abridgett

Things that helped me:

- small steps

- accept failures, don't let them stop you. My first "solo-traveller" holiday was a disaster, but the next four were great

- be open (i.e. say "yes" to things even if you don't really feel like it - being with people is IMO well worth it)

- life throws spanners in the works - but also golden opportunities

- help others. I enjoy baking and cooking, I might meet friends and bring some home-made treats along. Or offer to help them in DIY.

- be pro-active. e.g. ask if anyone fancies a walk/visit to a local attraction. Arrange a trip somewhere. Your circles may start small (e.g. with work colleagues) however make them interesting and it can grow.

- meetup.com has been helpful, however do something you'd enjoy _anyway_ - if you meet someone (friends or romantically) that's a bonus

This isn't a panacea, I'm personally struggling. However when I look at the good things I _do_ have, this is how I have them.

I remember a particularly geeky car trip looking for computer acronyms - e.g. "PDF". You only got full points if you also knew what the acronym stood for (e.g. Portable Document Format).

I'm a firm believer that the onus should be on the current development team to explain this to you. That is unlikely IME to happen without you asking.

What happens next will be an iterative process.

Do some initial investigation - don't waste time figuring things out, we just want a set of questions and areas to explain at this stage.

Ask for some help from the team - perhaps 30-60 mins, perhaps with different people to cover off the topics. It's essential that the team contribute - firstly they owe it to you, secondly only they know the background. Which bits of the codebase were experimental, which bits are ancient relics being removed, what's the direction of travel, which parts have subtleties. "Unknown unknowns" (to you).

Now "pay it forward". Ensure that the next person to join the team has a better time. Maybe this is writing some documentation - be it architectural, a glossary of domain-specific terms, updating/culling outdated docs. Maybe parts of the codebase could do with some re-organising or renaming to make it more self-evident. Perhaps the build/test process could do with some care...

I've done this several times, and after 3-4 hour sessions with "the one person who understands" (and a few hours writeup), we now have good documentation, better standards and multiple people including new joiners who understand. The guru also appreciates having more people to bounce ideas around with and no longer being overloaded with this work.

Such a shame - IBM have some good tech but it's buried beneath a crap-ton of marketing bullshit.

I was a huge fan of AIX and POWER processors back in the day and still think that Linux could have benefitted from some of the approaches back then(device handling for example).

However these days the company only pushes a smokescreen of AI this, hybrid-cloud that, blockchain the other, constant confusing renames. _Still_ "shipping more MIPS this year than last", on mainframes that no-one gives two hoots about.

As a result, they have near zero credibility to the modern generation (the last 15 years) who obtain resilience through cheap software rather than expensive hardware and expect near-instant hyper-scalability.

A friend was looking and in the end decided not to buy a Thinkpad as both his current Thinkpads mis-order keys when typed quickly and it seems unlikely that it's fixed. (And to be honest, they don't deserve the money with such a bad bug).

See https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ekin47/the_x1_ext... for the details.

Superb article: - shows how to debug a kernel oops - show use of extra tools (bpf, scapy, kasan) - dives deep into more esoteric bits of networking explaining from basic to how the kernel implementation works - demonstrates proof of the theory in multiple ways

Yes, it is a big "come work here on interesting stuff with fantastic people" (and show off your own skills and learn something neat) - and it's done without bragging and I'm sure will help others to debug their next OOPS :)

Kudos to Jakub (and presumably reviewers)

It didn't really seem to have any prioritisation - e.g. around titles, headings or any metadata (view count, edits, last updates). Agree completely it was awful.

OTOH I'm also a believer that you should be able to navigate to the right information.

People seem to think that writing pages is sufficient. A library works because pages are gathered in books, organised by sections and has an army of librarians to keep it running smoothly.

I treat documentation like code - DRY, refactor apply just the same. e.g. I might split a page up so that some common part can be re-used. I'll cull obsolete information or mark it obsolete. I'll _also_ updated headings to help them show up in searches.

If it ain't broke, a product manager will justify their position by making it so.

Atomic Frontier: superbly made science videos, I think I've learnt something in every video (62k): https://www.youtube.com/c/atomicfrontieronline

Xyla Foxlin: creative, very enthusiastic crafter, canoe building was fabulous (67k): https://www.youtube.com/c/xylafoxlin

The Tim Traveller: quirkly little places, fabulous humour (190k): https://www.youtube.com/c/TheTimTraveller

I'm immensely grateful to the developers involved. I'm sure it wasn't easy but it's one of those features that I've always missed ever since chrome added it. It also shows the value of a decent bug tracking system.

