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2 silly small ones:

* Small util on an ESP32 to turn my garage lights on when I open the side door.

* An app to track players I've played against before in Dota2 and pop up before a match so I can skip matches with players who I've found to be toxic.

I was just thinking of Logo today and how it got me super interested in programming. I ended up doing simple rectangles with my 5 year old. He loved the turtle!

I worked at a ~smallish startup. While we had around 20 devs employed we shared oncall between 3 people.

We invested a lot into availability - especially DBs. Most of our issues were internal DNS related which we at one point automated into hosts files that updated every hour.

Oncall was shared between 3 of us with all 3 paged at once and us getting on WhatsApp to 1. diagnose and 2. fix. Most of the time only 1 of us was close to a laptop but all 3 of us would assist as best we could.

One of us wasn't tethered at any point in time but for the most part we were able to get to a laptop within 30 minutes at most. I now work at FAAMG and find oncall especially stressful but it's once every ~6 weeks.

In my case you're 100% spot on with the unhealthy relationship part. I lost around 45kg in slightly less than a year and gained most of it back in the 2 years after. For the most part, it's due to really bad habits built up over years.

Addictions are interesting things to break - I suspect they're also very different based on the person. I smoked for close to 10 years before going cold-turkey from 3 packs a day yet the nicotine cravings I had doesn't come close to how badly I crave sweet stuff most of the time.

I don't think life is that simple. Being a skilled developer/engineer has very little to do with the ability to save money.

The first thing I thought of when seeing this was giving a card to each team member which allows for small purchases at specific partnered businesses - e.g. expensing lunch outings without most of the paperwork.

In the short term you'll probably end up feeling guilty about it but it's much better to work somewhere where you don't hate the environment.

Before I started my current job, I already had an accepted offer from another company (Company A). While I had some regrets about accepting the first offer too quickly I put it down to the second company (Company B) reacting slower and that they should probably have moved a bit quicker if filling the position was really a priority (they're interview process took much longer because the CTO was on holiday during the process).

Eventually I did start working at Company A but realized within the first day that my co-workers had almost no passion and some of them had very questionable work ethic. After two weeks I contacted Company B and asked if they would still be interested in me working there and had the difficult conversation with my manager. At some point one of the directors had me explain to a client that I was leaving by my own choice - to this day I'm not even sure what this accomplished.

I ended up being much happier at my current company and didn't have to work in an environment that I hated.

Close friends even commented on noticing a change in my demeanour within the first few days of starting at Company B.

Overall while I would do it again but I think it's also taught me to be careful when accepting a position as well as that it's much easier to rescind an accepted offer before you've started adding value to a company than resigning afterwards.

Thanks! Some of these were the only programming books that our local library had (in the mid 90s). I remember the Adventure Programs book quite fondly.

They could fail for hundreds of different reasons, not all necessarily related to being open or closed.

When I was in high school our local mobile networks brought out a feature called "Please call me" in which you used USSD to send an unbilled notification for another number to call you - you only got around 20 per day but that was more than enough. Most people seemed to use it to notify their parents that they were ready to be picked up from a prearranged place much like you're describing with missed calls.

On my first run today I saw some passwords going to the admin section on our staging servers so it really depends on what you're targeting.

As long as it's valid hex it should be fine, there seems to be a lower bound at which point servers don't respond but I didn't play around for too long with that part. Most articles also mention 64kb which the script can do with some small modifications.

Ansible is pretty decent but new release seem to break backwards compatibility quite a lot so be prepared for playbooks not working on newer versions should you need to reuse them at a later stage. Of course virtualenv gets around this quite nicely.

I liked ColdFusion as a whole but really disliked using it in a professional context - most other developers just seemed to have a bad understanding of how ColdFusion specific variable scoping worked.

Oh, as a side note. The company I ended up working for also used a timed "mini-project" to filter out some candidates, it wasn't much more than 2 days worth of work. After that I also went through a telephonic which was more of a introduction to what the company was doing as well as a bit of a culture check to see if I would fit in.

When managed properly outsourcing doesn't have to be a problem. Bad hires do tend to take a bit longer to show themselves and could end up leaving a bad taste to everything outsourcing related.

A few years ago I did some work via oDesk and ended up with a permanent contract for a US/Mexico based company that allowed me much more freedom than I would have had working at any South African company in my area.

Overall I enjoyed working with most of the other employees from across the world and some of the brightest people I've worked with was part of the team. I do think however that it probably put a lot more pressure on our manager than most conventional environments would.

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I love squirrel, if anyone is trying it out though just be aware of the default 100 or 1000 row limit. It's great for select statements but don't forget to disable it when running updates on a dataset.

Maybe I misread the article but I didn't get the sense that the $2.3M was in the last year. If the company has been operating for just over a dozen years that could be total revenue which given the type of software really isn't all that alarming.

I'm not sure that specifying how things won't work is done to appear superior rather than giving feedback. There probably isn't enough time in a day to try everything and if you can save some time by pointing out why something won't work off the bat it's probably a good thing. As with everything though, it kind of comes down to how you communicate that something won't work.

Have had a lot of fun with this so far even though I'm only at level 4, kind of went off on a tangent on level 3 and after getting a partial solution I realised that there was a much easier way of approaching it

Registration this year is open till the end of the qualification round.

Nice article, the write lock has really been making me think about whether it's really the way to go in our own stack.

Have been using this for a while now as a quick way to get data a bit readable. Works pretty well.