalent without touch screen and a detachable screen, I'd consider it for work.

Laptop Model: Surface Book 1

CPU: Intel Skylake dual-core processor 3.4 GHz

RAM: 16GB

Screen: 13.5", 3000×2000 (267 PPI) LCD

Personal Comments: I bought the Surface Book after waiting for years for a new MBP release, and despite owning it for around three years it's as fast and functional as it was back then. It's without a doubt the best laptop I've ever owned, and I couldn't recommend it enough.

While it's definitely something I wish he was harsher on, I remember him addressing it a few times and raising some good points and contrasts between the two - purely paraphrasing and probably not fully accurate:

* Rogan felt that he shouldn't be "the comedy police", and that his level of fame would make calling anyone out much more difficult. I remember him saying that one of the stolen bits was from Dave Chappelle, and that if Dave wasn't going to call her out for it, he doesn't feel he should.

* While it's hard to dispute that jokes were stolen, most of what she had stole had been from sketch comedy, which happens fairly frequently.

* Additionally, on many of her shows she's had a team of writers, so accusing Schumer of stealing jokes isn't factually accurate when it could've been a writer that stole from CollegeHumor or Dave Chappelle.

* In stances where one-liners were lifted, Rogan echoed the points of Marc Maron, who said that one-liners are largely fair-game, because no routine hangs off of a solid one-liner.

IMO, there are some weak arguments, and some that I agree with - and that's pretty much everything I like about JRE.

In all fairness, it's no different to any other major iteration of a framework. I imagine that a lot of Ruby developers will be telling their bosses about Rails 6, and trying to push towards it for multi-db support for large applications.

The big difference for me is that many .NET shops rely heavily on certain libraries and tools, and many of them are very slow to adapt. Umbraco, as a prime example, recently upgraded to Angular 2 for its admin section, and is probably a year or two away from an initial move to .NET Core.

I like Joe Rogan, and I think there's a handful of reasons why people love him so much:

1. He has strong principles. This is evident when you look at his involvement in the downfall of Carlos Mencia, despite being a relatively unknown comedian at the time.

2. The only filter is himself. He's not a part of a network, and thanks to you "fuck you money" he made from Fear Factor he doesn't need to answer to anybody. That allows him a level of independence to have who he wants on his show, and to talk about what he wants.

3. Passion. I do BJJ, and a lot of people have got into BJJ through Joe Rogan talking about it on JRE. It's funny how much of an impact he's had, considering there is very little footage of him actually sparring. For reference, he's got two black belts - one under Jean Jacques Machado in BJJ, and one under Eddie Bravo in his 10th Planet style of BJJ. Both instructors are as legit as they come, and they don't just hand out belts, so Rogan earned those belts. His passion for BJJ and MMA earned him his spot with the UFC, and a UFC post-Rogan will be a much-worse place.

4. He naturally leans to the centre. It's funny how some people on the left call him right-ring, and some on the right call him liberal, when I'd say he has individual views on multiple sides. He'll have a civil chat with Bernie Sanders on one episode, and will praise Trump for playing a good campaign against the Democrats on another. It's refreshing to see someone open his airtime to multiple different views, when even the likes of the BBC cannot represent both sides of a debate without extreme government bias.

5. He knows what he doesn't know, and he won't convince himself of something without fact. That attitude in a sea of people that push opinion as fact is refreshing.

Having worked as a .NET dev for the better part of a decade, it's a mixture of things:

1. The cost of moving a standard .NET application to .NET Core. If the benefit is there, it'll happen, but for established code bases I don't see why they'd bother when standard .NET works fine.

2. On the web side of things, many of the big content management systems aren't on .NET Core yet. Umbraco is the king of CMS's on .NET, and once they pull their finger out and focus on .NET Core I think we'll see a wave of developers moving to Core.

3. For general web stuff, there isn't a solid reason for people to move from the likes of Ruby, PHP, and Python to C#/.NET Core.

4. There's still a perception that .NET Core is a WIP. That's understandable, considering .NET has been battle-tested for decades, and .NET Core is still (relatively) new to the party. There was also the csproj issues from a while back, and that set off a few people from fully switching.

5. The naming has confused everyone, so the safe option is to wait for everything to sort itself out. .NET isn't going anywhere just yet, and the switch to .NET Core won't be a huge one for those that have had to adapt to new C# and .NET libraries over the years anyway.

Weirdly, I've found TV shows to be a great place to find great artists.

Even weirder is that American Dad got me into loads of bands, from My Morning Jacket to Wax Hang to These Kids Wear Crowns. I can name a handful of acoustic artists that I got into thanks to Netflix shows like Bojack Horseman, Queer Eye, Jessica Jones, and Final Space. I also watch wrestling from time to time, and the WWE often use some good songs when promoting PPV's or building promos.

The next time you watch TV and you hear a song you like, look it up on your phone or Shazam it. You'll probably find a ton of other songs by that artist/band that you like too.