One of the favourite events we did was "two truths and a lie". Each person makes three statements about themselves (as personal or impersonal as they like) and others ask questions and then vote. We did a little leaderboard. It was great fun and we got to know each other much better. I'll also never trust my colleagues to tell the truth ever again :-)

I hate to bring up the "don't be evil" mantra. That seems long in the past, however I do wonder what the impact is on hiring and retention.

Many people I know have certain moral beliefs that mean that they would never work for certain companies, examples would be:

- military - pornography - social manipulation (i.e. Facebook) - work practices and worker rights (i.e. Amazon) - proprietary approach (i.e. Apple) - lack of open source contributions

This is why (more than anything) I wanted the UK to stay in the EU. The EU seems to be one of the few organisations with the clout and principle to actually make this sort of thing happen - to improve people's lives and raise standards.

2 year guarantees being another example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...

We shouldn't need to even be discussing the ethics of regulating statements made by those in government (or opposition).

It's due to the unbelievable amount of manipulative statements and outright lies (e.g. many of the statements made by the current UK government and the "Brexiteers" - not just Trump) that this is even an issue.

A platform labelling or blocking repeated offenders seems sensible to me - however I do think the rules they are enforcing should be fair and equally applied.

Sadly the timescales are looking more like 1-2 _years_. That's before we get to anti-vaxers and there'll be a lot (there will also be plenty of side-effect cases - due to the sheer number of people being vaccinated at once, not because it's not safe!)

This won't change until companies are fined sufficiently to prevent this. More importantly, those responsible must retrospectively face prosecution and jail time. A CEO will only care when it's their money and their life that's on the line - they won't care about a large fine 10 years after they've left.

If only it applied those politicians and media moguls who have been peddling hate against other countries, the EU, the disadvantaged and even scientists and economists for many many years.

But their very own Pixel XL2 is now off support after 3 years. Very disappointing. It's good for another 2-3 years easily.

This can also happen with pumpkins FYI. Once poisoned my friends accidentally (it was a proper eating pumpkin not a carving pumpkin). Just a mouthful or two was enough.

Some companies have "competency matrixes" (or "growth matrixes") which show what's expected at each level. These can be helpful - showing that whilst a Junior person might just be expected to fix a bug, a more senior person may actively seek similar bugs, add test-cases etc. This is great at setting the scene as "how to level up" rather than of negative feedback.

The redbooks are hidden gems - what documentation should be. When I used to work with these (very nice) bits of kit, the redbooks were my bible.

They'd tell you the gory details, you could learn from the experiences of the authors. The "official" documentation was good, but wouldn't ever say "you don't want to do it this way, it'll end in tears".

PS: Note that the book is 2 years old now. And my experience with them closer to 10 ;-)

Share more. Whilst it might seem appealing to be "the one person" who can do something, it stops you moving on to new things. I've seen so many people go from "the guru" to "the bottleneck" because they've never done this. Sometimes due to "holding onto power" sometimes lack of time or motivations. Docs and explanations help the author to move onto new projects and new developers to pickup the old projects - a win/win.

I remember when I worked at IBM Hursley research labs 20 years ago. The lab director told us all "patents are very important to IBM". I expected him to tell us that IBM made billions from licensing them. He didn't say that though. I don't think he even _mentioned_ that. Instead he stated: "It raises the entry barrier for the competition".

Patents were (narrowly) created to _encourage_ the spread of knowledge. Instead of risky "trade secrets" a company would make the knowledge public for a short monopoly. Most patents these days are not worthy of protection (certainly not as long as they are granted for). We need different lengths for different patents - we shouldn't treat how rectangular a phone is the same way as a life saving drug.

For IBM owned* 9.0.0.0/8 which has 16,777,214 (and when I worked there twenty years ago there were a few hundred other ranges that they owned/acquired).

* Turns out they freed this up a while back (good!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Agreed, I particularly like the way each chapter dealt with a rank further up. Even if you have _no intention_ of going higher, seeing what they want from you and what they should be doing was immensely helpful and clarifying.

Reminds me when they built a (much older, smaller) kernel on a pSeries (POWER architecture) in under 5 seconds: http://es.tldp.org/Presentaciones/200211hispalinux/blanchard...

Gosh, 18 years ago, now I feel really old :D

For about 2 years and then it'll abandon it again.

Witness: - mac mini (for most of it's life) - mac pro (G5, dustbin variant) - both low and high end laptops at different times

Basically you can't buy Apple and expect to stay up to date by the looks of things.

One twist on this that I like when "priority" is a foreign concept is "So you want me to drop so-and-so's work for yours. I'm happy to do that on one condition - anyone else can come over and ask me to drop your work for theirs."