1,606 karma · joined April 3, 2010
Twitter is where I'm more used to seeing sealioning, where someone will make a comment about something and a bunch of strangers (sometimes coordinated elsewhere) show up demanding a debate about it.
Aside from that quirk of the SP3, I can't really think of any issues. I come home and plug it onto a dock where I have a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard as well as a 27" screen & webcam. It's pretty much a regular PC at that point. On the go, it's a touchscreen tablet but running regular apps and browsers. Some apps aren't touch friendly on Windows but they're rare.
I'm actually thinking of going back to a paper planner. It's a lot easier to grab a pen and add something to a list than type it into a todo list, set a reminder time, etc.
I think what got me the most was a dearth of jobs outside finance & Content Management Systems.
Not perfect, of course, but at least they're not ignoring the problem.
This is great for a lot of code but it's probably my biggest complaint about the language these days. PHP supports first-class functions, which is great until you realize all your functions stored in variables have $ at the front. So now, not only can't you use $ to distinguish variables from functions (because sometimes they're both) but you have to remember if something is a Closure* or not.
* another minor pet peeve is that you have to explicitly tell a function what variables it can see from the surrounding scope, but all anonymous functions inherit from a class called Closure whether they can see anything outside their own scope (a closure) or not.
Something about them triggers some kind of anthropomophization instinct in us.
That pretty much means my wife and I went from about a midnight bedtime to 9pm, which makes us feel really old & boring but it's the only way to make sure we have enough sleep to have a happy, productive day.
If I don't get enough sleep, my Tourette Syndrome gets worse. I also tend to get depressed & a little grouchy. It affects my decision making, and I have too many people depending on me to let that happen.
It's pretty unobtrusive up in the corner there. I'm sure it suffers from banner blindness. But I don't want to load the page up with ads. It's a tool for other devs, not really a revenue source. But the donations are nice.
~ $30/month from donations covers my Digital Ocean bill for the month.
I'm also trying to get some sales & affiliate revenue going with athletic wear designs on Zazzle. Starting with a niche to get rolling then probably expanding to more general designs. The biggest problem I've hit so far is their fulfillment times & prices.
We all went through those lessons in high school, but for a lot of people they just didn't sink in. And they still don't. Talk to a high school teacher about how their students use Wikipedia.
So not only will this platform support almost all the existing Windows software out there, it'll treat PWAs as first-class citizens.
My first only had 4GB RAM. Now, I'm not one of those programmers who insists he needs 32GB to write Hello World in PHP, but Docker wouldn't start half the time because other apps already secured the RAM they needed and that just wasn't sustainable.
This one has 8GB, which is much more comfortable. I use it for web dev (PHP/WordPress, Node.js), video calls, Slack, and all the other things an Engineering Manager ends up doing. After work, I use it for ebooks (Amazon Cloud Reader), Comixology, Flipboard, the New York Times Crossword, occasional gaming (my kid takes up almost all my free time, not that I'm complaining).
I feel like the Surface really hits the mark as a capable desktop/laptop I can throw in my bag and go. I picked up a Surface Dock on eBay and it has no problem driving dual monitors.
My only disappointment is the thermal throttling, which I hear was fixed in the Surface Pro 4. I tried playing games with registry settings and power profiles, but what's worked best is just a USB fan blowing right where the CPU is. With that in place, it never throttles down when I'm on a video call. But it's such a ridiculous hack. It reminds me of when I had a desk fan blowing over the back of my Commodore 1541 disk drive growing up.
It's kind of weird to use it on my lap with the Touch Cover, too. I need to put my feet up to have any kind of stable surface to balance it on. It's a lot easier to stand it up on a table, but I'd much rather lean back. To be honest, though, I don't use it like that very often so I can live with it. I'm kind of tempted by the Brydge keyboard coming out, but not for the price they're asking.
Before this, I had a Surface Pro 2. That one was way too thick & heavy, and the 16:9 aspect ratio was weird for the kind of work I do. I think the Surface Pro 3/4 really nail the form factor.
The carbomb drink always seemed like a WTF to me. I wondered how people from Ireland felt about it.
"There's a county map to go on the wall, A hurling stick & a shinty ball, The bric, the brac, the craic & all, Lets call it an Irish pub, Caffreys, Harp, Kilkenny on tap, The Guinness pie & that cabbage crap, The ideal wannabee Paddy trap, We'll call it an Irish pub"
I've had my infant on video calls and he mostly wanted to see all the people. And I've had to turn off my camera to change diapers before. But everyone's been cool with it. Clients seem to like seeing him.
On the flip side, I've been on calls with people whose toddlers were running around their home office screaming, and that's not cool.
Usually it's after everybody goes to bed, which I known is a bargain with the devil because I can't remember the last time I was allowed to sleep in on a weekend & catch up on sleep.
The other thing that helps is the fact I work from home. So my wife encourages me to get out of the apartment for a couple hours every day on the weekends. So, I go to Starbucks and code or read for a bit.
Everything is different with the little guy around, but it's a trade-off I can live with.
I reopened my LinkedIn account after a long absence once I got into management. One of the first thing clients are going to do before hopping in a meeting with you is to pull up your LinkedIn page, and it's a way to show them you know WTF you're talking about. I keep joking with my team that I still need to add the obligatory "smiling white guy in a suit" headshot to my profile.
I also find interesting management/leadership articles in my feed. So, Twitter for deep down geeky tech stuff, LinkedIn for the business side, Facebook for what my niece had for dinner. Each serves a different purpose.